Port Said and the arabic language

Yesterday I have been to Port Said. The main attraction of this rather small town is the Suezcanal and the canal itself is also the reason why the town was founded about 130 years ago. On the way to Port Said you can see really big ships which pass by from India or China on their way to Europe (or the other way). Unfortunately in the town itself you are not allowed to see the crossing of the ships, because the area around the port is a military area. The fees paid by the ships for using the canal are the second biggest income of Egypt’s economy after tourism.
The town itself was rather boring and ugly in my eyes, you can see some few remaining of the French people who used to live there in the 40’s and 50’s of the last century.
For me the most interesting part was the visit of a big Christian church, the church was divided into two parts (only by some movable wooden walls), one part was Catholic and the other part was Coptic. I have never seen something live this, two shapes of a religion in on church. Furthermore in the catholic part you could see the zodiac signs on the arch of the roof. I did not know that the signs are connected to catholic religion… strange church…

I want to talk about something else today, not connected to my trip, the Arabic language. I am in Cairo now since nearly two months and I can not speak any Arabic (beside some simple phrases like yes, no, 1 2 3,…). In the beginning I wanted to study some, but then I just found myself to lazy and unorganised. I see this as the biggest failure of my time here in Egypt, because speaking the language is very, very important. Everything gets difficult when u are not able to communicate with the people. Starting from shopping, going out or when ordering something to eat. And I am not speaking about difficult things like working in this country or studying. If you don’t speak the language of the country you are living in, you will quickly feel insecure (very often simple situations get difficult or even escalate because of language problems) and will search for people who speak your language, like other foreigners. Further on you will only stick to then, and as final result integration fails, which is TERRIBLE. When I was young I sometimes did not understand the refugees from Eastern Europe in my hometown, why they act so strange, did not hang out with us and always looked a little bit afraid. Now I can understand the situation of this people way better and I am thankful for this experience. I will try to do my best working on the situation (here and in Germany). Integration in Germany is not going very well in my eyes and one of the main reasons is for sure that the people do not communicate which each other. We must work on that!!