You approach the city from the east.

You don’t know what time it is. The words they taught you back home don’t work the way they’re supposed to. In time you’ll figure that out, but right now you’ve been reduced by jet lag and panic to a few phrases, half in the local language and half in your native tongue. The driver picks up enough to get you to the hotel.

The man at the front desk is polite. Your room is cool and the carpet is soft under your feet. It’s the most comfortable you’ve been in 13 hours; more, actually.

It is late afternoon. The sun sets on the other side of your hotel. From here, on the 8th floor, you can see across the river, across the island in the river, past the new Opera House the Japanese paid for, and past the other bank, into the heart of the city.

You take a shower and sleep for an hour. When you wake up you dress and ride the elevator down to the lobby. Out the great glass doors, around the corner, across the bridge, and you’re on the island, Zamalek. The air is as hot as the inside of a furnace and is filled with diesel exhaust and the smell of the small parks that dot the city.

It takes you a half hour to reach Liberation Square. The university is a block down that road, the place you’ll live once you leave the hotel two blocks that way (but you don’t know that yet).

There’s a lot you don’t know. But you’re going to learn.