Full of Korean food and trying to muster up the will to finish my reaction papers for methods and for law, I thought I'd take a break and catch my blog up. Last evening, after Phil, Ross, and I hit the juice place (I got peach for a change-not bad), we headed to the Abd el-Hadi pastry shop where we received a warm welcome and were plied with samples of the treats that are being prepared for the week of Mohammad's birthday (which falls on Monday this year). Hadi, as he introduced himself, seemed to be on top of all the goings-on in his shop. He used to be an equestrian champion of some sort and at one point even produced an aged photo of himself atop a steed leaping through the air. Phil left with a kilo of baklawa (which he has apparently since consumed in its entirety), while Ross and I settled for some of the holiday goods–peanut bars surrounded with coconut and coconut bars with pistachios in the center, surrounded by apricot. Urging us to return often to help him with his English, Hadi bade us farewell. We headed back to the apartment and spent the rest of the evening hanging out with Ablavi from next door and a French coworker of hers.
Today I spent reading and writing and avoiding the increasing heat and sand outside. You can't call it hot yet, but I had to throw off my comforter last night because of how warm it got in my room. Later on, I joined Marise and Phil for Korean which was followed by juice with Ross. Further inquiring as to the mysterious pile of rubble and the hole inside of the building across the street where the butcher used to be, we were told cryptically that "they" didn't want the store anymore and that that's how the system works. God knows what that means. Seems like a drastic way to shut down a butcher shop.
I also found out that I'll be able to work on my thesis research this summer which probably be done at least in some part back in the States, maybe also in Europe. It'd be nice to find a job concurrently with the research for a month or two, but with this economy, that's probably impossible.

News:
Egypt sees its first female mayor
Resignation of Palestian PMs signal progress toward reconciliation
British parliamentarian joins aid convoy bound for Gaza
Pullitzer-prize winning author to travel to Gaza on International Women's Day (tomorrow)

Bibimbap and Comparative Migration Law

Last night after sending out a slew of postcards and working on my résumé, I joined a bunch of friends for Korean. The vegetarian crew (of which I'm a sometimes member) got orders of bibimbap--delicious! It's always so surreal to have the Korean owner, Egyptian waiters, and a small herd of Americans interacting as if it were the most normal Tuesday night activity ever. We spent the evening catching up, asking about each other's winter breaks--some were snowier than others. On the way in, we passed a praying policeman or military guy praying with his gun completely apart from him, laying on the floor. I didn't bother snatching it or anything; it probably wasn't loaded anyway.
Today I breathed a sigh of relief as I realized that I made an excellent choice in selecting Comparative Migration Law as my elective for the semester. Mike Kagan (who's teaching the course) is fantastic. Maybe I should be looking for an international law program somewhere. I'm so fickle. Today we talked about jus sanguinis and jus soli as bases for citizenship and discussed the differences between the laws governing nationality in Egypt, Chile, Argentina, China, the UK, and the US. Eventually we'll be developing our own migration codes in small groups. I'm really stoked by the prospect. Tomorrow is my dreaded first trek out to the desert campus for my psychosocial class. I'll try and be optimistic tomorrow when I get on the bus for the hour-long bus ride, but no promises.
I've also been in contact with an author who was a former Rotary ambassadorial scholar to London in the late 1980s. He's coming out with a memoir that promises to be excellent and will discuss in part his Rotary experience. Check out his bio at the Huffington Post website.

News:
Nazi war criminal eluded capture, allegedly died in Cairo in 1992
Paper suggests lack of professionalism as much as problem as suppression in Egyptian media
Short films capture cultural currents in Cairo

An Inexplicable Energy Outage & Religion with Reham

Feeling better-rested than usual, I was prepared to start the day off on the right foot. I wandered, half-awake, down the hall to turn on BBC World, as usual, but without effect. I peered at the remote control, but couldn't see much since the closed shutters and doors blocked out the sunlight. I got up to turn on the overhead light. Nothing. Surely a fuse must've blown. I check--nope. So it was that our apartment (and ours alone in all the building) was without power all day. I can help but indulge the suspicion that Ahmed, furious about his altercation with Catherine and her comrades was seeking revenge and that it got botched in the process, our apartment being mistaken for theirs. That's just speculation, of course. Fuming, I ate my muesli with yogurt from the fridge that was warming up again, just as when the motor broke down not so very long ago. I showered, grabbed my things, and stormed off to Costa Coffee where I half-heartedly read the required readings for Refugee Law today. At 3, my friend and classmate Reham joined me. We'd begun discussing Islam and religion in general the other day and had decided to get together again to discuss more. This was put off in favor of venting, which both of us did. Eventually we reached the topic at hand and discussed the similarities in our religious over mediocre mango "Frescatos". We also discussed the propensity for Copts to have favored John McCain in the American presidential race, their identity and Egyptian identity in general. We touched on extremism and Ibn Taymiyya and the concept of Islam having a detailed plan for temporal governance while Christianity was differently focused. We spoke of saints in Christianity and a similar practice in Islam and found that we hold in common a disagreement with the ideas of praying to the dead and worshiping people instead of or in addition to God. Reham readily admitted that Mohammad was simply a man who was dead and could be of no supernatural service to mankind any longer, a huge distinction between Mohammad and Jesus that those who would seek to compare them cannot reconcile. The life of Mary (or Maryam as she is known in the Qur'an) is treated far differently by the Bible than it is the Qur'an (as are a great many things). Reham and I found it interesting that many Christians and Muslims across the spectrum agreed on a whole host of social issues, but that it is theology that divides us. Next time we meet, we hope to delve into that theology a bit more.
We were off to Refugee Law after that. The topic today was exclusions clauses of the 1951 Refugee Convention--reasons for revoking or denying a person refugee status. After our three-hour class Phil and I went to the Thai restaurant in the Semiramis Intercontinental only to find that the half-dozen or so empty tables were apparently all reserved. We then trekked (somewhat circuitously as I tried to remember how to find my way) to Kowloon for Korean food. Tomorrow night is my night to teach English in Ain Shams after which I may be having a friend cut my hair. God only knows how that will end up.

News:
Omar bin Laden ends up in Qatar after being refugee asylum in Spain, Egypt
EU, US officials meet with Arab leaders to discuss Iran
Nile, source of conflict among Egypt, Sudan, and Kenya

From Korea to Kandahar in Cairo

Yesterday was quite a full day. Our classes, now that Ramadan has ended, last three hours and the difference is quite palpable. I got koshary to go and left for my Intro course where I turned in my reflection paper on the refugee régime and its relationship with states' security interests and the language of humanitarianism. A couple of my classmates and I, after escaping from the fluorescent torture chamber, decided to get dinner. A nearby Lebanese place didn't have any room for the likes of us non-reservation holders, so we wandered to the Cleopatra Palace Hotel where one of us had heard there was a good Korean restaurant. I was skeptical as we rounded the corner and came upon the dodgy façade, but was pleasantly surprised inside. The kimchi was delicious as was our main course, bibimbap. Jamie, one of our group of three, had lived in South Korea for a year. She opined that the food in this Egypto-Korean joint was quite good, but that perhaps the rice was a little on the Egyptian side. The presence of dozens of Korean tourists ostensibly confirmed the authenticity or at least acceptability of the cuisine.
It was after ten by the time I returned home, but my evening was just beginning. My next stop was a house party in Mounira at an apartment near the French Cultural Center. Appropriately, there were a lot of francophones, affording me yet another opportunity to socialize in my second language. The rest of the number of guests were Canadian, British, Sudanese, Ethiopian, Iraqi, Lebanese, Italian, American, etc. I had a humorous conversation with my Ethiopian chum, Ammanuel in which he was earnestly trying to discover what American women really mean when they say "I don't know."
Finding myself still there, lost in conversation at 3 AM, I decided I probably ought to go home and sleep. A small herd of new acquaintances and one of my classmates had other plans and convinced me to join them at Odeon where we remained until sunrise. Honestly though, with the way my sleeping pattern is, it was worth it. The conversations I get to have and the experiences people share are truly unique.
Currently, after having slept in quite late, I've been buckling down and doing reading on whether people who are military deserters or trying to dodge military service obligations can qualify as refugees. In less than a couple of hours, I'll be heading to dinner at Kandahar which, though named after a city in Afghanistan, serves Indian and Lebanese food. Don't ask, I have no idea.

News of Egypt:
Education in Egypt
Rice not content with condition of human rights in Egypt
Egypt, Syria, and North Korea only three countries that ban commercial GPS
8 Egyptians charged in 'Eid sexual assault