So it's 12:30am on Monday morning, and instead of sleeping I decided to come over to the internet cafe to listen to the Celtics game. I mean come on...it's game 7. Let's hope they at least win so I don't lose sleep for nothing.
It's been a few days since my last posting. Other than classes, it's been sort of a quiet week. On Saturday we all went to Abdu and Hayem's (his wife) house again for another tremendous dinner. Too bad we can't eat there every night! We had fried chicken, a local Egyptian dish of rice, pasta, and some spices and sauce, eggplant, and a ton of other stuff. They are really great people and it's nice to have a non hotel/restaurant/touristy place to go once in a while.
Earlier in the week, we visited another shop that we will be working with for our service learning project. We went to a village called Stabl Anter and visited a glass blowing factory. This was an amazing place to go...it is an "illegal" community (meaning that the government doesn't give support to the area, unfortunately from what I've heard a lot of the very poor communities around Cairo are like this). All dirt roads, run-down buildings, no sewer or plumbing systems. Pretty un-imaginable if you've never been to a third world country, and even then you might still have never seen anything like this. Once we got to to area where the glass blowing shop is, there was a dirt soccer field out front with 6 or 7 kids playing, and lots of other kids roaming around. It was amazing to see kids who have nothing and are in a place like this have so much fun...that is why soccer is such a popular sport around the world, since all you need is a ball. One of the kids was actually really good. Probably wasn't any older than 10, but was clearly the best one of the group, and sported a Kaka jersey to top it off. We're planning on kicking the ball around with them when we go back.
Anyways, we went in the shop to meet the guys who were running out and learn about what they do, so we can get things ready to start putting some information together for the website (that I explained in a previous post). The figures were absolutely incredible, amazing detail of tons of different types of figurines. We saw a guy painting some of the figures, and were told that was the first day of painting the pieces, a new thing they will be doing. We also got to see a guy who was actually blowing the glass. He was extremely talented at what he does...I'm sure he's been doing it for 20 or 30 years, but it was awesome to watch him create a couple designs. I've seen glass blowing done in the past, but this had a different feel to it, probably because of the atmosphere we were in. We're all splitting up into groups to get more work done on the sewing, glass blowing, and carpet places...but hopefully I'll be going back to the glass blowing shop.
Fluids class is certainly moving at full speed now. We already have our first exam on Tuesday...and have probably covered at least two weeks of material in four or five classes. It's a good glass though, Mo is doing a great job and the material is pretty interesting.
Only a few minutes left in the Celts' game...going to get back to listening. I'll have more to come soon...
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