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Posts Tagged ‘yearabroad’

  1. Ooh, another update

    October 2, 2006 by dafyd

    I thought, being short of ideas, that I might type a little about what I’m actually doing on this course in Alexandria.

    In one sense, I have no idea. I could be in nice, small, quiet Durham, enjoying the last few days before term starts, eating ham sandwiches and having a drink in the evenings in the Undie.

    In the other sense – the one I actually meant – the course takes up four mornings a week. Yes, it really is a terribly heavy workload. Monday to Thursday, 9 o’clock to 1.30. The working day is divided into four sessions, each lasting an hour, with a half hour break at 11. In fact, most of the classes we have are doubles, so two hours, with a short break after an hour.

    The focus of the course is, obviously, Arabic. That’s Modern Standard Arabic, sort of like Received Pronunciation, which is the base of the language spoken from Morocco to Iraq. We have seven hours a week of grammar and vocabulary (thrilling, I know), and three hours of translation between English and Arabic. Add to that two hours of Media (reading the newspaper) every Tuesday, and we have 12 hours a week of learning standard Arabic. Which is considerably more than I have ever spent dedicated to learning a single language.

    The remaining four hours are Egyptian Colloquial Arabic – the Arabic actually spoken in Egypt. As Egypt is the centre of the Arab film and television industry, it’s fair to say that it is understood pretty much everywhere in the Middle East.

    The course is incredibly good. So much better than Durham’s Arabic, but I’m not sure that’s saying much. We are in a dedicated building (the “TAFL Centre”), and our teachers are on the staff of the Faculty of Arts, teaching us as an extra, which makes them very good teachers. The materials we’re using have been written specially (not some crummy American textbook) and are very, very good. If Alexandria can get this right, why can’t Durham?

    Anyway – there you go. A brief guide to my studies at the moment.

    Category 1 | Tags: ,,, | 2 Comments

  2. A few musings…

    September 28, 2006 by dafyd

    Ooh, I’ve been neglecting this. Mainly, to be fair, because I still haven’t found a reliable, easy way of accessing the interweb. It’s Ramadan, too, at the moment, which means shops and services open and close as they feel like, often not opening until 8pm…

    Anyhoo – here a few thoughts, in no particular order, that I’ve jotted elsewhere on the web.

    Arabic keyboards are fantastic… good job I can touch type, and just change the language…

    Klute equivalents in Alexandria are few and far between. The nearest we’ve found so far is called the Portugese Club and is filled – you guessed it – with Portugese expats. Alcohol, though, which makes a change from the most of the rest of Egypt…

    Ramadan… no eating during the day. Shops don’t even open until 8 o’clock IN THE EVENING… yet we have to be at uni from 9am. Grrrr.

    Enjoy France / Germany / wherever [this is from a discussion board with other Castle year abroaders] – and feel grateful that you’re not in a country where crossing the road is a full-size human game of Frogger. It’s worse when the taxi drivers haven’t had anything to eat all day…

    Ooh, even better is the entire Egyptian civil service and various public employees. Unemployment is so high in Egypt that the government literally creates new jobs by inventing new procedures… getting a student residence permit here requires visiting (I think) 8 different civil servants in 3 buildings in 2 cities (not including the Post Office or the embassy in London). It’s ridiculous. Heaven forbid that you put anything they don’t understand on the form (“English? Do you mean American?”) or leave the “religion” space blank. Luckily, the centre here has a little chappy who, as far as I can tell, is employed only to deal with these forms (at least, that’s all he’s been doing for the last 3 weeks).

    Speaking of pointless public servants, Egypt has a Tourism Police whose job, from what I can see, is to sit doing nothing at even the smallest “ancient antiquity” and expect money from tourists. You pay 10LE to get into the place, then spend another 20 or so trying to stop the police trying to show you “special government bazaar, tax free, sale today, owned by my cousin/uncle/brother/camel”.

    The roads here… most seem to have three lanes of traffic in each direction, though they don’t necessarily all go the same way on the same side. Lights at night are optional, and seem to be used only as a replacement for the horn when it doesn’t work or you don’t get out of the way fast enough. Rather than slowing down when one sees a potential hazard in the road (accident, pedestrian, camel, central reservation), drivers speed up, working on the theory that the obstacle will get out of the way before they have to brake. In fact, the taxis I’ve been in only used the brake when they needed to stop at my destination. I have crossed the roads in Paris – and these are far, far worse. Trust me on this. I was thinking the other day that a fantastic new reality TV programme would involve getting drivers from various countries, stick them in cars in London, and see who’s the last to be arrested/die. I would watch!

    Sorry this was such a rubbish post, but as soon as I get a chance to collect my thoughts and upload them properly, I will do. Promise. Ma salaama.

    Category 1 | Tags: ,, | 1 Comment

  3. Settling in

    September 13, 2006 by dafyd

    Sorry about the lack of updates recently – now I’ve moved out of the hotels I’ve been hopping between, I’ve lost a reliable, constant internet connection. That should change soon, though, once we’re allowed to use the university’s computers.

    Anyhoo… yes, I’m now in an apartment in Alex, living with Josh, also from Durham. Bizarrely, neither of us expected there to be any other Durham people on this course… says something about the organisational skills of Durham’s Arabic Department, methinks. We’re living literally 5 minutes away from the faculty, in an apartment block behind the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (the new Library of Alexandria). Very convenient, if a little shabby.

    The TAFL (Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language) course started on Sunday, with a couple of days of induction, form filling and administrative stuff. Then yesterday, we started two days of revision – most helpful when the only Arabic we’ve looked at since late May was for a resit (which, incidentally, I passed). Tomorrow we have a test to judge our level of Arabic, to make sure we’re placed in the right level teaching groups. For some reason, a lot of people are obsessing over this test, really worrying about what happens if they don’t do well. Judging from what I’ve seen of the students from other universities (Manchester, SOAS, Westminster, Bremen, etc), they’ve got nothing to worry about. Besides – this isn’t a pass/fail test, and nothing is set in stone. I’d rather do fairly badly in the test and be put in a group that reinforces some of the things I’m not sure about than be put in a group in which I struggle to keep up.

    So… that’s my life at the moment. Back at university, in a foreign country. That’s all I can think of for now. I have a couple of fairly interesting (and witty, I think) posts on general Egyptian life saved on my computer, which I’ll post when I get an opportunity. Suffice to say, the drivers here are absolute nutters.

    Category 1 | Tags: ,,, | 2 Comments

  4. Cairo

    September 5, 2006 by dafyd

    I’ve just thrown together a panorama from a few photos I took this afternoon, looking from the island of Zamalek in the middle of the Nile, back towards the eastern part of the city, Cairo’s main business and residential districts.

    Cairo, viewed from Zamalek

    [Clicky to embiggen]

    The grey haze you can see around the city? Yep, it’s really there. Cairo is, apparently, the most polluted city in the world. The government says it’s to do with the climate, but I doubt the number of cars and petrol costing less than the equivalent of 1p a litre help…

    Anyway: I think the big white skyscraper in the middle is the Ministry of Finance. The towers on the far left are the Misr National Bank, World Trade Center, Conrad Hotel and a shopping mall. The building with the big antennae on the roof is, surprisingly enough, the Egyptian television centre (the design, when you get closer to it, is quite blatently ripped-off from Television Centre, with a big round doughnut…). The tall brown building to the right is the Ramses Hilton, next to the Nile Hilton, both of which contain fairly large shopping malls. And at the very right of the picture, the small red dome you can just make out belongs to the Egyptian Museum, home of numerous mummies.

    I’ll see if I can do the same looking the other way, but as that river bank is pretty much one huge motorway, don’t hold your breath!

    Category 1 | Tags: ,,, | 1 Comment

  5. Ice Cold…

    September 3, 2006 by dafyd

    Or definitely not, in fact. I just wanted to use that title so I have absolutely no excuse to repeat the pun later in the year. Hit me very hard if I do.

    However… I do have an excuse, now. The hotel in whose bar John Mills so memorably quenches his thirst at the end of said motion picture is in fact the very hotel in which I have been staying for the last couple of days, the Hotel Cecil on the Alexandria seafront. ‘Tis a gorgeous hotel – you can really imagine Monty using it as his HQ during the North African bits of World War II, or Lawrence Durrell being moved to write his Alexandria Quartet whist staying there.

    I’ve spent the last three days sightseeing – I found a little man (as a good friend of mine would say) who took me round the sights, including a few off the beaten path. There are a few things I still can’t get my head around here, most of which involve the police. I’ll explain about some of them later, but one which sticks in my mind is the big display they make of how secure their “ancient treasures” (including my hotel) are – airport-style security arches at the entrance, and so on. But everyone walking into the hotel set the gate alarm off – generally carrying huge suitcases perfect for explosive concealment… and they couldn’t care less.

    Anyhoo – this afternoon I caught the train down to Cairo – nothing like as bad as I thought it would be, although I had absolutely no clue if I was on the right train or not. I’m staying here until Friday, when I’ll head back up to Alex for the start of term.

    I do have photos – lots of photos – but I’m on a very slow internet connection and it would take me forever to upload them. I’ll make sure I do as soon as possible, though.

    UPDATE: Photos from Day 1 are now on Flickr. Ooooh.

    Category 1 | Tags: ,,, | 2 Comments

  6. Israel etc

    July 21, 2006 by dafyd

    This is a great graphic that appeared on the front of today’s Indie, showing which countries do and don’t support the UN’s demand for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East [via Kottke]:

    Independent - Israel infographic

    Now, as everyone seems to be asking: I’m going to Egypt, which should be fairly safe. The rest of the group is planning on going to Damascus (in Syria, next door to Lebanon). Somehow I doubt that’s going to happen.

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