After having travelled halfway across the world, been solicited by nearly every cab driver in Cairo, and driven to the brink of insanity by the ever present car horns, I was more than happy to arrive at the sanctuary of our dig house to begin field school.
It is an amazing place: a lone building with thriving agriculture on one side and endless desert on the other, housing people from all over the world from Denmark to New Zealand. Comprising a good size of this population are our Egyptian counterparts who we met several days into the program. I am humbled by their presence as they possess an incredibly large knowledge of Egyptian history while I get easily confused between Amun and Ra. To help our conversations with our Egyptian friends move out of the hand signal phase, we spent much of the first week learning Arabic from Dr. Rabia, whose patience knows no bounds. This was most definitely a crash course, as he had no time to teach us the intricacies of Arabic grammar and went straight to "where is the bathroom?" and "how do you say...?" phrases. Although I've taken several classes in Standard Arabic, I learned the hard way that Egyptian Arabic is basically a language of its own, Malish.

Aside from Arabic classes, we learned basic archaeological theory in the field outside the house. All sorts of new words were introduced during these tutorials, such as plumbob  and goofa,  and I feel we now all have the necessary confidence to begin work excavating in Karanis. If you ever need a trench to be marked out, let us know. We're pretty good at it. Unfortunately the same is not true for translations into Arabic. In sha Allah, the coming weeks may be able to change that.