commuting

The new campus is situated exactly east of the center of Cairo. I believe the distance is 25 miles. Something like that, anyway. For this reason the University has had to rent the services of a huge fleet of buses.

On the whole, the bus commute hasn’t been as bad as expected. My initial choice was to live in the closest possible neighborhood to the new campus: El Rehab, a new suburban enclave. But among other problems (including the fact that I’m just not the suburban type, and also despise cars), my time there was utterly cursed. Evil spirits haunted my stay in El Rehab. For instance:

1. The rabid dog that jumped up and gouged my stomach, just two hours after I moved there.

2. A rabid cat chased me down the street a couple of months later.

3. A swarm of 150-200 flies somehow got into my place one night.

4. A rat broke in through a loose washing machine machine pipe. (And this was a sparkling new apartment complex).

5. One morning at 5 AM, I got out of bed and stepped into two inches of water. The entire place was flooded. Luckily, the bookshelves were raised three inches above the floor. All I really lost were about four unimportant books that I had happened to leave in a stack on the floor, plus one extension cord.

The other problem is that I lived in the very back of El Rehab. I was literally the furthest from central Cairo of any AUC faculty member. I was also the furthest from the new campus of any El Rehab resident. With all the other neighborhood stops, plus the time to walk to the stop in the morning, the commute door-to-door took one hour– even though it only took me one hour and twenty minutes to walk! I did walk it a few times out of frustration. But the walk route runs exclusively through sandy desert construction wasteland.

For all these reasons, I decided to return to Zamalek and simply deal with the commute. Of all Cairo neighborhoods where university faculty are located, Zamalek is the furthest from the new campus. It is also a major student neighborhood, primarily because it’s the location of the Hostel (a giant dorm that includes faculty housing on the top floors; that’s where everyone was quarantined with swine flu in June).

So, the buses are very crowded with students every morning. It used to be that I could avoid the student crowds by taking the 7 AM bus (the first of the day). But this year, the number of students is far higher than usual. The reason for that is that a new Egyptian law kicks in next year, forbidding 16-year-olds from attending universities. It’s a good law. Many smart young Egyptians, girls especially, have tended over the years to leave high school two years early. And while they are usually bright and diligent students, they’re still 16-year-olds, and no one is that mature at 16. So, I’m glad the law has been changed.

But it does mean that more students had to be admitted this year to make up for next year’s impending dip as the 16-year-olds are removed from the pool. The Admissions Office says they didn’t lower standards to increase the numbers, and though that’s the kind of thing one would say under the circumstances, I believe they are telling the truth– it’s a sharp bunch of freshmen in my Intro class this year.

With an iPod, the commute isn’t even that bad. And half the time there’s a friend on the bus next to an empty seat, and you can catch up on their news.

Nonetheless, the main reason the commute is only 45 minutes is because most of the housing areas near the new campus are still under construction, and remain relatively uninhabited. But we’re talking hundreds of thousands of houses under construction out in new Cairo. Once they are all occupied, surely less than five years from now (Egyptians have a gift for rapidly creating neighborhoods from sand) the 45-minute commute is likely to become an undoable 70 or 80 minutes. The return trip already sometimes lasts more than an hour.

In short, I think my days in Zamalek are numbered, so I’m trying to enjoy my return here while it lasts.