Settling in!

A lot has happened since I last wrote, but nothing too much of consequence.  I guess the biggest news is that we now have an apartment and are beginning to settle in. The saga of finding an apartment goes a little bit like this:

We were able to stay in the hotel until Tuesday...that was as long as our reservation went, and then we would be getting kicked out.  Well, trying to do ANYTHING in a Muslim country during Ramadan is nearly impossible...or rather you have to tack on an extra week to get things done.  The hours are haywire, for example nothing is really open during the day, but rather things open up late at night (after Iftar) and are open until about 2am.  So after getting kicked out of the hotel on Tuesday we stayed with a friend of a friend in her apartment.  Her name is Lauren and she was SUPER accommodating, patient and was very kind about letting us stay with her for a couple of nights.  We ended up staying with her Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

On Wednesday we took Adam out to the AUC campus so he could get settled into the dorms.  The campus is amazingly gorgeous and huge and it is kind of like its own little oasis in the middle of nowhere.  The only problem is that it is in the middle of nowhere and somewhat difficult to get to when the bus isn't running, or if you don't have a car.  Anyways, after dropping Adam off and exploring a tiny corner of the campus, we went back to Maadi (a suburb of Cairo--still really part of Cairo) and met with our realtor to sign the lease for our apartment.  It's a two bedroom apartment that we have conveniently converted into three bedrooms for Maddie, Zoya and myself.  We spent Wednesday night at Laurens again, and on Thursday packed up all of our things, called a taxi--which with all of our stuff they sent a 12 person van/bus, and headed to our apartment.  After dropping things off we headed to Carrefour to buy cleaning supplies and basic apartment necessities.

After 4 hours in Carrefour, which actually turns out to be in this nice mall--with a food court and a bunch of other stores, we headed back to our apartment and began to clean.  I don't know when the last time someone lived in our apartment was, but there was dirt for at least a year ALL OVER.  We cleaned non-stop until 3am and then took showers and hit the hay.

Since we don't have internet in our apartment yet...and we really can't expect anything to get done during Ramadan, we are currently sitting in McDonalds checking mail, writing blog posts, facebook-chatting etc... We start orientation tomorrow, which we wouldn't have known but luckily a lady on campus told us when we went inquiring about student IDs.

Not much else to say! I'll update later!