AUC and Zamalek

I took some pictures of the AUC campus last week. There are just random pictures, and since I don't really know my way around much I can't describe them very well, but they do give an indication of the desert setting.

Here is a picture of an Egyptian liscense plate, with both the Arabic and "normal" (I guess Latin?) numerals. "Egypt" is also shown in English and in Arabic, where it is called "Misr," which comes from an ancient semitic word meaning "frontier."

I took the metro into downtown on Saturday. About a 20 minute ride at the whopping price of $0.20 each way. The first thing you seen upon exiting the main downtown metro station is the Egyptian musuem directly in front of you:

And here is a picture of downtown Cairo from the metro station. As you can see from the billboards, the USA has had little influence in this Islamic country:

If you turn left out of the metro station, you immediately see the Lions bridge across the Nile, which is very similiar to the Bridge of Lions in St. Augustine, Fl, although much bigger.

Across the bridge is the section of town called Zamalek, which is actually a large island in the Nile. It has the opera house and art district, as well as a lot of foriegn embassies. Here is a street sign in Zamalek in both English and Arabic. Tahrir Sq. is where the old AUC campus is located.

Cairo tower is in Zamalek and is a very high tower (I'm guessing about 30 stories) with an observation deck. You can see the whole city from here. It was a very smoggy day. I could just make out one of the pyramids in the distance, but you cannot see it in these pictures.