Selfish

He was sitting outside my classroom waiting for me to finish.  The secretary had told him about me and he was very eager to meet me.

After hearing his story I felt sorry for him.  The Alexandria university halls of residence, which had been recommended to me by the Chinese and their Arab friends was apparently an expensive dump.  The main attraction for the Chinese was their discount, they were paying 1000 EGP a month, whereas the Arabs were paying only 500.

This poor Japanese guy was paying 300 USD per month (or more) for a place that he claimed was extremely dirty and small.  He had communicated with the TAFL Center via email (from Japan) and the TAFL secretary had quoted him the Chinese price and recommended the halls of residence to him.

This left me a little confused.  The director of the language centre (Lana Habib) had suggested I live there and said the price was only 1000 EGP.  Due to the Chinese, I was thinking of moving there from the hotel (where I had a big problem with mosquitoes).

In the end I helped arrange for this young man to stay in my hotel, which was certainly cleaner and cheaper.

What may have started off as a healthy friendship soon became very complicated. He was not attending every class and complained that the teacher would often use English.  He also told me that the teaching style was archaic and he felt it was his right that I should lunch and dinner with him every day in a restaurant.  I slowly found myself teaching him how to speak Arabic, which was not my job of-course.

He introduced me to his colleague from France, who also wanted to find an apartment.  I helped them find an apartment on the corniche, but there were only two rooms.  So I suggested that if she (the girl from France) was not interested I would take the room. However, he suggested I share a room with him, but I told him that was a bad idea.

Back in the centre, the girl from Denmark (his other colleague) agreed that it was bad idea, whereas the Koreans believed it to be a normal thing and mentioned that two of them use to share a bed.

Anyway, in the end, they (the French girl and the Japanese guy) said that they were interested, but they took forever to make a final decision and we spent the whole evening with the landlord listening to her story about how she was involved in some project to help students find accommodation in Egypt.

The next day, they were late for the appointment.  I was on time even though I was not required to be there.  By the time we arrived together in the apartment, the landlord had already reached an agreement with a group from Cairo and had taken the money from them.

So the search for an apartment for this student from Japan continued and continued and he moved in and out of the hotel.  Meanwhile, my assistance to him consumed a lot of study time.