The road to nowhere…
Enjoying the swimArchive for September, 2009
I’m not dead…
Sorry guys, I can only blame about 6 weeks of this rather large posting gap on losing internet, the rest of it was just me being disorganized… This is just a quick check-in post to let y’all know I’m still around, catch y’all up, and point you to some other places I will be posting.
So over the last 2 months, other than finishing up my job in France and getting a precious 5 days back home on British soil, I also spent a week in the Middle East/North Africa visiting three prospective unis in Cairo and Beirut. As my first actual trip to the ME/NA, it was a really amazing experience, and I have to say I’ve fallen in love with Cairo. Having been stupid enough to rent a car (not something I would usually do but, with the university an hour outside of Cairo and no reliable transport that I could find to get there and back, I didn’t see much choice) I got the wonderful experience of getting thoroughly lost, finally giving up on the car, parking on the side of the road in some part of Cairo that had probably never seen a tourist, and then exploring for the next couple of hours. I got to really stretch my (almost non-existent) Arabic, enjoy some great local food, and get a great feel for the place. I also got to experience the wonders of Cairo traffic, but we won’t go into that!
Beirut, on the other hand, struck me as more like a cross between New York City and LA. To be fair, this is largely because I was staying in the coastal area which was all rebuilt after the war and is now the hip/foreigner district. Even walking and taxiing out to the center and more southern areas which certainly don’t resemble NYC, it just didn’t seem to me to have the life Cairo does. Probably just my preference for chaos shining through…
Long story short, hour long commute or no, it looks like I’m headed to the American University in Cairo in the spring to finish my BA there (that’ll be 3 semesters to go at that point).
As for this semester, I am now comfortably ensconced in my ex-closet of an apartment in NYC (is there anywhere else in the world where someone can charge you $800 a month to live in their closet?), attending classes at the Bard Globalization and International Affairs Program, and interning at the NYU Center for Dialogues: Islamic World – U.S. – The West. As part of my Reporting in International Affairs course I will be writing articles for the online journal BardPolitik and blogging with them here. Pop in and have a read once we get started for the semester (things should start getting posted some time next week).
So that’s it for today. I’ll try and post again soon on slightly more interesting topics. I’m hoping that being in NYC is going to provide me with plenty of those!
