tomorrow?

Apparently I leave tommorow. At least that's what my flight information tells me. A lot of people have been asking me about classes, schedules, where i'll be living, travelling and the sort so I figured it might be nice to give a little rundown.

Tomorrow I'll meet up with the other 20 plus students and we'll begin our egyptian adventure. During the first week we will have an intense orientation where we will, according to the packet they provide us with, "be oriented to the thrills and spills of survival in Cairo." We will get to know our peers and the surronding area which we will learn to call home. We will also start right up with Arabic by learning the most important things we'll need to know to get around cairo.

Here's a copy of our daily schedule (which means sunday, monday, wed. and thursday)
8:00 Breakfast (those who know me well know that I hate getting up early so this will be interesting)
8:45 Group Devotions (Where we are asked to share things we're struggling with/learned/excited about etc with the group)
9:30-11:00 Arabic (scary, I know)
11:15-1:00 Course Lectures or guest speakers
1:00 Lunch
2:00 Cultural activities
7:00 Occasional guest speakers

On tuesdays we will have our required service trips. We won't find out what we're doing until we get to cairo but i'm excited about this.

Classes other than arabic will be held in consecutive block seminars. They are as follows:
Islamic Thought and Practice
Peoples and Cultures
Conflict and Change

The latter two courses will take place as we travel throughout the Middle East. While we are based in cairo, we will be visiting several Middle Eastern countries. A good portion of our conflict and change class will take place while we are in Israel/Palestine. In addition to Israel/Palestine, we will travel to Turkey, Syria and Jordan. This however, does depend on the political climate.

we will be living in "comfortable, spacious flats" with other students. Usually the female students outnumber the males, but the spring marks the first time where there will be more males than females. Aside from breakfast and lunch on days we have classes, we are responsible for all of our other meals. Apparently, the markets surronding our flats are cheap and have good food; vegerarians can be "easily accomadated" lets hope this is true!

in addition to our flat and the travelling we will spend a week with a muslim family in cairo. several weekends (which translate into friday and saturday) are reserved for travel to different sites in egypt. we have to pay our own way (though the prices are good) we will be going to the pyramids, alexandria, Luxor, Mt Sinai and other places.

well, i think that's all for now. i'm extremely excited but i will miss you all and appreciate your prayers!