ﺻﺒﺎﺡ ﺍﻠﺧﻴﺮ

sabaH al-Kheer. Buenos días. New experiment: Arabic script. Does it work? Can you see it properly? In any case, Jess was wondering how the sunrise looks on the Nile, so off I went to take more photos. The pictures here show a series of typical sights from crew practice. In the first, (L->R) Ryan, Maple (one of us Katies), Mari, and Leah wait to catch a pre-dawn taxi. The taxi drivers have started to realize that if they happen to drive by the dorm at exactly 5:45am they are almost guaranteed a fare from one of our little groups heading to the rowing club, so we've started to get the same drivers over and over. We practically don't have to tell them where to go anymore (yimeen at the Sheraton Cairo, heena kuwaisa at the Vodafone sign.)

In the second photo, some of the team ergs as warmup before the coach ("Capitan Amr") arrives. I think Liesl, Adrienne, and maybe Sas (another Katie) are also in this pic. Maybe Hyewon also. It's hard to tell. People are blurry.

After erging for 20 minutes or so, enough other people have usually arrived at the club for us to get out the oars and boat. The boat is a monster since it has to hold 9 people, and usually it takes the whole team plus three or four bystanders to help us get it off the rack and into the water. The team rotates between three different sets of oars, seemingly at the whim of Capitan Amr since the AUC women's team is usually the first team to launch from this particular rowing club each morning. There is a set of green-and-yellow striped feathering oars, a set of green-and-yellow striped non-feathering oars, and a set of black feathering oars with little white stickers on them that spell out AUC.
Capitan Amr has been somewhat at a loss as to how exactly he should train a cox who has never rowed on crew before, so mostly I've been getting left behind as the team goes out for practice and told to erg for up to 40 minutes at a time. It's good exercise, and it helps keep me awake during the day, but it gives awful blisters and my Grand Canyon tendonitis has been resurfacing intermittently.

In the third pic, (L->R) random bystander, Leah, Salma (doesn't go to AUC, seems to be a friend of Nancy's), Maple, Adrienne, Nancy (who shows up whenever she feels like it, and is allowed to get away with it), another random bystander, Capitan Amr, Sas, and Liesl.

In any case it seems like none of this team drama is going to apply to me anymore because I'm being forced to quit the team. Sad. :'(

Not because of any particular fault of mine or anyone else's, but because of a simple massive conflict of scheduling and interest. My Society and Culture in Ancient Nubia class is making a once-in-a-lifetime Egyptology-department-subsidized field trip to the Nubian frontier itself (which is to say, Aswan, with a side trip to Abu Simbel) on the exact same weekend as the big competition that the AUC women's crew is being groomed for. I offered to keep showing up to practice (Cairo's quite nice in the early, early mornings), but as it seems Capitan Amr has already found a replacement for me in Salma, there's not much point.

Oh well. Maybe now that I don't have to go to bed so early I'll actually have time to do my readings for class. :P