"Asalaam aleikum! Where are the frauenbathrooms?"

My paltry Arabic did me no good in the Frankfurt Airport, where I had about 3 hours layover between Chicago and Cairo. (For the record, frauenbathrooms are called "toilette," just like in French but say the final e, and they're right over there, just more discretely placed and with fewer indicating signs than in the US.) I took some pictures for your viewing pleasure.

Christ Jewelry and Watches International

Goethe Bar--if you click the picture, in the background you can see a big white statue of what is assumably the man himself reclining ina big hat

On the way to Frankfurt I sat next to a couple from Wisconsin going to visit their family in India, and on the way to Cairo I sat next a Finnish couple going to Egypt for a meeting. At my gate in Frankfurt, I saw a group of kids whose Georgetown hoodies and guitar case gave them away as American college students. I sat with them and sure enough they were all enrolled in the American University in Cairo (AUC) this spring. One girl mentioned that she felt loud and American in the Frankfurt airport and I felt the same, but ignorant too. It's kind of presumptuous to be in a place where your only vocabulary in the local language comes from "Sound of Music." Although some things are universal; Mom will be pleased to hear that I saw "Das Goldene Sudoku" stocked in the business class section of my second plane.

There were a couple moments on the plane when I thought, "Wow, I'm actually on the plane. I've been planning this for over a year and it's on the brink of actually happening." I think it would have taken me about 20 more years to pull this together if it hadn't been for Mom and Dad helping me so much. So many other people have prepared me, but it's not quite the same as late night faxes, endless phone calls on my behalf, and sacrificing their bedroom to serve as ground zero for my packing efforts.

Everything went smoothly getting from our house in Chicago to the dorm in Cairo, and the few glitches are not worth mentioning. All the AUC students were corralled and put on a bus going to our dorm. The drive from the airport was about an hour, which gave us the opportunity to see the city. It was a little before sunset as we were driving, which bathed the whole scene in a golden light, revealing a city looking quite like Metropolis (the new anime version), with a hodgepodge of buildings mixed together. It was stunningly beautiful architecturally. There was laundry hanging out of a lot of windows and satellite dishes on the roofs of crumbling buildings. Billboards are everywhere. There are palm trees and a lot of other greenery just mixed in. I even thought the sand next to the runway was beautiful. It's just so not-grass. Most everything in the city is paved, but even in that way there's just so much variety.

There's a lot more to describe but I'm very tired and quite jetlagged, so more later.