First day of classes

Today was the first day of classes at AUC. My first class was computer organization and assembly language programming at 10:30am, and the classroom had been changed on the schedule today. When I went, there were a few students there, and one of the students received a call that the class was canceled. I don't know the reason, but my guess is some sort of AUC administration failure.

The classrooms at AUC have an interesting design; while there are buildings, the classrooms are not entirely within the building. The doors to the classroom open directly to the courtyard outside rather than to a hallway. The School of Sciences and Engineering building is gigantic, so it took me 15 minutes to locate my classroom.

My second class, Microeconomics, was brief. It may be too early to tell, but it should be an easy class.

This was the first time I really got to see the regular AUC student body. The school is slightly smaller than Fordham in terms of undergraduate population, with a little over 4,000 students. There may be a gender discrepancy at AUC just like Fordham, as it seemed like there were more females than males.

After school I went to Maadi for Mass. There are a few Catholic churches in Cairo and Maadi was probably the furthest away, but I wanted to see what Maadi was like. I took the subway from Doqqi to Sadat (Downtown) and then switched lines to get to Maadi. The ride took longer than I thought, so I ended up being late for Mass.

The church was a small parish called Holy Family on Road 15. The 6pm Mass was in English by a priest who had a French accent. The congregation was very diverse with people of all different ethnicities. I don't think I'll return there next week because it was too far of a commute.


Holy Family Catholic Church, Maadi, Cairo



The suburb of Maadi is very different from Cairo, at least the part that I saw. The streets are quiet but are not well-lit. Most of the houses that I passed were quite luxurious, and the strip of stores and restaurants near the metro station were well-kept and modern. To me, it remembles the similar suburb of Newton, Massachusetts. Maadi is known for having the second highest concentration of foreigners, after Zamalek, and I did in fact see more Western faces than in Cairo.