Recap/Yes I really have been going to class... see!!!

So Alexandria was fun--we stayed on the grounds of the former castle of a prince who had way too much money and very worldy architectural tastes. And when I say worldy, I mean he was probably just indecisive and didn't know whether he wanted Moorish, Turkish, Islamic, Japanese, or Gothic styles and decided to add a little of the above: Moorish geometry on the ramparts, a few friendly-looking gargoyles, a Japanese pagoda, and a Bavarian color scheme, just to throw us off a little bit.
The other international students are, for the most part, very nice and I continue to love my roommates more and more as we go on adventures together. Impressively enough (though unsurprising), there are actually more people here than at who are under the impression that they are the most unique, season travellers in the world. And, as such, they naturally know more about everything Egyptian than the other non-world travellers and find it beneath their sensibilities to actually converse with you. Most are more than tolerable and genuinely nice people, excited to be in Egypt and go on adventures. I have yet to find the perfect cohort to travel with, seeing as how my style of travel tends to be relatively physically demanding, bordering on damaging, but between the kid from Australia and the West Point boys, I should find someone to go on "Lindsey's Bhutan Death March of Upper Egypt parts I-II" (for details on the history of this title, please direct questions to my parents).
But I swam in a cold, pretty, polluted ocean, that proves that the '76 Barcelona Convention to protect the Med from pollution is not entirely working. Ironically, most of the pollution found is not from Egypt itself, which has only one Med port (Alexandria) and is runoff from countries to the north. Ironically, most of Egypt's coastine is marshy, shallow, and incapable of supporting a deep water port; thus, since Alexandria is an articially created port and has a harbor, the harbor acts like a sponge soaking in all the free-flowing debris and other pollution. At this port I, for the first time, realized why precisely sea turtles swallow so many plastic bags. When I previously considered the issue, I visualized a whole shopping bag and considered how little it actually resembled a plastic bag. Oops... by the time they have been tossed about the land and sea, the bags are in shreds... small shreds that shockingly resemble the whitish-clear tentacles of jellyfish.
Off of the environmental beat, it was just nice to be in a quiet place for awhile. While I am obsessed with the frantic pace of life in Cairo with its honking and constant movement and construction and donkey/man dodging (only the donkeys don't harass me, so they are on the whole a nicer addition to the streets), it was nice to feel quiet. I found palm groves and some neat pine trees with small, irregularly-shaped cones that my mom would have loved to make a Christmas wreath from, a few Egyptian couples having a bit of fun inside the palm groves, a turn of the century lighthouse, and some of the best ice cream I have ever tasted. Strawberry and mango hand-swirled inside a crispy cone--Candice would never have left and I was left seriously tempted to buy a block of dry ice and bring a few gallons home with me. Note to Kate: no, there is no competition with Graeters as this was gelato-like, and therefore serves and entirely different purpose on the ice cream chart.

I have started school now and decided to drop Colloquial Egyptian in favor of a symposium on International Development. I'll get a colloquial tutor so that I can bargain better at the markets and bring everyone back fabulously cheap jewelry and other fun things, but I wasn't a fan of getting graded on a subjet that I am taking for purely practical, non-academic purposes.
Oh, and for those of you who want gifts from Egypt (you know who you are), Egypt is well-known for the following items: scarves, knock-off designer handbags, camels, jewelry, especially gold and with some lovely alabaster and turquoise, tacky shynx and pyramid statues, good-luck amulets, turkish coffee, really yummy oranges, and a great collection of books on Egyptology, Coptic art and illuminated texts, and papyri, both real and fake. Interesting fact of the day: papyri is actually extinct, for all intents and purposes. It was semi-domesticated, but when its cultivation was abandoned upon the discovery and widespread availability of paper, the semi-domestic strain was too weak too fight against other invasive and domestic plants. In 1968, one small patch was found in the Nile Delta, but otherwise the only remaining papyrus is grown in a field to be sold to tourists. Warning: if it crinkles, it's not papyrus, it's beaten banana leaf.
So, the moral of this story... all is good in "the Land of the Pharoahs", more later, and I am busy avoiding fake papyrus, fake designer handbags, and close encounters with fake world experts!!!