Not so cultural...

We received the following letter from a foreign exchange student at AUC:

Dear S&H,

I am currently doing a semester abroad here at AUC at the new campus and am unfortunately really disappointed. My friends recommended the program after spending a summer studying Arabic at the downtown AUC campus and told me how amazing it was to be right smack dab in the middle of the city and cultural festivities. I had heard about the new campus but was told it wasn't "that far" from downtown and figured I had nothing to lose. I'm sure you can imagine my surprise when I arrived at the new campus and realized I was in the middle of a number of developing upscale communities surrounded by desert...not exactly the cultural experience I was looking for. I have to take a bus or Cairo Cab downtown to be able to experience the streets and true culture of Cairo. I wish I was able to walk down the streets near Tahrir square and eat koshari and falafel sandwiches between my gaps like my friends had told me about...and although Cilantro's not bad, that's not exactly what I flew thousands of miles to experience.

I recently read an article in the Daily News that really hit home and I thought that this was the best place to voice my opinion and maybe open a discussion forum. In the article, the reporter recommended: "For the sake of its foreign students, AUC’s Arabic Language Institute should seriously consider returning to the university’s old location in the heart of downtown Cairo."

YES PLEASE.

I've checked your blog quite a few times and although I'm not one of Cairo's "Who's who", it has given me insight into one sector of society and definitely given me tips on where and where not to go! However, I'm hoping that this will serve a different purpose; to open up a topic that I'm sure many of the Egyptians at AUC and sure as hell the foreign exchange students are feeling."


Here is the link to the Daily News article:
http://www.thedailynewsegypt.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=17202