New York, New York

I am currently at the Student Honors center of the SUNY New Paltz university in up-state New York. I met my house mate Marius M. in Times Square yesterday and we walked around the city for the evening and ended up at Grand Central Station where we hopped a train for the country. Nicole, my other Cairo house-mate, picked us up. The ride to New Paltz was steeped in talk of the good times in Cairo and general happiness for the unexpected reunion. Northwest Airlines won't have a flight until tomorrow so today Marius and I are road tripping further up with Nicole while she meets with her father. I'll be on the flight tomorrow for Mpls. Inshaallah. Amazingly nice day here. Everything is so clean!

Kids

Today Campus was raided by over a hundred little kids. They swarmed into the tennis court during my afternoon class and all gathered in the shade to watch a punch and judy show that, from what I gathered, was meant to teach them English. As I watched after class, the puppet was trying to count to ten in English but would always revert into Arabic until the kids, counting along with him would help out. They proceeded to sing songs together and generally goof off. Something I have noticed here is that children are the same everywhere in the world. They think alike and find the same things interesting and fun. I wonder, when does that begin to change as the different cultures really take root?

Friends

Over the weekend I dropped my laptop and broke the screen. Shattered it really. How typical of me. I didn’t think I could function without a computer so a few days ago I went to the computer mall, a big building a few blocks from AUC that is home to around a hundred little computer shops, to find a cheap monitor to hook up to my laptop. A few of the shops sold monitors and I found a place that sold all used/old screens “mish ghalee”. So I dropped a hundred guinea and walked out holding this dinosaur of a screen and managed to grab a cab back to my flat. I was so happy to have my screen I decided to set it up “alatool”. After ten minutes the screen was glowing and I was busy installing the software for my $10 webcam. It was then that I noticed the half-inch long “saraseer” (cockroach) sticking his head out from under the base of the monitor. Immediately, I flashed back to my friend Mark’s story about a friend of his who’s apartment building was being torn down because of an extreme cockroach infestation. She asked Mark if she could leave here television at his place until she could find a new apartment. He agreed. A few days later he thought to move the TV from the middle of his dining room over to the wall, and when he picked it up, twenty cockroaches bolted for cover. He never thought that the bugs would be living IN the television and from that day forward his house had it’s own cockroach infestation. Sad story. Well, all this dawned on me in a split second and I exploded from my room and ran downstairs to fetch the Raid. The can was practically empty but for fumes. I ran back up and grabbed the monitor without slowing and lugged it onto my balcony where I tipped it on edge and sparingly sprayed into the porous base. FIVE huge roaches wriggled out and I had just enough spray to kill them before they scampered out of sight. This was serious. I immediately brought the screen through my flat, careful that no roaches climbed out in transit, and brought it down to the street in the elevator. The bowab was there and I told him to watch it on the sidewalk while I ran to Isis Market to buy a new can of Raid. Once I got back I opened up the can on the monitor, eventually pulling off the back case to have better access to the insides. At first a whole pile of roaches tumbled out and I had to scramble to kill them all before they escaped. I sat out there for about an hour with the monitor in the middle of the sidewalk. The people walking by probably thought me a strange sight standing over it with my can of “mabeet a-saraseer”. Finally the bowab weighed in, (I think he was a bit amused at my frantic battle with the bugs) telling me they were probably all dead and I might finish upstairs on my balcony. I agreed and allowed him to carry it up and set it on the ledge outside my room. I was scheduled to have a call with Kristi that night so I hesitantly brought it in after a few more rounds of spraying until the thing was literally dripping. During our conversation about four more roaches tried to make a run for it from the monitor and each time they met their death as I talked. I knew I couldn’t leave it unwatched so I got a big garbage bag and put it in and sealed it up with a final blast of Raid. The next day I had daylight and a screwdriver. I took the front cover off and found their main hideout: a series of nooks in the plastic molding. They must have succumbed to the overnight fumes because the whole lot of them were dead. With one last series of Raid sprays I determined that, finally, I had beaten them and it was safe to bring the monitor in permanently(the monitor now no more than a bunch of circuit boards and a TV tube), although I have never really been at ease with it, even until now. Even though I was vigilant, there is no way to really know if one or two of the vermin managed to escape. I guess only time will tell. And thinking back I should have known better. The whole computer mall was infested with roaches. I saw one or two in half the shops I visited. And when the shopkeeper picked up the monitor to test it, I now remember the one little roach that ran for cover.