Classes started on Sunday (Friday is the Muslim sabbath, so Friday and Saturday are the weekend) and here is my finalized schedule for the semester:
HST321: Social/Cultural History of the Medieval Middle East
ANTH320: Peasants, Nomads, and Rural Change
ARIC320: Intro to Sufism
ALNG109: Intro to Egyptian Colloquial Arabic
Needless to say, I'm looking forward to it.
The AUC International Student Handbook had alerted me that AUC had a more professional attitude among its students on campus, and that they typically dressed very well for school. Well, half of that turned out to be true. (Warning: major generalizations ahead!) Egyptians do dress very well on campus, certainly enough to make me feel like a bum in my Levi's, non-brand shirt and undone hair. But it's not a professional dress, it's a social dress. My first impression walking onto Greek Campus (the most socially buzzin' campus) was that of a high school kid in a new school. To the left of the entrance gate is a large rock (granite? i dunno) staircase that becomes a platform to the library entrance. Sitting on every tier all the way around the stairs are couples and cliques of students decked in Gucci, Armani, what have you, chatting and waving cigarettes peering down on the pedestrians no doubt for conversational purposes. Then once you make it around the stairs, there is the courtyard, absolutely packed with loitering and milling students. Then you get to the stairs of the social science building, which lead to an open hallway overlooking the courtyard. Now, the SSCI building stairs are a prime social domain. Especially if you can get enough people to stand and talk and smoke on them so that the only way to get to class is to awkwardly excuse yourself though. Then again, maybe I should just stop being such a nerd and getting to class five minutes early. The classrooms are nearly empty until it seems an imaginary 'minute-bell' (as we had in high school) rings and suddenly the cigarettes get one last drag and the hallways are bare.
To top it all off, after leaving my first class of the semester, I came out into the SSCI hallway to find two Egyptians in a bit of a tussle, a girl hanging onto the sleeve of one guy. Blood out the other guy's nose. Friends stepped in and soon the guards. Lovely. ...just some unfinished business from last semester, I presume.
An eerily empty Greek campus. The stairs wrap all the way around and the entrance is behind them. The hallway I'm talking about is to the right, behind the white columns.
I prefer to spend my time near the fountain in the more laid back Main campus:
To take a step back, the social attitude is very huge at AUC, but in a lot of cases, I've noticed Egyptian students already somewhat more participant in class than at MSU. The extreme cases otherwise are of many of the ultra rich that attend my school. These are sons/daughters of ambassadors, ministers, tycoons, whose lives are financially set and seem to be at university exclusively to socialize, and don't so much feel like answering to some middle-class professor.
