Peaches and fail

Termtime at the Institute has officially begun! The building works are now more or less finished and classes start tomorrow morning - and despite having an Arabic week with a day off on friday, it really is the morning. From our point of view perhaps the only benefit to staying at ACL is the feasability of staying in bed until nine (wild) while we on the other hand are learning the hard way to get used to a 7:30am start. The sound of the children over the road chanting their English alphabet is no longer an annoyance but an alarm clock. Rage.

Feedback from those staying at the Institute is for the most part positive, if a little bored. The only way to get into town is via a scheduled bus so many of the students there have yet to properly explore Alexandria. Still, there's a small gym now set up, television and regular pilgrimages to Carrefour - and who needs the seafront when you can dabble your toes in a marsh. Magda's grandchildren are often about for a game of basketball in the little front courtyard and a skinny, sleepy cat flops on unsuspecting laps. Judging by the Arabic shouting match that followed, in asking for a Nescafe I appear to have christened the coffee machine too.

This is the first year ACL have had their own accommodation and the rules are clear: amongst others, no hugs (between male and female pupils, even on site! - our greetings were tinged with slight exasperation), no drugs (apparently prevalent in Alexandria, where the pint glasses of sugar cane juice alone ought to be a Class A) and no political activism. This last point is backed up with a story about a student two years ago who wisely chose to spend his year abroad distributing leaflets for some fundamentalists he met at a mosque. No fear there. As a liberal lefty in Egypt at this time, or indeed any relatively well-informed young person, it's hard not to feel saturated in the 'spirit of the revolution' that smiles from the pages of magazines, stares from billboards, glistens on the graffiti-covered walls - but to engage in protest ourselves I feel would not only be irredeemably stupid but a little patronising towards the efforts of the people who were actually here in January, and have to continue to live here once we're gone. The message was clear: say what you want, write what you want, photograph what you want provided it's not in a uniform. But you are a tourist, and now especially it's only apropriate to behave as such.

Which brings me to what we did the following day. Knowing we had a 'placement exam' and Egyptian colloqual oral exam the next day, we did what any sensible student abroad would do: we went to the beach.

To clarify, this is not the Alexandria seafront, which is heaving during the day and too full of 'sharks' (the testosterone-fuelled kind; real sharks would be a picnic by comparison) to bear thinking about, but Montazer beach, a little further down and usually requiring membership to get inside. Enter Riham. The family we rented our apartment from also have a flat downtown, and, would you believe, a beach house. We meet them early on Friday morning and drive down, and are joined later by the rest of the class.

Above: Some of the fiendishly expensive seaside homes; the 'real' beach is about five minutes away.
Below: Sunbathing, and Jakub the highly compliant sandman. Below below: we return to the beach hut and prance about on the neighbouring roof where apparently it's possible to sleep at night.

The sea here is warm by midday and while there are a few rocks underfoot, it's highly swimmable. Alexandrian beaches are man-made so the sand is under a foot deep, which unfortunately means no digging holes. However we spend a lovely afternoon slow-cooking under the Egyptian sun, eating melted KitKats and having our fusha (Modern Standard Arabic) relentlessly mocked, again. On the way back listening to Buzzin and avoiding the old men on motorbikes making kissy noises - yes there are more than one - we spot the best bumper sticker so far. Oh Abdo.

Am having a hard time taking the idea of work seriously. As it turns out this attitude is really just as well, because the next day we sit our placement test, and even if we had spent the last week revising it would have been beyond nightmarish. As previously mentioned we have never learned the colours. Or gerunds. Or how to spell in any capacity. Falling asleep midway was probably avoidable but hopefully that will get easier in a few days' time, whereas our Arabic appears to be at least a year behind what they'd anticipated. We are to be divided into two ability-based groups, presumably Awful and Mostly Awful, and given alternate Arabic names for the year just to drive our incompetence home. For the first time in five months, tomorrow we open our Al-Kittabs. In the meantime I think the picture below sums up the general mood for the day: