First impressions

So. First things first, I guess.

I had a nice couple of days with my friend Chiara in Rome. Even though I was not in Rome for long, I still managed to see quite a lot. We stayed with some friends of Chiara's sister - a very nice family with a really lovely flat right by the Colosseum. Then we headed over to Chiara's hometown Pescara, where we spent time with her family and went to the beach. This was my first time in Italy and I really enjoyed it. I thought I couldn't speak Italian anymore, so it was nice discovering that even though I'm not exactly eloquent, I can make myself understood most of the time and understand quite a lot.

Me in front of the Colosseum

Forum Romanum

Chiara by the Spanish Steps

St. Peter's Square

St. Peter's Basilica

Swiss Guard

Moses by Michelangelo in San Pietro in Vincoli

Pantheon

Piazza Navona

Piazza Venezia

The Trevi Fountain

The street where we lived

Originally the plan was that Chiara and I would travel to Egypt together on the 3rd of September. However, she suddenly got a problem with her foot, and found out she had to have an operation as she could hardly walk. Therefore, she wouldn't be able to travel to Egypt until the 13th. I was very nervous about having to travel alone, but the people from our class were really helpful, so everything turned out well. Rachel and her boyfriend Ahmed picked me up from the airport in Cairo. The next day I took the train from Cairo to Alexandria with Jake, who together with Nazmul showed me around downtown Alex and took me to the holiday flat where Lara, Scarlett, Zubda, Nosheen and Hamida let me stay with them.

My first impression of Alex was....overwhelming. This is a city which contains almost as many people as my whole country, with a traffic whose only guiding prinicple seems to be survival of the fittest.The sound of honking is heard constantly. If you're about to do something crazy, you honk. If you see someone you know, you honk. If you're annoyed or angry, you honk. If you're impatient, you honk. If you're bored, you honk. And sometimes you migth even honk to the beat of the music blasting from your taxi.

If we learnt anything the first days, it was that everything takes ages. Somehow we managed to spend the first few days doing nothing but grocery shopping - with the heat and the crazy traffic, everything took longer than expected. It didn't help that we didn't know when rush hours would be: what was supposed to be a 15 minute drive to the shopping centre Carrefour ended up taking an hour and a half.

But standing on the balcony in the comfortable evening temperature, overlooking the sea and listening to the calls to prayer resounding from every corner of the city, Alex suddenly seemed infinitely more charming.

One night we started talking to the 6-year-old girl Malak on the balcony below. We talked to her for hours in Arabic, and I even sung her some old Norwegian songs on request. The next night her 19-year-old sister Aya came out on the balcony as well. We were invited down to visit them at 1 in the morning, and were served tea and cookies until 4 am. We really couldn't have asked for better neighbours and friends: one day when we came home they even brought us homemade lunch.

You know what: I might just come to love this city.