Settled

I have a room! When I say "I have a room" I really mean that I just have a room. I splurged and got a bathroom which is more of a spacious walk in closet with the standard sink/toilet and a shower head above all of it. There are two beds with enough floorspace to side step from the door to the water closet, which, when viewing the entirety of the room from the door, seems like an afterthought. Ah well, but for $3.82 a day its perfectly fine. So I'm moving from Zamalek to Talaat Harb which is about a $1 difference in cab ride but a $19 change in boarding costs.
The building which I have moved to was built around 1905 which makes for some interesting architectural departures from the normal forms around the US. For instance, the main stairwell wraps around the open air elevator shaft. While the elevator is smart enough to know which floor is which, there are not any call buttons above the 2nd floor. This makes for a long trek down from the roof where the hostel and my room is.
Classes are going well but the technical complexities of the language are rather wearing. To give a brief over view of what I'm trying to absorb: Arabic has 28 letters and no vowels. Well thats not entirely correct. There are six vowels but in normal texts they arn't written. To make this even harder the sounds are OO, ooN, In, eEN, Ein, and en. Compounded with the very entertaining fact that 12 of the non-vowel letters have almost the same sound; only differentiated with a rolling R on the tongue (which sounds vaguely like a Spanish R) or a guttural R which sounds like a rat being drowned.
Luckily I haven't had to execute a mafia style disposal of a rat since most of them are quite friendly. They are slightly smaller than the average house cat and since they are better scavengers than the average Cairo street cat. Since the rats have more muscle and numbers the cats generally leave them alone. However when a fight does break out there are always a few bums to bet on it. The rats normally have the spread with 4.2 to 1.