A Day in the Life

We are nearing the end of the first section of the program, which means we are getting very close to digging! Clearly, I'm excited. But before we get there, I feel you should have a better sense of what life has been like the past few weeks. So, here's the schedule, annotated by your faithful narrator, to give you a sense of what EVERY DAY has been like (with the exception of Fridays, which are field trip days/days off from Arabic class).

The day begins at 8:00am with breakfast. Breakfast, as you may recall, is pretty delicious. You recall, right? From the breakfast post!

After breakfast, we are free until 10:30am. I usually take a nap. Or do some reading. Or take a shower. It is a very nice, lazy time, before the day has gotten too hot, but the flies are usually out in full force by then, so you have to pick and choose where you sit outside.

10:30am is TEA TIME, a lovely time of day. They offer five kinds of tea: black, cinnamon, peppermint, anise, and hibiscus, as well as milk and sugar, and these delicious little cookies called "Pastos," or "Kikos," which are biscuits covered in chocolate. AKA delicious.

At 11:30am we have seminar, for which we do a lot of reading, and make presentations on the oases. We sit in the tea room, which is always blissfully cool, dark, and practically fly-free, which makes it a very pleasant hour and a half.

At 1:00pm it's LUNCHTIME! Which is a wonderful time of day. When I began writing this post a few days ago, I wrote "lunch is typically all vegetarian, and features soup and bread and some other dishes." But then this week we've been having a series of non-vegetarian, slightly unsatisfying lunches. A famously unpleasant one, which we've had twice, consists of french fries for a main course. Most of the time, though, lunch is pretty yummy. Soon, when you see the lunch post, you will understand.

After lunch we are free until tea time. I usually do homework for Arabic class, which coincides with 4:00pm afternoon tea.

Arabic class is from 4-5pm. In it, we play a lot of vocabulary bingo, memorize new words, and draw pictures on flash cards. We also call one another by arabic names - mine is Zahra, which means flower. Not to be confused with zara, which means plantation! Our teacher Fatma, is a lovely young woman from Giza - she has just won a Fullbright scholarship, and will be going to either Boston or Ohio next fall to teach Arabic. She is a lovely person and a patient teacher. (But sometimes we find it hard to focus! The days sound free here, but the time passes quickly, and there is always research to be done and reading to be taken care of...)

From 5-7, we have our afternoon break. This is just around sunset, which usually occurs at about 6pm. Sometimes we do yoga with Christine, if the mosquitoes aren't too bad, and sometimes we just laze about. This is the time when I am most likely to be found playing card games - cribbage is my new favorite suggestion, since I discovered Eric knows how to play!

At 7pm it is dinner time. Dinner is usually delicious. You will see all about it in the dinner post! After dinner we can have tea or coffee in the tea room (a lot of tea, I know! It's wonderful!), or we can do more homework.

If we don't have much work to do, we can walk into town, which is about half an hour's walk away, and buy oranges or ice cream or peanuts or pastries. (They have delicious macaroons here, but I find things are generally a little too covered in honey... More on pastries later, I promise!) We also sometimes watch movies on the projector, and look at the beautiful stars from the roof!

I usually try to go to bed at 10 or 11, so I can wake up at 7. But usually I end up asleep by midnight... Or 1am, if it's been too difficult. And then, in the morning, I wake up to do it all over again!