Illness, and other updates

The week following my trip was particularly uneventful because I became sick and could not do much of anything. The Wednesday after returning from my trip, I began to feel sick at school, and that evening I realized I came down with some sort of food poisoning. It soon became apparent that it was not going away anytime soon. I went to see a doctor at Al-Salaam Hospital in Mohandeseen on Saturday. Since I am an AUC student, I was entitled to free healthcare and prescriptions there. I think I may have been given priority treatment too, since there were about a hundred people waiting in the lobby and I only had to wait about five minutes before seeing a doctor. Surprisingly it was an efficient and convenient trip to the hospital.

I spent the next several days in bed, essentially too weak to even leave my room. By the eighth day I was back to feeling some semblance of normality, and returned to school. Considering I am only studying abroad for a few months, a full week of being confined to doing nothing was unfortunate, but I am glad it happened after my spring break, and not during it.

I originally thought that something I ate or drank in Turkey gave me the food poisoning, but everything I had in Turkey was well-cooked and high-quality. I realized that it came from the fish on the EgyptAir flight from Istanbul to Cairo. I wasn't thinking at the time that this fish probably came from Cairo, and therefore from the Nile. The only thing I have ever avoided eating in Cairo was fish because I wouldn't want to eat anything that came from the Nile. (Alexandrian seafood is a different story.) Searching around on the Internet, it seems like at least a couple others have gotten food poisoning from EgyptAir food also.

The weather has gotten warmer, reaching 95 degrees on some days, but it is still bearable. The nights are cool and there is usually a comfortable breeze that carries over into the morning. There was a sandstorm the other day, and so when I returned to my apartment in the evening, everything was covered in a thin layer of dust.

Unfortunately the bug season has picked up. I've been leaving my windows open at night and so I wake up covered with mosquito bites. Flies are becoming more common, but they are merely an annoyance. We also have to deal with an ant issue in our apartment. Tiny ants are attacking all the food in the kitchen, which was never a problem until last week.

At AUC, May is the last month of the semester, and it seems that's also when the work begins to pile up. Most of the grades for classes are based on four exams, and two or three of them are in the last three weeks of school.

I have still a few things left I want to see before I return to the US. I am going to visit Siwa oasis in the Western Desert perhaps next weekend, and hopefully the monuments at Luxor the weekend after that. There are a few things left in Cairo that I am planning to see, notably the Pyramids. I will have a few days after final exams before my flight home for those.