Day 164

4July 2nd

Started I woke up with my throat feeling a bit starchy. I quickly deduced that the reason for this was a lack of vitamin C. Something that rarely happens back in the states, but with my rather poor eating habits here, something that can easily happen. So I slept in rather than going to go work out and then went to Metro to buy some Orange Juice, or what I thought was orange juice. In reality, I had purchased a 1iter of orange nectar, which is what we normally purchase. However checking the milligrams of Vitamin C on this side to the wikipedia article on vitamin C, made me realize that only by drinking the entire liter could I get just 100% of my daily requirement. After finishing up my research for the day I headed back to the Metro and bought the slightly more expensive however twice vitamin C content, natural orange juice. Also when I got home, we had two people come over and look at the apartment. They spent about 5 minutes total looking at the apartment. They probably were not that interested in it. Oh well, no problem to me. After that I went to ultimate Frisbee and played around there. Although I am not that good, I did get better the more I played, and I ended up doing “the greatest,” which I was pretty proud of. I got a ride home and got stuck in awful traffic. It took over 2 hours to get back to Zamalek, as there apparently was some party at the British Embassy. However, I found these two hours extremely enjoyable as I got to talk with these people, who were either Egyptian or had spent 3 years working in Egypt and really knew the details of the country. So I found out the story behind the unfinished buildings which comprise the slums of the city as they have no government regulation whatsoever, as so people will just build haphazardly and will leave room for future expansion. I also learned that all the new development is going on in Heliopolis and Sixth of October city as rich Egyptians and foreigners move out there. This is basically the same idea as the “white flight” and soon real-estate experts say Zamalek and the entire downtown area will turn into the slums, just like what happened in American cities. I also learned that one man controls 65% of all the steel in the country, creating a quasi-monopoly, and he has forced up the price of steel required for building in order to improve his profit margins. Crazy country I live in.