More Like the Womb Than She Wanted

I flew into Cairo this afternoon. North Africa, which is generally supposed to have nice weather, has now provided me with two genuinely terrifying landings. The first while flying into Tunis during a monsoon. Today, people actually spilled coffee on the ceiling. I'm generally pretty good with a little bit of turbulence, but this time I really had to fight off the nausea. My real concern wasn't for safety, even though several overhead bins had opened and heavy bags were crashing into the aisles, but rather that I would stagger off the plane looking completely ill. When I was in Morocco last November, they were worried enough about H1N1 to have used temperature scanning equipment and healthcare workers to weed out the sickly. I wasn't about to start this trip by getting thrown into quarantine.

My seatmate, who has perfect timing, made a dash for the toilet just as things started to get rough. She told me before she left that she had always found it useful to close her eyes and pretend like she was in the womb during turbulence. Anyway, she was in the toilet for the first big drop, and is almost certainly going to die from typhus or diphtheria or whooping lung or whatever it is you catch from direct contact with human waste. Unless her mother kick-boxed while she was carrying this girl, I think "the womb" was a pretty poor comparison - or at least not good for the reasons she suggested.

I've come to Egypt for a two month intensive Arabic course - Egyptian Colloquial in the morning and Modern Standard Arabic in the afternoon. After a placement exam scheduled for tomorrow morning, I'll find out into which of ten or so courses I'll be placed. I've done some studying on my own and took a beginners course in Rabat at the end of last year. My only goal for tomorrow is to start from somewhere beyond scratch -- that, and to walk over to the Nile, because how cool is that? The Nile!

Finally, I'll apologize right now for the the silly heading of this blog. This is the kind of magic you can expect with a google image search for "egypt banner," thirty seconds with a font called "papyrus," no fear of cliche, and no sense of quality control. I also understand that blog etiquette demands that the first post always be in the form of an apology, but in the age of twitter, I don't think we're meant to feel sorry about our narcissism anymore. So here goes.