Monday May 12th: No more time for travelling and adventures...time to actual start doing some work (I guess this is a "study abroad" isn't it?). We started Fluid Dynamics class today. Four hours of it. I was surprised though that it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Yea, it's only the first day, but the four hours actually passed pretty fast. Mo (Prof. Taslim) is a great teacher, and that will definitely make things easier. I've never been in a class with 11 kids before either. It's much much better. To bad that won't happen when we get back to Boston.
We looked around the AUC (American University of Cairo) campus a bit, then had a meeting to prep for the community service learning projects that were planned for this trip with an NGO (Non Governmental Org.) from the AUC. This was a disaster. It looked like the presentation was put together in 20 minutes before we got there. There was pretty much zero organization, and the bridge painting project that we had planned to do isn't even going to happen any more. We'll see what happens, but it isn't looking too good so far.
And apparently it's illegal to play cards in Egypt. We were sitting in a courtyard on campus playing cards and two police officers tried to come over and confiscate the cards. We ended up just putting them away, but it was a bizarre situation. Maybe they thought we were betting or something, which I could see could be illegal, but how is that any different than playing backgammon or chess? I've never been in a situation like that before, where the civil liberties we have at home (that apparently are taken for granted) are taken away from you without question. But there are a lot of parts of culture in Egypt that are far different from what we are all accustomed to.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment