I am a bad blogger

I haven't posted in a month?! OK that is waaaay too long. Sorry people! Things here continue to go really well. I started school 2 wks ago and so far I love it. I am teaching 2 sections of World History to 10th grade and 4 sections of 12th grade political science. The World History book is the exact same one that I used while teaching at Sullivan! Nefertari has never offered a political science course before so not only am I teaching, I am also writing the entire curriculum! Writing a political science course in post revolutionary Egypt during the formation of a new government, elections and the writing of a new constitution is pretty much the most amazing thing I have ever been lucky enough to do. The students are pretty par for the course so far. I think high schoolers anywhere are pretty similar. My biggest battle is going to be getting them to speak in English. They are supposed to be speaking all English, all the time, even with their friends but this is fairly difficult to enforce as I'm sure you can imagine. When I told one class that I was from Chicago a student in the back stood up and without saying anything and pretended to fire an automatic weapon then said "alcatraz"! Alcatraz? Wha? "Mobster!" he said. Ohhhhh...Al CAPONE! So good to see my city has made a positive impression on the world.

I get to and form school on a microsbus which is nice but chaotic. In the morning they pick me up a few blocks from my house and then after school they drop me in the same spot. We arrive and leave with the students. Luckily on my bus it is me and 3 other teachers and then 2 adorable little kids. We all sleep the whoooole way home. The bus issue has been a bit of a mess until recently. The first week they forgot me one afternoon after school. FORGOT ME. At this point there were only 2 of us on the damn bus so to forget me was pretty impressive. I have missed my bus once and had to take a looooong and costly cab there last week. It was the first day my bus was coming at 6:05 am and I apparently was nowhere near ready to wake up at 5am. But I made it! It also takes over an hour every afternoon to get everyone on the right busses and get them all on the road. It is pretty infuriating. And hot.

Ramadan ended 2 wks ago. Finally. I am feeling pretty proud of myself for making it all the way through! At the end of Ramadan is a holiday called Eid. Everyone gets the week off work so we headed to Sa7el...the north coast of Egypt on the Meditteranean. A few of our friends parents have houses there so it was an amazing cheap trip! The drive from Cairo is about an hour and a half. We had to stop on on the one road that goes there to get gas which was a mess. In Egypt an attendant pumps your gas for you and the line for gas was out of the station, down the driveway and on to the highway. There are not as many gas stations here as in the states and I'm pretty sure that station was one of only 2 stations you could go to once on the road. It was, as I mentioned, insane. The beach is AMAAAAZING. The water is so clear and blue and so so warm. We brought banangrams to the beach, made a sand sea turtle, played pro kadima, slept, everything. There are men who walk up and down the beach selling all sorts of amazing food and I had delicious fresh mussels and 'lil clams. So so so good! Just to make you jealous, here are some pics of what you missed!

So much more has happened in this past month that I wish I could remember to write about! I promise to be much better about doing this weekly. Yeesh.