I wanna know...

After a late night of studying Arabic, I woke up early to take a shower, and nearly immediately screwed up my face in disgust when bringing in my towel from the line. We don't know why, but about once a week something is sprayed or released or who knows what in our neighborhood in the early hours of the morning and a thick fog of disgusting-smelling something fills the air and attacks our noses and clothes, which are just politely minding their business and drying themselves, but become brutally assaulted by the smell. Add that one to the list of things I doubt I'll ever understand.

After this disappointing beginning to the day, we walked out and after customary morning greetings to the boab, felt a few drops of moisture, but chalking it off to either the fog of doom or dripping air conditioners (the only time "rain" falls on your head in Cairo...) we kept walking to get a taxi. A few steps later, though, and we realized that we were experiencing quite another phenomenon. Real rain! The word on the street is that it rains a few days every year in Cairo, causing many otherwise clean clothes, people, and buildings to experience the joy of acid deposition/rain, and creating hazardous mud situations once the water dares to challenge the desert. I didn't get more than a few drops today, but I am proud to say that I have almost slipped several times, and that I can now attest that it does (albeit rarely) rain in Cairo.

I was thinking about writing more about the wonders of the Arabic language, especially because we read an article in our Arabic class about the differences between the colloquials and fusha, and what should be done about the increasingly diverging colloquials, etc. In Sha Allah, I'll talk about that later. For now, I'm just going to make a mental list of all of the songs about rain.