A portal into the past and some great hospitality

My first few hours in Egypt were quite hectic, I must say.

My bus driver, who was assigned to me by the university I was studying at, dropped me, along with my two duffel bags, off on campus. But I soon realized my dorm was not on campus. After getting an Uber (man, Ubers are so cheap in Egypt, it’s amazing) and reading off the extremely unclear address that I was provided, my new friend and I were driving around for, I kid you not, an hour trying to find my accommodations. My driver was quite literally rolling down his window asking random people on the street if they had any clue where my dorm was.

It ended up being a 10-minute walk from campus… That first encounter, however, showed me the warmth of Egyptian and Arab hospitality.

The dorms I was provided were honestly much nicer than I was expecting, with an apartment layout similar to what you may find at the Hub or Empire, except with no TV, a broken AC unit (which, in the middle of summer in Egypt, was not pleasant), and an exquisite view of half-finished buildings.

During the summer program, I was lucky to quickly find a group of friends, myself, four other Americans, and a Brit, who all bonded extremely quickly and became my core group. This December, I even got to stay in Reading, England with my friend and his family, getting a taste of the English countryside.

My friends and I at the world famous Abu Tarek Koshary restaurant

Arriving in Egypt, I honestly didn’t have “culture shock,” more just awe. Egypt is truly an inexplicably raw blend of the old and new. When walking through downtown Cairo, you are stepping foot through thousands of years of history, walking through markets where merchants have haggled and traded for hundreds of years, ducking under doorways to glimpse at caves where Jesus and his family found refuge. All the while, on the other side of the street, there are donkeys dragging wagons of fruit. Then, if you go another couple hundred yards, you can find yourself in a Louis Vuitton or Zara store and see the skyscrapers that make up the metropolis of Cairo, the seventh most populated city in the world.

Busy street market in downtown Cairo

Donkey drawn carriage