I Found my Zen

Vacation is treating me very well so far. Thursday night I decided to go to bed early... but then I couldn't sleep and my friends started texting me and telling me to come out. I have never been one to resist peer pressure, so I went out and met them at the ACE Club. Then I went to my first house party while in Egypt and ended up staying out until 4 AM. But hey, I'm on vacation. Yesterday I went to the biggest mall I've ever seen in my life!! It was 7 stories tall and so large that I can't even begin to describe it. We saw Inception (I've already seen it once before), and it was still amazing. I always enjoy going to movies when I'm in other countries because I feel like I'm at home. I also went shopping! And accidentally charged things to my credit card. Oops...

Everything in Egypt is brown and sandy and dusty. But today I went to a park where everything was green!! I laid down in the grass (that felt like golf course grass, but it still made me happy) while everyone played frisbee or catch, and I felt so calm and at peace. Families came to have iftar dinner there after fasting, and they were looking at us like we were crazy... probably because I was laying in grass and we were playing games. It was also clean there! There was no garbage in sight which was amazing... Cairo is a very dirty city, generally speaking. There is garbage everywhere.

Have I talked about the calls the prayer? I think so... they happen 5 times a day over a loudspeaker-esque thing and you can hear them wherever you are in the city. I can hear it in my apartment, for example. Every mosque (and there are a billion of them, approximately... that's sarcastic, but still) will do their own call to prayer. So if I'm walking down my street, I can hear 3 different calls to prayer at the same time. At the park today, we were walking up a hill and it was time for iftar (the 6:30 call to prayer that means the fast is broken and people can eat and drink). All the mosques in the city below us started their call to prayer, and they all happened at the same time. It was such a hauntingly beautiful thing to hear. I tend to think that the calls are peaceful sounding, unless the guy doing it has an awful voice because it kind of sounds like he's singing... but he's praying. So to hear a bunch of them all together at the same time was incredible.

I am actively preparing for my trip! I'm doing laundry... oh yeah. To wash a load of clothes in the US takes about 20-25 minutes. Here, it takes about 2 hours! The machine will randomly stop and just sit there. I call it the resting period... the machine is just taking a break. Everything else here takes about 10 times longer than normal, why not laundry too? Tomorrow I need to buy sunscreen, pack, finish laundry, maybe get a pedicure (which only costs about 50 LE here, or about 10 US dollars!!), and get ready for 5 days of fun!! I'm so excited to snorkel... even though I can't really swim. I have doggy-paddling down though, so I'm pretty sure I won't drown. I'm just excited to see the Red Sea! Oh yeah... I'm pretty sure that Insha Allah I'm going to go to Istanbul for spring break. One of my friends here is from Istanbul, so hopefully a group is going to go there! There are so many places I want to go... I just need to find the time and money. But it's what the experience is all about! And teaching, I guess...