Classes started yesterday. Real classes, I mean. During orientation, I don't believe I ever thought about how other students attend AUC, so yesterday, when there were like a million Egyptians, I felt overwhelmed and out of place. Also, it was super crowded and I don't really like big crowds of people. Making it even worse was the fact that I hadn't tried to find my classes beforehand. It would have been really smart of me to do so, but for some reason, I thought it would be easy to find a building that my schedule labels as "HUSS". As it turns out, HUSS is another name for the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Hall and the building that my schedule lists as BEC is formally called the Abdul Latif Jameel Hall. I understand that Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud Hall should have a nickname, and I don't really have a problem with the name "HUSS", but seriously. Where does it come from? Like the School of Science and Engineering is called the SSE. It's nice and logical and easy to find. But BEC? I just don't get it. Anyway, here are some pictures of the new campus.


I'm not sure if you can tell, but the traffic here is insane. It's kind of funny, but I think it would be petrifying if I was actually driving myself. Also, there is this complete disregard for traffic laws. If you're at a red light, but there are no cars coming from the left or right, you can just go straight, until a car comes and honks at you, at which point, you can keep going, but the guy behind you will have to stop. I'm not sure if you noticed, but in the picture above, the bus is driving on a two lane highway. Yes, that middle lane of cars is probably illegally straddling the lane markers, but no one here cares.

The library. What you see is like a nice shady shell full of holes to sit in for a real building that has big glass windows. The other day I was in the library with some people and we saw this guy cleaning the windows from this giant three story ladder. The ladder was so tall that there was an extension thing from the already really tall ladder to make the guy go higher, and he had to wear a harness and have a metal hoop that allowed him to lean totally off the ladder. It was bizzare and frightning.

This is what I thought the campus looked like when I took this picture, during orientation. But really, you need to imagine this courtyard packed with stylish, rich arabs to get a better representation of it.


Dorms. New Cairo and New Campus are about 45 minutes away from Zamalek, where I live, on a good day. This means that they must be about 35 minutes away from downtown Cairo. Either way, I feel kind of bad for the people who live in the dorms on campus. They're pretty swank and I believe they are the first people to ever live there (there is even this really nice courtyard with blue tile fountains and a flat screen television), but I think it's pretty isolated and difficult to get into town to explore the city. On the other hand, they don't have to get up at 5:45 for an 8:30 morning class, four days a week. You also might notice how it is influenced by pueblos and stuff like that. I think the new campus is really cute becauase the architecture is this crazy fusion of pueblos and Mexican archetecture, contemporary architecture, and Islamic architecture and motifs.
Like you can see here, there are a lot of blue tiled walls, which is a reference to Islamic architecture. Also there are a lot of archways on the other side of campus. I don't think I took enough pictures to illustrate what I am talking about.

Here is a random ceiling of a random building. I've been seeing a lot of really cute courtyards within academic buildings, but I haven't been bringing my camera because my bag is kind of small.

In other news, I think my mailing address is:
Agnes Traye
International Student
The American University in Cairo
El Tagamoa El Khamis
P.O. Box 74
New Cairo 11835
EGYPT

But I don't know how reliably I'll be able to get mail. Claire and Julia told me that their friends who got packages last semester basically got boxes with everything valuable removed from them. So maybe don't send me expensive things. Maybe just start with cards or something, I don't know.