Climbing the Great Pyramid is technically illegal but worth any trouble involved. Last year two CASA students were arrested trying to climb it naked- taken to jail with no clothes…There truly is a lot of life and history in Cairo.
-Letter Home, Summer 1978
Some CASA students had other ideas of a prank. I remember during one particularly boring classroom exercise when in my recitation I tried to provoke Professor Hassanein, a Doctor of Philosophy in Medieval Arabic Grammar, by mixing up the Classical language’s finished case endings with Egyptian Colloquial’s unfinished mush mouth, kind of like mixing Henry James and Mark Twain in the same sentence. I would probably have had a better result reciting in the nude. Hassanein expected nothing less from me, his worst student that year.
