So last Friday night I went with some friends to Wadi Degla, one of the big sports clubs in Egypt (in Maadi suburb of Cairo). For those of you not familiar with Cairo, think of it as New York City. Everyone lives in New York, but you really live in Manhattan, Long Island, the Bronx, the Village, Upper East Side, whatever....that's Cairo. Anyways, Wadi Degla is one of the biggest sports clubs in Cairo as it has branches in Maadi, New Cairo and 6th of October City. My friend Khalid plays for Wadi Degla New Cairo. The three Wadi clubs and a club in Alexandria have all started American Football teams this year. They have a 4-team league that will play games every Friday night. It is so much fun. This was the first game of the season and it was New Cairo at Maadi.
It was a blast. They "know" the rules to American football but they're not quite followed. For instance as soon as the ball is passed to someone, you see 22 people running down field, like soccer more or less. The crowd loved it though. Except the game was slightly anti-climactic ending in New Cairo winning 2-0. Imagine me and the other American guy Justin in the stands trying to explain to the crowd what a safety is and how football can have a score of 2. Nobody knew that there was any scoring option other than a touchdown. But what I liked is that the crowd was into it, the players had fun, and it was a good time.
The first picture is the teams shaking hands after the game. The second picture is the team playing. Number 8 (white team - Maadi) is the quarterback and he's passing the ball off to his running back. The third picture is me, Khalid and Justin and my friend Hassan in the front.
The last picture is of the Wadi Degla signs at the club.
I'm sick as hell by the way.... so while I lay in bed this weekend, expect some more blogs to come!
-G'do
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Every floor is my ashtray. Every street my garbage can.
NO NO NO. Don't assume from the title that I've become a complete litter bug. This is just how I feel sometimes. EVERY floor - the floor of classrooms, the sidewalk, the street, the floor of restaurants, the floor of buses and trains, the floor of the mall, I'm no exaggerating to say that EVERY floor is an ashtray for people. I feel so uncomfortable sometimes because I look around for a trash can or ashtray or somewhere I can appropriately dispose of my cigarettes but my Egyptian friends are always "just drop it." So I have acquiesced and now every floor is my ashtray too. However, I have not been able to acquiesce to the fact that every street is my garbage can. People just drop it when they're done with it. Much like cigarettes. Newspaper? McDonald's bag? Soda can? Cigarette pack? Tissue? It doesn't matter! Just drop it where and when you're done with it! Seriously the environmental people in the States would probably just cry here.
So school has been keeping me pretty busy. And I also am teaching English to Egyptian college students too. The problem is that my classes are at the old downtown campus, an hour away from where I live on New Campus - which is out in the middle of the desert. So each day I have class - Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday I take the 10AM bus downtown and I meet my friends Kais (German-Tunisian) and Ellen (American) and we study until our classes are 5:00. After class gets out at 8:00, we (me and my other classmates) take the 8:30 bus back to campus and we arrive close to 10ish. So I am gone every day from 10 til 10. My friends on campus have been giving me hell because I'm never around anymore. But these grad school classes are brutal IF you get behind or don't stay ahead. I'm doing great - because I have made sure to always stay up on it. But I've seen some classmates who haven't - and it's not a good thing.
I'll tell you all about my English class disasters in my next blog - so stay tuned. I'm learning how to be a teacher as I go, and believe me I have so much sympathy for those who teach now!
But last weekend was SO much fun. I blogged before that I had the privilege of being asked to help recruit for IUPUI at a college fair in Egypt with the IUPUI Director of International Recruitment. It was SOOOOO much fun! It was CRAZY and I didn't expect that we would have the turnout and interest that we did. It was an overwhelming response. I shutter to think what would have happened to poor Pat if she had been there all alone! Let me explain something about Egyptians. For Americans - it is widely accepted that you can make a career out of pretty much anything. So people go to school to be nurses, engineers, lawyers, doctors, they study math and history, they want to be teachers and police officers, they study political science and social work. Basically American students have diverse ideas about what success is - what they want to devote their lives to and so what they study in college.
This diversity DOES NOT exist in Egypt. You MIGHT be successful as a lawyer or businessman. You can probably do pretty good as a doctor. BUT engineering is the only REAL way to be successful and make lots of $$$. So this fair was mostly a bunch of US liberal arts colleges. One had a law school (but not medical and engineering). One had engineering (but it wasn't well known and didn't have medical or law). One had a medical school (but not law and engineering).
IUPUI has IU's nationally ranked law school. IU's nationally ranked medical school. and Purdue's world-renowned engineering school.
Thus - EVERY student wanted to talk to us. It was crazy. There were two of us behind a table and in Cairo and Alexandria both we were absolutely mobbed with at least 75 students at a time for the entire 3 hours the fairs. NYU looked pretty bored. I thought Boston was going to fall asleep. And here are Pat and I who can't stop to take a drink of water because the students were aggressively (yes there was some pushing and yelling) seeking information. "I want to be a doctor. I want scholarships!" "I want to be an engineer! How much?" "Do you have scholarships for medical school?!" And this was how it continued for three hours. The problem was once we were done talking - we had ABSOLUTELY no idea who was next and so we just picked someone and that's who we talked to. We tried to talk loud enough that everyone who had similar questions could hear. However that didn't work. Because as soon as I was done. The student next to this one would have the EXACT same questions - apparently expecting different answers.
It was so much fun though. These students are so so so eager to be successful. And to many of them, success means a degree from the states. They are so eager to do it. I have never seen American students so eager. It reminded me of why I hear stories like in Purdue. Two of their Master's programs in engineering this year (I think Mechanical and Electrical but can't remember for sure) have NO American students in them this year. It is this eagerness to succeed that is leaving American students and employees behind in the world. We have taken for granted too long that we are American and so all will be okay. While the rest of the world is aggressively trying to pass us up. And they are using our own colleges to make that a reality. And I say - good for them. Americans could take a page from the eagerness and determination that these students show. It shouldn't give Americans an excuse to write articles like "Foreign workers take American jobs" or "The assault on American Universities" that I have seen. They should be writing articles like "Americans are falling behind and its our own fault" and "Wake up America! Success comes to those who want it most - and that's not us anymore!"
~Randy
~Ramy
~G'do
~IUPUI International Ambassador
So school has been keeping me pretty busy. And I also am teaching English to Egyptian college students too. The problem is that my classes are at the old downtown campus, an hour away from where I live on New Campus - which is out in the middle of the desert. So each day I have class - Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Thursday I take the 10AM bus downtown and I meet my friends Kais (German-Tunisian) and Ellen (American) and we study until our classes are 5:00. After class gets out at 8:00, we (me and my other classmates) take the 8:30 bus back to campus and we arrive close to 10ish. So I am gone every day from 10 til 10. My friends on campus have been giving me hell because I'm never around anymore. But these grad school classes are brutal IF you get behind or don't stay ahead. I'm doing great - because I have made sure to always stay up on it. But I've seen some classmates who haven't - and it's not a good thing.
I'll tell you all about my English class disasters in my next blog - so stay tuned. I'm learning how to be a teacher as I go, and believe me I have so much sympathy for those who teach now!
But last weekend was SO much fun. I blogged before that I had the privilege of being asked to help recruit for IUPUI at a college fair in Egypt with the IUPUI Director of International Recruitment. It was SOOOOO much fun! It was CRAZY and I didn't expect that we would have the turnout and interest that we did. It was an overwhelming response. I shutter to think what would have happened to poor Pat if she had been there all alone! Let me explain something about Egyptians. For Americans - it is widely accepted that you can make a career out of pretty much anything. So people go to school to be nurses, engineers, lawyers, doctors, they study math and history, they want to be teachers and police officers, they study political science and social work. Basically American students have diverse ideas about what success is - what they want to devote their lives to and so what they study in college.
This diversity DOES NOT exist in Egypt. You MIGHT be successful as a lawyer or businessman. You can probably do pretty good as a doctor. BUT engineering is the only REAL way to be successful and make lots of $$$. So this fair was mostly a bunch of US liberal arts colleges. One had a law school (but not medical and engineering). One had engineering (but it wasn't well known and didn't have medical or law). One had a medical school (but not law and engineering).
IUPUI has IU's nationally ranked law school. IU's nationally ranked medical school. and Purdue's world-renowned engineering school.
Thus - EVERY student wanted to talk to us. It was crazy. There were two of us behind a table and in Cairo and Alexandria both we were absolutely mobbed with at least 75 students at a time for the entire 3 hours the fairs. NYU looked pretty bored. I thought Boston was going to fall asleep. And here are Pat and I who can't stop to take a drink of water because the students were aggressively (yes there was some pushing and yelling) seeking information. "I want to be a doctor. I want scholarships!" "I want to be an engineer! How much?" "Do you have scholarships for medical school?!" And this was how it continued for three hours. The problem was once we were done talking - we had ABSOLUTELY no idea who was next and so we just picked someone and that's who we talked to. We tried to talk loud enough that everyone who had similar questions could hear. However that didn't work. Because as soon as I was done. The student next to this one would have the EXACT same questions - apparently expecting different answers.
It was so much fun though. These students are so so so eager to be successful. And to many of them, success means a degree from the states. They are so eager to do it. I have never seen American students so eager. It reminded me of why I hear stories like in Purdue. Two of their Master's programs in engineering this year (I think Mechanical and Electrical but can't remember for sure) have NO American students in them this year. It is this eagerness to succeed that is leaving American students and employees behind in the world. We have taken for granted too long that we are American and so all will be okay. While the rest of the world is aggressively trying to pass us up. And they are using our own colleges to make that a reality. And I say - good for them. Americans could take a page from the eagerness and determination that these students show. It shouldn't give Americans an excuse to write articles like "Foreign workers take American jobs" or "The assault on American Universities" that I have seen. They should be writing articles like "Americans are falling behind and its our own fault" and "Wake up America! Success comes to those who want it most - and that's not us anymore!"
~Randy
~Ramy
~G'do
~IUPUI International Ambassador
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Survived the Weekend
So I had a pretty fun weekend. It started on Thursday night (as the weekends in Egypt are Friday and Saturday). I survived my first sandstorm on Thursday night. It was SOOOOO bad. I was trying to catch the bus at 7:15 to go meet friends downtown and the storm started about 7:10. It was just a blinding wall of sand that blew right at you. My nose, mouth and ears seemed full of sand. I was blowing sand out of my nose and cleaning sand from my ears still the next afternoon. It was funny because it FELT just like a storm in the States. The sky got dark and you could see "clouds" rolling in and it started to be a little windy. I SWEAR I thought it was going to start pouring. This of course is silly b/c it rains in Cairo maybe once a year. But suddenly it was just SAND everywhere. While in the bus the lights reflected off the sand like fog or heavy rain and it really decreased visibility. Once we got into Tahrir (downtown Cairo) it was better, but still windy and it was still kicking up sand. When I got back to campus later the next morning the place was a WRECK. Signs and trash cans, patio tables and umbrellas, chairs and trash just blown all over the place. This campus is FILLED with water fountains and they were just completely clogged with leaves and sand.
But I had a lot of fun this weekend. Tonight was a felluca ride (my third or fourth so far) for the Law Students Association. A felluca is like a sailboat that you ride on the Nile. They aren't particularly fun after your first one, its really the company and fun you have with friends that make them worth it.
I met some new friends Thursday night too. I'm glad I'm a social person or I would hate living here... but I don't cause I meet people like every week. I found out some GREAT information about Gaza too. I met a girl who has been a few times. I want to do my internship there and so she had great pointers and information to share with me.
Also I got confirmation from Pat, the Director of International Recruiting at IUPUI that she will arrive on Wednesday night. I'm attending a University fair with her in Cairo on Friday and Alexandria on Saturday. I'll be offering the alumni perspective to IUPUI in an attempt to recruit for Egyptian and other Arab students to come to IUPUI for their undergrad or grad school. That is really exciting and providence that I got to meet Pat right before I graduated and planned to meet her for this. Its kind of exciting to represent my school as an alumnus so soon after graduating.... woo hoo!
Loving Cairo,
Missing home,
Never wanting to leave,
Randy
But I had a lot of fun this weekend. Tonight was a felluca ride (my third or fourth so far) for the Law Students Association. A felluca is like a sailboat that you ride on the Nile. They aren't particularly fun after your first one, its really the company and fun you have with friends that make them worth it.
I met some new friends Thursday night too. I'm glad I'm a social person or I would hate living here... but I don't cause I meet people like every week. I found out some GREAT information about Gaza too. I met a girl who has been a few times. I want to do my internship there and so she had great pointers and information to share with me.
Also I got confirmation from Pat, the Director of International Recruiting at IUPUI that she will arrive on Wednesday night. I'm attending a University fair with her in Cairo on Friday and Alexandria on Saturday. I'll be offering the alumni perspective to IUPUI in an attempt to recruit for Egyptian and other Arab students to come to IUPUI for their undergrad or grad school. That is really exciting and providence that I got to meet Pat right before I graduated and planned to meet her for this. Its kind of exciting to represent my school as an alumnus so soon after graduating.... woo hoo!
Loving Cairo,
Missing home,
Never wanting to leave,
Randy
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