Pre-Departure Thoughts: To All the Cities I’ve Lived In — and To the One I’m About to Meet

I grew up in a small town between Egypt’s two megacities: Cairo and Alexandria. Between Cairo’s Nile, carrying layers of history, and Alexandria’s Mediterranean breeze and Greco-Roman echoes, I learned to love cities shaped by water.

I am drawn to places where water is impossible to ignore, where it shapes the air, the people, the pace of life. I imagine Copenhagen through that lens: the canals, the wind, the way movement feels lighter there. It’s when I feel most alive.

I also carry Doha with me, a city shaped by the Gulf and by migration. Growing up there taught me what it means to live in a place built by people from everywhere, where languages overlap in coffee shops and where the sea meets glass towers. But it also showed me the quiet invisibility of the workers who make the city run. Doha gave me my first questions about labor, belonging, and who gets to feel at home.

Last summer, I was supposed to volunteer in a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan. When that plan collapsed at the very last minute, I ended up interning with a London-based organization called Migrants Organise. It changed everything.

It was my first time meeting the ruthless bureaucracy of seeking asylum in Europe — watching people wait, fight paperwork, and explain their lives over and over to systems that barely see them. I realized I didn’t want to study migration from a distance. I wanted classrooms that are not sealed in a vacuum.

That’s how I found DIS.

An academic space that doesn’t stop at theory. Field trips that matter. And the chance to volunteer while learning — not only about people, but with them.

As I walk the Mediterranean Corniche in Alexandria, watching waves crash violently against the rocks, I imagine the people those waters carry — their stories, their dreams, their waiting. I think about my responsibility not just to know, but to listen. And then to act.

So I come to Copenhagen carrying a lot with me:

• my fear of cold weather (I freeze at 20°C),

• my love for thrifting learned in Cairo,

• my coffee habits shaped in Doha,

• my recent matcha obsession born in London,

• and a wide, restless imagination ready to meet people, hear stories, and grow.