Ticked off at Vodafone (the owner of Verizon and the wireless that is starting its Coca-Cola style domination) but finally figured out how they make all their money. One can buy a number (a SIM card) for almost every country in the world and prepaid cards. However I finally discovered the catch. After a few weeks the prepaird card expires—even if you don’t use all the minutes—and if you don’t recharge your minutes before the card expires your phone expires and it costs 20 pounds to reactivate. So last week I bought an “old card”. Basically they screwed me over and gave me a card that expired this week, not realizing it I just ordered a new cell card to recharge my phone and call home since AT&T does not work (I’ve tried like every day in the past five weeks). However, the new card was all used up on “recharging my phone”. The only good thing is that this was a good card so it lasts until August 15th—except that all my minutes were gone on recharging my phone so now I still have to go buy a phone card to recharge my minutes to call home. Ticked—sometimes you just want to call home!

Oh well, nothing can be done til about 10:30 tonight when Sarah and I head to the all-night café Insomnia to read poli sci all night if we have to (where they supposedly have healthy American food—hopefully, I’m starting to feel really unhealthy and plan on going home and being on the biggest diet ever!!).

Today was a normal day: paid for the Nile Cruise (a bit costly but worth it), studied a bit, went to Arabic class and found out that I got an A on the presentation part of my exam (we will get the other grade tomorrow or the next day), then grabbed lunch with Mahrean and Anthony at Euro Deli—so good! After that I came to my room, did emails (they are never ending and not looking forward to two-months of voicemail built up on my cell when I get home!), read and critiqued an article for poli sci, and wrote an Arabic speech.

Right now just venting how much I hate Vodafone (althought I would buy stock—they are taking over the world) and waiting for Sarah to shower so we can head to study more and eat!

Random Egyptian things I’ve been thinking about adding for a while:

“Egyptian Rain”: what we call the disgusting water you get on you when you walk down the street, comes from the air-conditioners

“Arabo Trash”: those that grew up in wealthy households (different than Eurotrash) and don’t know the difference between Arabic and English, just converse with a combination of words in each (regardless of who they are talking to!)

Toilette: somehow more proper for a girl to ask where that is rather than the “hamam”, also the location in Egyptian homes for the washing machine, dryer, and water heater

Bak-sheesh: a tip Egyptians want for everything, ex: “here’s the directions. . .bak sheesh?”, no shame in asking

“Egyptians have hearts, Americans have brains.”: ridiculous quote from our “personal shopper” yesterday

Tammy’s: an Egyptian brand of cereal that copies all American brands for about the tenth of the price, never buy it because even if it has the same name (apparently copywrite/trademark laws don’t work here!) it’ll be disgusting

“Bakra Inshahallah” Tomorrow, God willing: means it’ll never happen in the next few weeks (sarcasm)

“Inshahallah” God willing: won’t happen in our lifetime (sarcasm)

“Eaza” means “I want”: a word we play games with, when we say “let’s only talk to each other in Arabic” it usually follows with us going off with a list of what we want back and forth: rugel gameel, icecream, yanam. . . .it goes on and on 

I’ll try to add some more random stuff in the future cuz it’s kind of fun to see the little things!