End of the week

I took a couple pictures of the AUC campus Thursday, but only the
outskirts.

View from the third floor of the library. On the left is all new
construction, mostly still in progress. The complex straight ahead is
the Future University. On the right is nothing but open desert.

These are the student dorms.

New construction across from the main gate. There are at least a
thousand student cars that park on the road every day.

Parking lot.

From outside the gate.

The weather here has finally gotten to a point where I can say it feels like a summer. There were a few days last week where it was less than sixty degrees, cloudy, and very windy all day. Usually Nate and I leave the balcony doors open at night, so some nights the apartment actually got extremely cold by the morning. However today it was sunny and at least eighty degrees.

Even though we haven't gotten to the "uncomfortably hot" temperatures yet, it still baffles me how the Egyptians can wear so many clothes in moderate temperatures. On this note, here are some of my observations on what Egyptians wear. The Egyptian males who dress in the Western style typically wear slacks, dress shoes, and a dress shirt with a woolen sweater over it, regardless of occupation or class. Some men wear suits or a uniform depending on their job. However wearing it seems like every Egyptian man wears the same uncomfortable-looking woolen sweater. Women typically wear a long skirt, a woolen sweater, and the higaab (head scarf). No one wear shorts, males or females, as it is considered immodest. I have only seen a few teenaged Egyptians wearing shorts in public, but they stood out quite prominently.

A large portion of the population dresses in the traditional style. I haven't quite figured out the reason behind the choice of style, but I speculate it's correlated with social class, location, occupation, and religious piety. It may also be a reaction to preserve traditional way of life. Typically businessmen and other professionals wear the Western style, as do the wealthier Egyptians. The location has a lot to do with the choice too. My district of Doqqi seems to have a very high percentage of those wearing the traditional style, perhaps up to twenty-five percent. In Islamic Cairo, it's practically one hundred percent. In
Mohandeseen, Downtown, Garden City, and Zamalek, most of the population wears the Western style. However nearly one hundred percent of women wear a higaab (headscarf), regardless of whether or not they wear Western clothes or not.

Males who dress in the traditional style wear a long woolen tunic and possibly a turban or hat. Usually they're white, brown, or black. Women will wear a sort of robe (I don't know the name for it) that covers everything but their face. Colors vary. A small but significant percentage of women wear the burqa, which covers everything on their body in a black robe except for their eyes, including hands and face.

At AUC, all the students dress in the Western style, as does most of the faculty and staff. It seems about half of the females choose not to wear the higaab. The only people who can be seen wearing traditional garments at AUC are the construction workers who are there temporarily. Even at AUC all the males wear long pants, though I have seen a couple males wearing shorts.

My gym is another place where the dress tends to be more liberal, although even there most of the men wear pants.