last week....

So last weekend we took a trip into the Sinai peninsula and did a bunch of stuff. Here's an e-mail I sent my mom about it:

Mt. Sinai was really cool. We left at 6:30pm from Cairo in a bus, and we got to the base of the mountain at around 2:30am. We then joined throngs of other tourists in our trek up, though many people took camels up instead. My friends Josh, Katelyn, and I kept a really fast clip and we’re able to easily reach the top before the 5am-ish sunrise. The stars out there were amazing, the best I’ve ever seen. The sunrise and the surrounding area was very pretty as well. Afterwards we went down to st catherine’s monastery at the base and saw the alleged burning bush (good to see its still alive 3500 years later).

Then we drove two hours to Dahab, on the red sea. It was pretty cool, we could see Saudi Arabia across the water. Dahab is very touristy, so we were able to wear shorts and I wore my earings. It was nice to hang out there on the water and go swimming, but the downside was that we didn’t have any access to running fresh water. All the showers in our rooms ran salt water. The red sea is incredibly salty as well, so that was a little uncomfortable. The second day at Dahab (Saturday) we went snorkeling, and saw a very gorgeous coral reef. I remembered some of the times in the keys see really pretty stuff, as well as checking out the empty bottoms of some of the south florida beaches. The only issue at dahab was we had to cross very shallow water on top of dead coral, which was very sharp and unstable, in order to get to some deeper waters.

My classes are going well. The Director teaches “Peoples and Cultures” and “Conflict and Change” which mostly consists of a variety of speakers and several readings. This past week we heard Paul Gordon-Chandler, an Episcopal priest who serves in Egypt and just wrote a book about Mahraz Mahouli, who refers to himself as a “Sufi-Muslim follower of Christ” and was exposed to Christianity through reading about Ghandi. Very interesting and exciting material. We also heard Bill Stewart, a high ranking diplomat from the U.S. Embassy, which was also a very valuable experience. The speakers come and visit us and usually speak to us in the Director’s flat. We’ll be especially focusing on those courses during the travel component in November. Islamic thought and practice is taught by a Muslim Egyptian woman who is a professor at the American University in Cairo, and our Arabic course is likewise though by AUC profs. They’re interesting, but we have a variety of papers.

This weekend we have nothing scheduled, which is a nice opportunity to be able to get some rest, do some homework, and hang out around Cairo. I cannot believe I’ve been hear as long as I was in France. It’s crazy.