An Ajer in Alex: Settling in

The biggest part of the last weeks has been spent flat hunting. I was looking for flats together with Sara, Chiara and Rachel from my class, and finding a suitable furnished flat with four bedrooms proved to be quite a challenge. Most times we would be shown flats with the wrong number of rooms: we would ask for four bedrooms, the simsars (brokers) would insist on taking us to what they claimed were 8-bedroom flats, which would of course turn out to have 8 rooms in total, only two of them bedrooms. Or they would take us to unfurnished flats, some of them not even equipped with as much as a toilet. Or they would show us really nice flats, with the only drawback of being situated right next to the American consulate, with wagonloads of restless soldiers right outside the door. My personal favourite, however, was the one where the landlady eagerly tried to persuade us not to take the flat, stating that it was very bad and expensive: it was clear she did not want us there. Judging from our flat hunting experience the following conclusions can be drawn:

In order to become a simsar in Egypt you must lack either the ability or the inclination to count rooms and beds.
It is important to Egyptians to have many living rooms and sitting areas; whether everyone has their own room or bed is secondary.
Bookhshelves are superfluous.

However, in the sea of hopeless simsars we managed to find a very helpful and honest bawwab (doorman) called Karim, who would actually tell us exactly what the flats he could show us was like, so that we didn't need to waste time looking at more flats unsuitable to us. In the end he managed to find us a flat in a quiet, green area in inland Alexandria, close to where we need to get the bus to school. It is a spacious flat in a nice, old building. It only had three bedrooms, though, but we converted a sitting room into a bedroom - I think we will still manage to fit our guests into the two sitting areas and the one dining area. This flat came a little too complete, but after cleaning out dirty socks, whitening creams and broken kitchen utensils enough to fill 30 bin bags, the place actually became quite livable. We still have the black-and-white picture of our landlord's father trying to look sexy with his moustache, but I guess we can learn to live with that. And once we find a decent place to buy our groceries around here, our lives will be complete. I only hope that my grandfather can forgive me for the weird positioning of the posters in my room: I wanted something other than Mickey Mouse stickers to cover the holes in the wall.


The TV room in our flat

The living room

The dining area

The corridor leading to our rooms

The bathroom


My room

The kitchen

The view from one of our balconies

After finally settling into our flat, we started school this week. Originally we were supposed to study at a language centre at the University of Alexandria, but as they quadrupled the fees less than a month before we were supposed to start, other arrangements had to be made. Madam Magda, the professor who used to be responsible for the British students at the university, runs a centre called the Alexandria Center for Languages (ACL), which is where we have ended up going. We have mostly the same teachers we would have had at the university, and the ACL compound is very green and nice, but the biggest drawback is that we will not be part of Egyptian student life. In addition, the centre is situated pretty much in the middle of nowhere, by the Cairo-Alexandria desert road. Oh well, I guess we get to know an area we definitely wouldn't have visited otherwise.

Inside the ACL compound

The classes so far seem good, although there is less focus on spoken Arabic than I'd hoped. That means we will have to be make a bigger effort ourselves to find ways to practice our speaking. I've already met up a couple of times for language exchange with an Alexandrian girl called Tigu, who is really nice. The first time we met we mostly spoke English, whereas we managed to keep to Arabic virtually all the time the second time, which made me very proud. I will definitely be looking to do more stuff like that.

As most of our time so far has been spent settling in and getting used to the way things work here, I can't say we have really enjoyed Alexandrian life to the fullest. I hope that we now will get more time to explore Alexandria and travel in Egypt. However, we have done quite a few pleasant things already. Last weekend we went to the beach, and by the end of the day I had already gotten a tan. The water was warm and clear and beautiful, and I had a great time. You can meditate over that where you're sitting in rainy, cold Norway or England. There is a Norwegian saying which translates to something like "There's no such pleasure as malicious pleasure". You are welcome to meditate over that as well. Meanwhile, here are pictures from the beach:

We also went to a concert in the opera the other night. Young, talented musicians from Germany, called the Munich Ensemble, performed with well-known Egyptian musicians. Most of the performance I really enjoyed, and the opera house in itself is also quite nice. Plus, we got free tickets, so all in all we got very good value for our money.

The opera

Apart from that, hanging out at cafés along the Corniche is always nice. In the laid-back atmosphere of these places time stands still - this is how Alex should be experienced.