Still alive, but the kicking has ceased

Hey Peeps,

Seems I was better at updating the blog earlier in the trip, huh? I blame school. I regularly study 4 hours a day on weekdays. (on top of 4.5hours of classes). Maybe it doesn’t sound like too much for you grad/professional school types (I’m especially looking at my med school and optometry school friends) but it’s still a lot and it means I don’t sit down to BS on my blog as often.

Okay, so that’s the biggest thing that’s eating my time in Egypt. The course goes by fast and there’s lots to learn, and since the course is everyday, you have work to prep for the next lecture every day, plus homework. Okay so I’m just whining. This is just a warm-up for my own grad school experience, but I think there’s something about spending most of your time not understanding most of the words that you hear that makes it difficult.

Weather is usually decent, but sometimes up and down. The down happens when we have sand storms. I guess it was bad enough that one of you from Canada heard about it from somewhere. Yeah the sand storm sucked. That one last week was like the 3rd one we had. It must have been bad to get on your news (implied from your comment). It's been gone for a couple days, though today another light one started. It's hard to breathe, there's no sun and every thing gets covered in dust. But oh well, everywhere has it's version of bad weather, and our season for this is ending soon.

What else? I must admit I’ve really lost a lot of energy to be pure Egyptian. The western me has crept back in and resumed his place in my mind and heart. I think there are a number of reasons.

First: being at school. I now interact with a bunch of westerners, and if you ever went to school (which you all did) you know that you don’t spend all of your non class time working on your classwork, so that most of my chatting with new friends is in English (which everyone speaks, even though not everyone is native English speaking; not even the majority.) On that note, I went to a party last weekend, thrown by a roommate of one the guys in my class. It was his (the roommate’s) birthday. The party was really weird, really fun. It was weird in that except for the “Fool” and “Ta3maya” on the table along with all the other party food, you could have been in any house party in Canada (or, more likely, Germany, given that many of the people there were German). It was pretty sweet, it was the most western thing I’ve done since I got there. And indeed once you get sucked in, get given a taste of westernism, it’s easy to slip back into it. And it’s happened to me.

Second: loss of purpose. I think I’ve lost some of my feeling of purpose in Egypt. I’m learning the language at the end of the trip, and I haven’t done anything so far that has told me, “this is, without a doubt, THE place where you belong.” So while it’s good, I have enjoyed it, and I could see returning with a more clear sense of purpose, there is currently an absence of purpose that seems to influence my attitude in the direction away from exerting a lot of effort to put myself out to experience more of Egypt.

Third: awareness of the end. I know I’m going home in about a month. And most of my free time (except on weekends) is spent studying. So it hardly seems worth it to throw a whole bunch of energy into efforts and relationships that will be ending very soon. This is most especially given that I’ve sort of experienced a pattern of relationships here. This city is big, and not having a car and a super clear idea of getting around (or just an absence of desire to expend the large amounts of energy it requires to get around if you don’t want to take cabs everywhere, which I don’t) means sometimes relationships are difficult. This is coupled with an absence of activities that people seem to do regularly as things they use to pass the time (e.g. play pool/go to sporting events), and my conversational skills just means it’s a bit challenging and for the above reasons, my energy isn’t up to it.

So how are you reading all this? Good? Bad? Ugly? Don’t worry about me. I’m okay.

By the way one of my good friends here (my family who came to Egypt knows him) has had a couple of serious medical incidents in his family – his dad was just diagnosed with acute leukemia and this just 2 weeks after his nephew with found to be having a very serious congenital disease. So if you’re the praying type, please send a prayer up to our God for his family.

I know I didn’t post on jobs yet. I’m sorry.

And to those of you waiting on emails from me, I’m sorry. I’m thinking of you all the time. I’m just not writing lots. It’s hard to be super-super regular on those too. I hope this blog will satiate you until I get to it. I hope I make good use of this weekend for that, but don’t hate me if I don’t.

BTW what happened to the Oilers? I’m still following them over here (of course) and I hope they get back to reality. Bold prediction 1: they’ll make the playoffs.