When people ask why it is I study Arabic, usually I answer that the Middle East is warmer than China. Yes, this is largely intended to get a laugh. But that doesn't mean that it's not perfectly, 100% true. I hate being cold. I'll grant you that, like any good Coloradan, I can appreciate being curled up warm and cozy with a book and some hot chocolate in front of a snowy window. But the issue I have with this is that you then have to go deal with the snow. You have to scrape your car and shovel your walks and have jeans soaked to the knee from snowmelt. And so I moved to Egypt. Egypt has no right to be cold!
So I had a bug. Well, I suppose given the local health climate, I shouldn't use that term loosely. Not a bug like parasite, a bug like a cold, and a particularly bad one at that. Coughing, phlegming, the whole bit. It was charming. I actually managed to lose my voice on Thursday, which turned out to be more good than bad. As it turns out, not having a voice in a language program makes for a rather easy day. But at any rate, I spent most of the next 20 hours or so sleeping, getting up mostly just to watch The Rocky Horror Picture Show with the room mates, and then alternating sleeping and reading until about 2pm the next day, when I though I was reasonably recuperated, could talk, and needed a bit of fresh air. So I figured I'd escape the smog of the city and go out to Maadi (a suburb) for dinner and my room mate's softball game.
On a totally tangential note, dinner was lovely- Lucille's is a country-Western themed restaurant that caters to expats, plays country music, and makes a mean pancake. It was a little disorienting being in Maadi. It's very Westernized. Very. It looked rather a lot like, oh I don't know, maybe any one of the neighborhoods just around downtown Denver, where it's not precisely downtown, but not suburbs either. And there were white people. It was strange. We weren't sure if we were supposed to be operating according to Cairo rules, or according to Western ones. But we decided we were still allowed to cross the streets Cairo-style.
At any rate, we got to Mel's softball game, and I'm still snuffeling and hacking just a bit. You'd think the balmy warm clean air would have cleared things right up, right? 'Cause I'm in EGYPT where it is supposed to be WARM. But no. This has to be the day it gets cold and rainy. Seriously. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen it rain here, and it has to start when I'm standing shivering with a cold on a softball field. So now I I'm just straight up ill. I mean, you choose a place (and a language and a degree, for that matter) for it's climate, and Murphy's Law is going to do everything it can to thwart you, isn't it? Well, if Murphy ever shows his face around here, I'll phlegm on him.
