"When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person...

...you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."
Albert Camus

He had widest of terrifingly mystified brown eyes. He wasn't begging. Wasn't harassing. He found my camera most fascinating. That was all. He strangely knew some English, finding it strange I spoke some Arabic. His wide grin, bright white teeth were infectious as he staggered about the square, meeting with some other boys. Happy. I wondered if he went to school. Wondered where his family was. Why he was alone. Where he was going. But none of this seemed to matter. And I realized I was perhaps the same in his eyes. I couldn't have explained it, nor could he. Less needs explaining here under the Egyptian sun. Everyday here is warm, sunny. Checking the forecast is pointless, it's simply always radiating. Which may be more uplifting than I would have professed.

One of my professors once dismissed the probability of taking photos around deeply religious Muslims. Images are powerful. You will never, ever find a painting, sculpture, or any visual representation of Muhammed. Ever. It's a terrible sacrilege. Are we dissatisfied with what we see around us? Striving for the security of permanency delivered by images? I don't know. But walking around with my camera has made me question this. Or perhaps I always have been. Like the Chinese and Japanese tourists one often sees, gathered around famous buildings or monuments, snapping away with their cameras, hardly ever removing their eye from the lens piece to see where they actually are. Is this now cultural? Americans can be this way. As tourists. But I now make an effort to leave my camera in the dorm. See what's around me without the obstructive force. But I have daily routine here now anyway. There's philosophical banter.

Much like at home, and I usually don't find myself walking the halls at school taking pictures. I used to take photos on the shuttle bus to campus. Now it's one of my favorite times of the day, blazing through the anarchy which is Cairo rush hour (Cairo's population tops 22 million between 9 and 5) with Arab pop blasting and a welcomed breeze drifting off the Nile. It's strange to criss-cross the Nile on my "commute" now each morning. It's really rather unexciting, to be perfectly honest. And brown. Sewage still finds its way into the Nile, where drinking water and whatnot is drawn. Which, since the Egyptians purify with chlorine, is not the most potable, particularly for Westerners. Shower water has an oddly "farm animal" odor.

Hmmm...not much today. I am now experimenting with Egyptian food, which is awesome. My vegan ways may not survive here. I absolutely will not eat meat, fish or poultry. Absolutely not. Nor will you find me drinking bovine milk, or scrambling eggs soon. However, if something happens to contain dairy, that's fine at this point.

A most unenthralling of days for the grounded narrative. Another orientation, and tour later this afternoon. I met another interesting person, Ally. Ally just spent the last year living with a host family in Istanbul, and is studying Arabic for the first time too here at the AUC. She is the nearest I've found to a teenager, as she graduated from high school last year, took her gap year in Turkey and is attending Sarah Lawrence in the fall. We got lost together in the Falaki building leaving the "reception" lunch after orientation. Really lost. Stuck in elevators, back hallways and stairwells lost.