Finding Home Far From Home

By: Judith Uttendorfer
Co-Senior English Editor

It’s been two years since I arrived in Cairo for a three-week vacation. Those 21 days were enough to make me fall in love with the city. Three weeks turned into 104 … and counting.

I remember exactly how it felt to walk around Khan el-Khalili for the first time. Smelling spices in every corner, feeling the heat that never really leaves that place, seeing the bright lights of the lanterns reflecting on the walls and hearing the evening prayers.

There is a saying that once you drink from the Nile you are destined to return to it. It is part of the mystical stories surrounding this country like a coat. Stories so ancient and yet so present that I can still feel them when walking through downtown streets.

These include stories about ancient pharaohs, oracles predicting the future and pyramids so full of traps that one would never dare set foot inside.

It does seem very likely to me that some kind of mystic force is keeping me here. How else would a German girl that loves organisation, green fields and German food survive in Cairo?

The things that seem so fascinating on holidays can quickly become real struggles of daily life. My schedule has been messed up countless times because I did not expect everyone to be half an hour late. Packing for summer because you move to the desert will make you freeze like never before.

Despite the challenges I am facing, I never regretted moving to Cairo.

There is no other university that could’ve given me what AUC is giving me. Combining my German background, studying politics of the Middle East provides me with countless opportunities for widening my horizon.

Discussions in class are more interesting when one is coming from a completely different culture. The questions I ask and the kind of focus I put on a topic are very different from my Egyptian friends.

Living in this city has taught me a lot. My confidence level doubled and I am looking at my life with more ease. In Cairo, everything will be made possible if one just knows someone who knows someone who, again, knows someone else.

“Cairo is a tiny village,” my mum, a woman that moved from an actual village with 16,000 people to a city with 22 million, always says.

Here, there is a feeling that is created by the unbelievable warmth of Egyptian people and a network that reaches the most unexpected places.

It is this community that made it possible for me to find a friend after just being on campus for five minutes.

And it is this community that makes me feel a part of it rather than an outsider. I cannot put my finger on what exactly it is that is keeping me here.

It might be however, a combination of a sip of the Nile, a touch of mystic ties and the welcoming community that made Cairo my home far from home.