So this post is finally coming to fruition (ironically now that all of my classes are officially over).

On the two days a week that I have classes, I have yet again fallen into a manageable routine. So here goes:

Every Monday & Wednesday, I wake up on the dot at 8:20am and check my email before hopping in the shower. I tend to catch the shuttle at 8:55, which takes twenty minutes to get to Downtown. After getting off at the third stop, I swing over to the Fateer stand on Faliki Street where I get a fateer (thin pancake with sugar) and a bottle of water from the market. From 9:30 until about 10:45 I have my Introduction to Political Economy class, which is one of my favorite classes. After that, I sit on the cafeteria terrace on Greek Campus and chat it up with friends or grab a cup of coffee from the Aroma Coffee stand on campus. I putz for awhile, either reading The Economist or just relaxing ignoring any work I may have to do.

From noon until 1:20 I have my Comparative Politics of the Middle East class, which is the most painful since the professor has no idea what he is teaching. Yet again, being a former ambassador doesn’t qualify you as an academic. I am sorry. No matter how close you were with Slobodan Milosevic, you have no right to teach at AUC. After class, I grab an ice cream cone with Katie and we walk back to Greek Campus where I grab a beef luncheon sandwich and another bottle of water for lunch – yet again – on the cafeteria terrace. Since most likely I haven’t done my work for my next class, I walk up to the Mac lab on the 3rd floor of Social Sciences building where I read articles from Foreign Affairs, New York Times, and Washington Post, amongst other media outlets from Pittsburgh, Murrysville, and Washington DC.

I finally get to my work during my hour and a half off, and print for free since the Mac lab doesn’t charge for printing. Beautiful since the Library charges about the same rate as they do in America. At 3pm, I head to my class down the hall, where I still have mixed feelings about the class. Issues in Middle East Politics is taught by a world class intellectual who knows the Middle East inside and out but a lot of times I just wish he would stop asking us so much and just give us an insight into his brain. He actually just took us to the Arab League where we got to hear one of the ambassadors speak.

After my Issues class, I have to hot-foot it over from Greek Campus to Faliki Campus (we have three campuses in Downtown). I then hafta book it up four flights of stairs to my Survey of Arab History course from 4:30 until 5:50. This class is interesting, however, I didn’t sign up for the “History of Islam” which is essentially what the class was. We talked for 2/3 of the class about the rise of Islam and the Muslim Empire and then briefly touched the thousand years prior and the thousand years after. It also helped that I read The Economist during class under my notebook. Had I not, I probably wouldn’t have survived.

After class, I would run down Muhammad Mahmoud Street to catch the 6pm shuttle, which I made half the time and the other half I didn’t. So yes. Two days a week of classes and I’ve fit into my routine. I take the same hallways, go thru the same doors, get the same food, sit at the same areas basically every day.

I guess I will just have to get into a new routine when I return to AU in January.