Tuesday, November 17, 2009

I've had my own mini-plagues of Egypt experiences recently--after managing to avoid stomach troubles for months, I've been afflicted for a week, my throat mysteriously also has begun hurting (coinciding with a delightful post-nasal drip), and some mysterious creatures (not mosquitoes this time) have been nibbling away at me during my sleep. Pharaoh, let my people go. And write the rest of my thesis for me while you're at it.
After a night of stomach problem-generated sleeplessness, I walked to the shuttle, zombified. Everything seemed particularly surreal along my route because of the sleepiness, but a taxidermied fox, frozen forever mid-growl suddenly appeared on one of the streetcorners I pass. Suddenly in the sense that it wasn't there before, not in the sense that I was hallucinating stuffed creatures promenading around Cairo.
New campus had its share of interesting sights too--a Model United Nations poster with George W. Bush flanked by Hitler and Stalin. The text asked what they had in common. The answer? That none of them had Model UN in school. Never mind that Bush went to Harvard in the 1970s, a school whose MUN program began in the 1950s. To be fair, I don't suppose it's something an MBA student would've taken an interest in.
There's also a big poster depicting a friendly, fluffy sheep asking something like "Can you imagine an Eid without meat?" Given the cuddliness of the spokesheep, I had thought it was some kind of social awareness campaign about the social and environmental impacts of meat consumption (or perhaps even a PETA-style appeal). Nope. The cuddly sheep wants you to donate money to supply animals for poor people to slaughter during 'Aid al-Adha. Oh well.

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