And so it begins

I've been promising a blog for a few months, but time and circumstance and my own inability to finish anything have stood in the way until now. This will be a record of my experiences and impressions of Egypt, my semester studying here, and associated travel and events. I've been writing bits and pieces since I left the States back in January, but in a form that's far more accessible to me than to anyone else reading them, so first I'll try to edit those and get them up, ideally with the dates they were written, not edited. Once that's done, it should become more of a real blog. Thanks for reading, and I'll try to make it worthwhile - if you know me you know I could talk about all this for days straight, but sitting down and writing my impressions in a way that's accessible and also satisfactory to me is difficult. Regardless, if you want to know about something and I haven't posted, feel free to ask; I'll be glad to tell you how everything is and what's going on.

Boston

Flying out of Boston at night was a bit of a humbling experience. The view from the window as the plane dipped to the left was almost worth the cost of the flight alone. You can go into a city a million times and see everything there is to see, but you're missing a vital part of the city if you've never seen it from above. The entire coast and inland is lit up in gold as far as I can see; it's a comforting sight to consider while flying into and over utter blackness. The fact that you can call a city a city, singular, one entity, is amazing when you consider the diversity of the people in it, the range of actions taking place, each separate building and road and park, each community and neighborhood, not to mention its history - what is is and all that it has been - and it's all one city, it's all Boston, a tiny spot a map - it's not an easy concept to grasp, but flying above it and seeing it in a stark dichromatic gold and black really helped.

It also helped bring home where I was going and what I was doing, which is nice now that I have time to really consider that.