All a blur

So I see the last entry I made was on Tuesday of last week.. weird to think almost a week has gone by between then and now. We finished taking Survival Arabic classes, which lasted four hours each day, thank god. Let's see.. nothing big Cairo has happened between then and now, but we did go to a resort on the Red Sea from Friday until yesterday. It was as awesome as you would think.

The place is called El Gouna, and we stayed at the Movenpick hotel (a Swiss resort) literally on the Red Sea. The water was maybe 75 yards from my patio door. So yeah, that was cool. They also had a couple pools and a lot of beach huts with lawn chairs, etc. Very picturesque. And speaking of, I put some pictures up on my webshotes site. There's some of the beach, and a lot of us drinking Egyptian beer in my room. I guess it sums up the experience. But really it was a nice quick vacation before we get thrown back into Cairo. Some friends and I also took a ride on the sea on a speed boatish thing, and got to snorkel. My first time snorkeling around coral.. it was sweet.

El Gouna reminded me a lot of Florida, because everything is so flat, and it seems like the developers just came and plopped down all these new buildings in the middle of a place where no one would intentionally live. It just felt isolated from the rest of the country. But that was ok for our purposes. In the "town" of El Gouna there was some karaoke bar where a ton of us went on the last night, and that was definitely fun. If you can, try to imagine about 10 American guys on stage belting out Bon Jovi's Livin on a Prayer while a crowd of Egyptians look on. Yeah, it was fun.

In sadder news, the shutter on my digital camera won't open when I turn it on anymore, so I might have to get a new one, which is an unneeded and irritating expense. I don't think it will be possible for me to rely on other people for pictures for the next three and a half months. But Casey did take a good shot of me standing in the Red Sea. I couldn't part it, and there were no Charlton Heston spottings. Sorry everyone.

Classes also started today. Colloquial Arabic is at 8:00 am, but I have friends in the class, and there's a section at 3:00 that might open up. Islamic Art and Architecture of Cairo should be really fascinating, but there are 7 field trips, all on Fridays and Saturdays, and I don't want anything to interfere with my ability to travel in Egypt and the region. That's all for now.. and I'm starving. Talk to you all later.