It was too much hassle uploading my pics from Alex in the other post, as they seemed to refuse to go where I wanted them to, and I'm not exactly a technical genius. So here goes.

The market close to our holiday flat

Café by the sea

Nosheen, Scarlett and Zubda

Me, Lara and Hamida

The lunch our neighbours made us

The view from our balcony

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.
    

Heading off

So. After weeks of writing to-do lists, I am now finally ready to head off for my year abroad. I've even gone to the immense trouble of creating a blog with a suitably lame blog name, so you better read it!

I'll be leaving Norway tomorrow, 30th August, and will spend the weekend with a classmate in Rome, before we head to Egypt on the 3rd of September.

Lucky as I am I have managed to catch a nice cold, so now I have a little something to remind me of the homeland as I start my travels. I am also very happy to have received an e-mail from SOAS this very evening with information which would have been very helpful had we received it two months ago. Nothing makes you feel more prepared than when you right before departure receive a long list of things you should have done before leaving. I'm sorry to disappoint you, SOAS, but I somehow doubt I will be able to undergo a full medical examination and obtain a medical certificate during the next six hours.

After two years of studying Arabic, I am armed with useful phrases like "Certain modern literary trends in Europe (...) are characterized by the abandonment of realism as practised by previous generations, in that they no longer have the intention of presenting a picture of a given person or event which makes us think that it corresponds to reality, but rather incline to a fragmentation of narrative in order to present multiple points of view and to juxtapose scenes which appear to be disconnected", so in other words small talk should be no problem. Real ice breaker, that one. Egypt, I'm ready!