Fee Misr! In Egypt!

Hello Everyone!

I made it to Egypt safe and sound.
I am probably not going to be able to blog as much as I would like right now because my computer is broken. I bought a netbook the day before I left because I figured I didn't need to drag my whole computer with me (which is relatively new) and it broke literally 2 days later. I am going to take it with me to orientation tomorrow and hopefully one of my teachers will know how to fix it or where I can get it fixed. Until then I'm on my roommate's computer only about once a day, so be patient with the blog and emails and such!
I took a bunch of pictures today and I will try to upload them as soon as I can but it may be a while! but as they say in Egypt- mish mushkila (no problem)!

We had two days of orientation in Washington DC. The weather was terrible! It was chilly and rainy the whole time! But we managed to make it to Georgetown for cupcakes anyway. We actually arrived to the cupcake shop after it closed, but the owner was standing outside and one of the girls in the program, Sousan from Michigan, said something in Spanish, and the owner speaks Spanish, so they had a short conversation and gave us 2 boxes of cupcakes for free!
We left DC at 10pm on Friday night and flew to Frankfurt. The plane ride was long but I didn't get much sleep. We went into the city at Frankfurt and had lunch at a cute German restaurant. I had weisswurst (white sausage) and a pretzel and beer. We then left Frankfurt at 9pm (Frankfurt time) and flew to Alexandria.

We arrived in Alexandria at 2am (Alex time) and went through passport control and customs which was organized chaos. We took a bus and arrived at the dorms around 4am. We started orientation at noon.

We've had orientation the last 2 days. Yesterday we had our evaluation interviews so they could place us in class. Today we took a bus tour and went to the citadel and a mosque. It was very beautiful. Alexandria is located right along the sea so the view is awesome! After dinner we went to a cafe on the sea and smoked shisha (hookah) and drank tea and juice.

It's an adjustment, but I'm really starting to love Alexandria! All the students in the program are awesome and we get along well! The Egyptian girls in my dorm are really nice and friendly as well! I'm having some trouble with the language. It's amazing that after four years of standard Arabic one can still have so much trouble understanding the local dialect. But I'll get there. It's only the second day and I feel like I'm understanding more already.

Tomorrow we are going to tour the Alexandria library! Very exciting! And classes start on Wednesday.
I'll hopefully have lots more soon!