Flight Around the World

Wow it's been a week since my last post... So much has happened and I don't think I'll be able to cover it all, so I will focus on several aspects of my journey. For the first part of the journey, I flew into New York and met the group that I am staying with. There were thirty people in the group, but only 25 are with the same program that I am and only 16 will be going to the same school.
A little backgroud on the program- it is called the National Security Language Initiative and is sponsored by the State Department of the United States government. Students are selected to go to each of 7 countries, and the program that I was chosen for is to study in Egypt. We haven't started language classes yet, but our first day learning Arabic is tomorrow.
The government divides the scholarships for this program between several different organizations to better carry out the goal of the program. The Egypt program, along with a couple others, is through AFS, an experienced exchange organization. Therefore, we go through much of the same process as other AFS participants with a few added details. This means that like students in other progams, we meet with our groups for the first time at a university in New York city. Here I got to know people not only from my own program but who were also going to other countries. After a few meetings and some free time, we left for Cairo at about 11:30 at night. Our flight was delayed because one passenger forgot not to check his medicine and it had to be retrieved, but finally we took off.
I can usually sleep really well on the airplane, but only managed to sleep for 5 hours this time since the group was lively and interesting enough to keep me awake for a long time. We arrived in Cairo later than planned, but that really wasn't a huge setback. Here you can see the contrast between the view in the two flights, NY City being the one at night and Cairo being the daytime picture.


After that we went to a hotel and had some further orientation activities. In the USA I had heard that since Cairo is in a desert, people here are very concerned with water conservation. You can imagine my surprise when I saw this right outside the hotel:

We also saw a championship soccer match between the USA and Brazil. I'm glad I cashed in on the moment while the USA was winning 2-1 since Brazil ended up with a 3-2 comeback win:

At the end of the day yestersday we met our host famlies. Mine is very nice and has hosted students in the past. The food here is also greart, and I have learned some (very) basic Arabic even before the lessons.
The weather here is hot and sunny- always. Also, nobody wears shorts so there is a constant heat and a degree of sweating outside, but nothing too extreme. I prefer this weather to very cold weeather, but look what happened to some chocolate that I had left over from the flight:

Well, I will post again as soon as I can and report my Arabic progress. Also Friday we are going to the Pyramids, and Sunday to a soccer match.

-R H Kramer