Cairo, where the world is very small.

I moved into my flat on Saturday. My flatmates are Danielle (a nurse, 27, from Montana) and Jab (a student, 25 or so, from Paris). They both study at Kalimat, like me. The first coincidence was that Jab and I ended up in the same foosha class. (Foosha is Arabic for Standard Arabic. Aamiyya is Arabic for Egyptian Arabic). I then discovered that he spent the whole of last year doing an MA in Durham. Weird. We all get along very well.

Kalimat is brilliant. I have foosha classes 9-12 and aamiyya classes 1.20-3.30. Classes run Monday to Thursday. I have 4 teachers, 2 for each language. For foosha I have Radwa (f) and Rifat (m), for aamiyya I have Hiba (f) and Sharif (m). For foosha I have been entered at level 2.5 and my classmates are from Germany (2), Sweden (1), Belgium (1), France (1) and next door to Harrods (1). For aamiyya I am in the beginners' group, with 4 Americans, 2 Germans and a Chilean. The teachers are genuinely among the best I have ever had, and although I have only been here for one week so far, I already feel as though I have learned a lot more than I would normally learn in a week. For lunch, we (myself, Julian and Toby, Rikke (f) who is from Denmark and various others) walk over to a take away place and get things like fuul and falafel, take it back to Kalimat and sit in the garden. 2 fuul sandwiches with salsa cost 3EGP, which is about 30p. And a perfectly good lunch.

In Cairo, it is generally easier to walk in the road rather than on the pavement. This can at times be quite terrifying, especially walking into the oncoming traffic on a 3-lane highway, especially with Egyptian drivers swerving and ignoring the lanes as much as they do, and motorbikes dancing around everywhere, taxis virtually driving into you because they reckon any Westerner walking must be in need of a taxi, even if they are going in the opposite direction. Crossing the roads is also fun. Pedestrian crossing are virtually unheard of, and I haven't seen many traffic lights, either. You just have to launch out into the stream of traffic. Luckily I have learned the hand signal for "wait", and it works pretty well. Also, there are always so many people around that you never have to wait long before a local who has been crossing these roads all their life turns up, and you just tag onto them. It is not unusual, however, to spend a fair amount of time standing between two lanes on one of the aforementioned massive roads, waiting for a chance to finish crossing, with cars going very fast just inches infront and behind.

The donkey carts go on these roads, too. Of course they do, logically, I just hadn't expected to see donkeys pulling carts of oranges along the equivalent of a motorway.

Last Monday afternoon, Julian and Toby and I took a taxi over to Khan El-Khalili, which is a large bazarre the other side of the city centre from here (I am in Agouza, they are in El-Doqqi, for anyone who knows Cairo at all). We wandered around it for several hours, and the only purchase we made was 2 bangles. Obviously that was me. For some strange reason, a lot of the stall holders seemed to think I was Russian, and shouted at me in Russian to come and buy their products. This happens wherever I go, actually. Not even just in Egypt, now I come to think of it. Do I look Russian? It got dark pretty soon after we arrived, but the market didn't start shutting down for a long time. It is spread over several narrow streets, and we wandered around them all, and accidentally left the bazaare and found ourselves in some slightly dodgy-looking, definitely very poor areas, where the people there just stared at us. They didn't even bother shouting at us, like everyone in the touristy areas does. They just watched us in silence as we walked past. There was some excellent architecture though, and Julian got some good pictures. We then walked back across the centre of Cairo, which took us over an hour, walking in the roads al the way. We stopped first for orange juice (here, you can buy freshly squeezed fruit juice, they literally make it in front of your eyes to order, on street corners - there are stalls with mountains of fruit and you just tell them what kind of juice you'd like. Costs about 20p usually) and then food, the name of which I have forgotten. Also from a small shop on a corner. We ate it walking down the road. My feet were very sore the next day.

Time for the upsetting things I have discovered. According to Danielle (and she is nurse, so I reckon pretty reliable on these things), over 90% of Egyptian girls and women, including those my age and younger, are circumcised. Female circumcision was made illegal last year, but it is still widely practiced. The official figure is 90%, but the Christian population of Egypt was not taken into account, because it is assumed that they don't do it, although it is widely known that many Copts do. Therefore it is highly likely that the actual figure is higher than 90%. A confusing but apparently widespread misconception, which contributes to the "Western women are easy and up for it" idea, is that if you are female and not circumcised, wearing jeans turns you on. I can only assume this idea is a combination of knowing that, as a general rule, Western women are not circumcised, and the observation that most Egyptian women don't wear jeans.

Wherever I go, people (particularly men, but not exclusively) shout at me, make comments, blow kisses and make strange "tsstsstss" cat noises. At times it is quite annoying, and can be invasive and stressful, but mostly it just happens so much that ignoring it is pretty easy.Thankfully it is only ever verbal. This is because, I am told, a new law was passed a couple of months ago making forms of harrassment other than rape illegal and therefore punishable. Until then, rape was the only form of harrassment you could press charges for, and the death penalty is one of the forms of punishment for that. Well, obviously no one wanted to risk someone being sentenced for death for touching them in the street, so never charged for anything. But now we can press charges for other kinds of harrassment, and all the men are scared to do anything. It seems I have come at a fortunate time.

I went to the English-speaking service at the Anglican Cathedral on Zamalek yesterday (stress on Zamaaaaaalek) with Danielle - I had been told about the pastor and he had been told about me before I even arrived in Cairo, and then I got here and discovered Danielle knows him pretty well. That was a coincidence in itself. We got invited to lunch with the pastor and his wife, and another English couple were there too. It turned out that the husband, Russell, had grown up in Wells...

Many of you may be wondering - am I covering my hair? No. Most Egyptian women wear the hijab (hair but not face) and there is a lot of variety in the style of scarf you use. Many of them wear what I might wear around my neck as a scarf, some of them wear silk things, some of them have designer labels written all over them. However, a significant proportion of Egyptians don't wear it, and for that reason I don't feel I need to. No one has shouted "haram" (immoral! shameful! disgracesful!) at me yet. I always get that word mixed up with "himar", which means donkey. There are also plenty of women who wear the whole lot, face and all gone, with just their eyes showing. Many of these even wear gloves. Since I have been here, I have hardly seen a single person, even Western tourists (although an American student did annoyingly break this yesterday) wearing anything shorter than ankle length. I follow suit.

I think that just about does it for now. I will finish with some of the unfortunate but entertaining things which have been said this week. From Julian: "tentacles make it more exciting" and "you're just a slightly more attractive version of a pig"(he would like me to point out that he was using the plural form of "you", and that he was speakin from the point of view of those who do not view women as having the same rights as men. From me: "your bridge is full of Fred".