As soon as I set foot in Los Angeles International Airport I thought to myself, “what in the world have I done?” It was my first time in the United States, and I wasn’t visiting California. I had moved to California.

To cut a long story short, I was sick of my job in the corporate advertising world. I was going through one of my ‘life is too short to do something you don’t like’ phases and decided to do the one thing I had been passionate about; study psychology. I got accepted into the master’s program, quit my job, left everyone and everything behind and moved to Los Angeles.

I’m not entirely sure what I expected, but I certainly did not plan ahead. Sure, I had a hotel room booked, a few apartments scheduled to look at and a job interview lined up to support myself while studying. But besides that? Nothing much. Having lived with my parent’s in Cairo my whole life, I wasn’t really prepared to think about things like rent, utility bills, roommates, or — as the situation at hand revealed to me — transportation.

I wanted to convince myself that I could do it. That a single, Egyptian female can thrive in a foreign environment, excel and enjoy it too — and to a certain extent, I did. I still live in the US, but moved from LA to Colorado; but that’s a different story.

My first few days in LA were pretty tough and to top it off, none of my Egyptian credit cards worked. I found myself curled up in the fetal position in the corner of my hotel room, crying and having dramatic  visuals of my becoming homeless, getting kicked out of the program and, unable to afford a plane ticket to go back home, ending up dead in a park somewhere with insects eating at my body.

Surprisingly, that did not happen and I was ready to conquer the world of apartment hunting.

It is worth saying that I had never, ever looked for an apartment. I didn’t know what I was supposed to look for or what constituted a ‘good apartment,’ really. But after a long time hunting, I did narrow it down to two options that stood out.

Apartment 1

I looked up the address online — a fascinating feature for me at the time, thank you 2006 — and saw that it was on a boulevard that I had remembered spotting on my way from the airport to the hotel. I figured that it couldn’t be that far and decided to walk.

Lesson #1: Just because the street is close to where you are, does not mean that it can’t go on forever and ever. Turns out, the apartment was a five kilometers walk in the scorching heat in one of the longest streets in Southern California.

“I’m finally here,” I thought, and the leasing agent had been friendly on the phone, so I was excited — except that, apparently, people can be friendly on the phone and racist in person.

I was greeted by the American version of the proverbial Madame Atteyyat working at Mogama’ El Tahrir: overweight with disheveled, curly, blonde hair, munching on chips and talking on the phone. She got off the phone after a long five minutes and when I asked her about availability, her response was, “Sorry, we don’t have any vacancies and won’t for a long time.” I was pretty naïve back then and didn’t really have much experience with race relations in the US and so I innocently thought there was a mix-up somewhere, thanked the lady and moved on.

In retrospect, my hair is uber curly, it was summer time and I was kind of tanned and the same lady who turned me away had told me earlier that there was a vacancy on the phone.

Lesson #2: Some people will be discriminative, deal with it.

Apartment 2

I moved on to the next apartment, but decided to call first to make sure that apartment was still available. It was a person named Sam; could be Samuel, could be Samantha, who knows. I called and with the “hello” coming at me from the end of the line dread fell over me. Sam sounded like he was Arab. Sam turned out to be Samir. Oh, dear. I decided to put my racist ideas against my own people aside and see where this was going. It went exactly where I thought it would.

Samir, a student from the Gulf region, was renting out a room in his apartment and was generally a very creepy guy. As soon as he found out I was Egyptian he was delighted, said he would offer me a lower rent “alashan el habayeb” (for the loved ones) and then proceeded to question where my parents were and how they allowed a single girl like me to move to LA by herself. Unsolicited, he then told me how his sisters back home would never be allowed to do that because he’s from a “conservative” family, and then started complaining about being single, and how he’s ready to settle down.

After many “ya assoula,” (honey) “ya jameela” (beautiful) and “enti shaklek bent nas” (you look like you’re from a decent family) comments, I hung up. But before I did, he invited me to go watch the weekly soccer game that he plays with the other Arab guys, because “enti zai okhti w ayez akhod baly mennek,” (you’re like a sister and I want to look after you).

When I told my mom that story later on, she was not amused, and started mumbling things about how she should’ve never let me go in the first place.

Lesson #3: Avoid Creepy Sam.

I ended up finding a great apartment, and I thought that my life would mainly consist of going to school, the library and watching a little TV. It turned out that Creepy Sam was the tip of the iceberg of situations that I was yet to encounter.