Away for a while

I won't be blogging for a while 3ashan aho ba2a, i need to get it back together. plus, i feel my blogs are sorta pointless so until then ashfko 3ala 5ier. It's not quiting if i plan to come back :p

and to the beach here we come

I so want to go to Egypt right now, most of my friends or off somewhere or another this time of year as i sit here watching YouTube videos of Egypt and places i've been over there. Khan Elkhalili is a definite must for anyone who is planning to visit, my grandparents live right next to the Hussein masjid so i pretty much know the place inside and out. Ras El Bar was also another place we went to every summer when we lived over there, it is probably one of the most beatuiful places in Egypt, with the best fiteer, and mishabek out there. one day i plan on buying me one of those houses/ huts over there. ahhh dream on. Any certain places that you miss visiting and havn't been to in a while?

this looks like some place in Cairo but i dunno it says it's ras elbar

Now this is def. Ras el Bar... ah lovely i miss it

Also Ras elbar

Baba Ali

You know a couple of posts ago where i was talking about those matrimonial pages where people are seeking this and that, well i found this video today on YouTube by Baba Ali and it was explaining the exact same stuff i was trying to say, except he's much funnier. check it out

for some reason the video won't upload with me but you can check it out here --> http://www.youtube.com/user/ummahfilms

you can't live with em but you can't live without em

couple of days ago my parents drove to Virginia to go pick up my grandma who's been staying with my uncle, and i was left here to defend myself with the little monsters. that's why i haven't really been blogging much. I was ultra super excited to see my grandma again but at the same time admit i was a little nervous. see when i was little and living in Egyptland my family and I were living with her and therefore i was her favorite, and unlike every other Arab who calls their grandmother "seto", " tetah" or " gedah" i called her " Amah" kinda slang for mom, all my uncles would come and call her "amah" and that's what i grew up knowing and i think part of calling her mom made her like me, but then we moved to the US of A and even though i was still her favorite when she came here the differences between generations and cultural upbringings and mindset began to show. During my graduation party, which was all girls i was told by her to go wear something on my skin when i wore my maxi sleeveless dress, i was told i should already know how to cook, and why was i not wearing abayas? When she came last night while sitting down eating dinner she asks if i had cut my hair, when i tell her yes she laughs telling me i was stupid to cut my hair, long hair is a crown on a woman's head, i laughed it off as well but i could tell she was kind of serious. don't get me wrong i love my grandma, she was the one that raised me, we joke around, and can have the best time in the world together. the differences between us and how we were raised are more noticeable then ever though!

Update: she just told me and my mom " i dunno why you and your daughter are wearing what you are wearing? why don't you and your daughter wear niqab?"

just so you know my mom dresses in wide abayas and long hijabs covering the chest, she goes more with netural colors

i on the other hand am usually wearing skirts with tunics and cardigans, sometimes maxi dresses or abayas, i'm very loud with my colors, so for the most part we wear proper hijab lol

bad hair day

So i have this problem with my hair, actually just the front of it, but from all the wuduh it's sort of a hot mess. it's all dry and brittle no matter how much i condition it or treat it, it's still the same, but even if it gets fixed i'm gonna have to make wuduh again i don't see how it can be like the rest of my hair. anyone have this problem? is there anything you do that makes not so dry from all the wuduh? tell me whats you secret :p

( this is my hair after wuduh) lol

i love her hair, it's beautiful, i love everything about it from the color, to the wave, to how shiney it is. ok i'll stop now, but hey at least now we know who makes more wuduh

Surprise is not a word i like

Now i love surprises like the next girl, like i was super thrilled when my best friend just dropped by North Carolina with her family that one time, unannounced. or when i get a gift for no reason except that i was remembered. but i hate hate people trying to jump out of a closet and yell out "BoO" or "surprize" jumping out at me period, that's asking for it. you can ask my siblings who have tried doing that. they have the scares to prove it. Now i wasn't always like that but i went through a tramatuazing experience that has caused me to hate surprises! yes, yes i said it.

It was a friday i remember, and like every child my age i was happy that it was. The knowledge that i was going that night to get some blood tests at the hospital where my uncle works didn't phase me much, i was a brave girl.
we walked into the hospital and were led to a room with two beds, that should have been a warning to me, but this was Egypt. of course the doctor was late, meanwhile i walked back and forth in front of a room whose door was made of glass i would stand there trying to fix my hair and admire myself. The Doctor managed to come and i was told to lie down on the bed, i bravely did so and was a little confused by the distraught look on my mom's face, it didn't hurt i assured her but she just sat there opened her Qur'an and started to read. While the doctor was giving me the shot his phone rang and he left the syringe INSIDE my hand and went outside the room to talk, i can say this was when i started getting nervous. A while later the doctor came in and everything started getting blurry, the last thing i remembered was me being rolled into the room with the mirror doors, there was a light of in the distance but everything close by was black, then everything did go black.

you know those movies where someone is sleeping and then they suddenly wake up and go" AHHHHHHHH" well that's it felt like when i woke up. I was in pain, there wasn't one particular place, my whole body was hurting and i felt high. My dad suddenly comes into view " habibti" he says " you had a surgery" I'm not really understanding what he' saying cause that's not even possible. then all you can hear from me is " ehhh? eh? what?" &*^%&^&)(%%E$@&#^%*%P_*&*^ then it was back to the blackness

I woke up again, it was morning this time, i vaguely remembered having a bad dream but i couldn't exactly remember what it was, maybe because i was in too much pain. Wait! that was it, i had a dream that my dad told me that i had a surgery. i looked around, i looked at my arm. it was hooked to an IV thingie and my left hand where i'd taken the shot last night had something inside of it. It wasn't a nightmare after all, it was the real deal. i called my mom and she came and it turns out i had my appendix removed by my own uncle, and no one cared to tell me.

So since then, me and surprises haven't really gotten along, i try to avoid them at all costs.

2 ends of a spectrum

As a teenager everything seems so difficult. it feels as if everyone is against you. I'm not sure what my point is really or where i am heading with this, but i guess whatever your age is there will always be difficulties to face and looking back all the the things you thought were hard to face back then seem a joke now. my little sister who's 3 will get mad if you call her a little girl and she so wants to be a big girl. she'll try to put on my high heels, put some lipstick on her mouth and walk like she's on a catwalk! I'll look at her and in my mind I'm telling her to enjoy her age, there's no going back once you grow-up, you can only look back and remember. how i wish to go back to the simplicity of being 3 when my biggest challenge would be trying to not eat the spinach or the broccoli. but i can't really tell her all this, because at her age all i wanted was to be a big girl.

I Miss her

It's so sad to know that you're losing a friend and losing touch with them but can't really do anything about it. All the memories serve as just that, they're now something of the past. but what truly breaks my heart is when this is happening with your best friend, the one who ceased to be that and turned into a sister, a family member really. This is exactly what is happening to me. We went from living on the same street, to living 2 streets away, to about 10 minutes away, to 12 hours, and now about 3 days. we used to see each other everyday, even after i moved we used to talk almost everyday and now, barely talk at all. I'm probably the least person to know anything about her right now. ugh i hate feeling sappy and I'm probably leaning towards being cheesy but hey there's a chance of zero that she'll probably visit here so i can go on as i want. At the beginning i didn't realize how much we've really grown apart and I'm afraid to even think about it. What is even more sad is the way we used to say we'll go to the same university, be roommates, and probably end up living next door to each other, and now look at us; we're not likely to get any further than we already are. we used to feel disbelief at those who promised to be friends forever but left time to take its toll. maybe it's my fault, maybe its hers. I'll never really know until i talk to her.

Garage sales rock my socks

The other day my sister got me this purse, brand new, for only $1.50. i love garage sales. I swear finding stuff on sale makes me feel all fuzzy and warm inside. It's the thrill of the hunt.

This is what i learned from AP chemistry!

I'm sorta out of it today and nothing special going on but here's a picture i took around the same time last year of our board in AP chemistry. these words there are made up of symbols of the periodic table, so don't go saying nothing is learned in that class, and just goes to show you how cool we were.

I HATE FISHING!

Here's an embarrassing story that i have so far been good at keeping hidden, but as of now the blogger world will know all about my little mishap. so one day, our family and another family were on one of those detested fishing trips and for some reason i cannot remember i was walking alone in the woods, I've probably blocked out from the embarrassment. anyways, I'm walking and i hear rustling and since i was pretty close to where my family and the other family were fishing i figured " hey it's my brother, let me give him a good scare" so i started getting all excited and giggly and right when the person came around the corner i jumped out at them doing my Tarzan yell. only problem, it wasn't my brother. it was my dad's friend. i tried passing it off like i was sneezing or something, but alas, the damage was done.

That's not the only reason i hate fishing, i hate seeing anything being killed, even if its only a little fish. i get so sad seeing the little things stuck on the hook and fighting for air. really, who wants to see their dinner dying in front of them. problem is my dad and siblings see it as entertaining and get that thrill when they do catch one, and my dad views fishing time as "family bonding time" which means we all have to go, and which also translates into me and my mom sitting shooing away mosquitoes and trying to dodge the ant hole, while my dad and siblings stick worms into a fishing pole and throw it in the water waiting for the fish to bite, which is exactly what we did today!

I met the president!

I had a dream. it was a weird dream, but it was an entertaining one if you could say.
It started with two groups, um and one was running after the other, it was the good guys after the bad guys. that's how it always is in the movies, anyways we make it down to the basement and there's a large group of people. i think we were supposed to be protesting something; I'm not sure what but i guess it was a pretty big deal because right then PRESIDENT OBAMA came and took the microphone, and when he did that people started walking away. I started yelling at people to stay put and stand their ground. Mr. president saw that i was struggling, you know i had a sore throat and all, so he gave me the microphone and i started telling people to stand up for their rights, it was their duty. President Obama admired how i stood up for what i believed and we had dinner which was grape leaves or wara2 3nab, lol. except i didn't know what to say, so it was awkward. when i woke up i was like OMG i just met the president and i had nothing to say to him. stupid, stupid, stupid, you just ruined your one time chance. so if you did happen to meet the president what would you say to him?

blog and blog again

so i was looking around at some different blogs and just typing in names to see the different ones that would come up with me and many of the blogs i saw were either started many years ago and left to rot or had only one post and that was that. For some reason it made me sad to look at these blogs all abandoned and empty. It made me even more determined to go on writing mine and continue with it even though i don;t get much readers. At the end it's not really about who comments, who likes and who doesn't but about putting your ideas and feelings out there. To die so young, and there was so much potential. it breaks my heart. really, it does.

opinions!

Ok so i would like to get peoples opinions on this, even if you don't regularly or even follow this blog at all, just tell me which one is better darn it!! I need this for my logo inshallah, and I'm not sure which one. if you think a different font and color from a different picture go together, mention that as well. gracias!

midnight koshary

last night i couldn't sleep so i went downstairs for a midnight at one snack. i found some leftover koshary and some dressing in the fridge and mixed the two. while i was eating my mind drifted to that restaurant that i will someday(inshallah) open, it would be Egyptian food like koshary, bashamel and such other Egyptian food with a twist of Indian because i just know how to rock my curry and hot spices, and if i say so myself, i make a mean dish of meat masala. seriously my family is so hooked on Indian and spicy food that my mom got the white kid that she used to babysit hooked on that stuff, and he was THREE! i have the name of the cafe/restarunt down. i pretty much have everything ready...in my mind. which reminds me i probably should start working on getting that closing line of mine up, which has the same name as my future restaurant/cafe by the way. and oh ya the koshary was good, thx for asking.

i Owe my brother one

so today we're sitting down after praying maghrib and my brother goes " Does anyone notice anything different about me?" we all manage to come up with some smart allecky ( is that a word?) thing to say and i go " finally, you change your shirt" my mom chips in with " well you need to cut your nails" with a unanimous " EWW" from everyone. we kept the gussing game up untill finally the bro. goes " No it's my birthday" my mama goes ' no, actually you were born yesterday, your birth certificate just says its today" ah well that's a relief it wasn't only us who missed his birthday he did as well.

the thing is one of my friends birthday falls on the same day as my brother and whenever she mentioned when her birthday was i'd chip in with " thats the same day as my brother!" so yesterday( thx to facebook birthday alerts) i rememberd it was her birthday but forgot it was my brother's. our family doesn't celebrate birthdays much but i know its still nice to be rememberd on that day, but hey i blame my brother. he's the one that didn't put his birthday up on facebook!

Happy Mother's day...everyday!

Today i woke up to find my mom sick with an inner ear infection, basically what that means is that if you get up the world would seem upside down and everything is all shaky which also may cause throwing up and unfocusness, something about the fluid in the ear that keeps a person stable. since i am no doctor and have no intention of becoming one this will be the end of my discussion about inner ear infections. the only reason I'm talking about inner ear infections is because my mom had one, you know we never really appreciate how much our mothers do for us until we try doing what they do. My mom for example, takes care of 5 kids( well I'm not really a kid but i prly act like one)takes them to school, the cooking, washing, teaching, and everything in between. seriously, its a full-time job! today, since my mom was sick i was up and about doing everything from cooking to doing the dishes and by the end of it i was exhausted! and i hadn't even done half of what my mom does. so instead of just having one day to honor our mama's, we should be celebrating it everyday! wow how many times have i mentioned an inner ear infection in this post.

I cleaned a stove today and i don't even work at Mcdee's

It was my first time cleaning a stove and i found it oddly satisfying.
it all started when my brother decided to complain that no one was making him any food. i proceeded to tell him that if he's so stupid that he can't open the fridge and get his own food, then he's too dumb to pass his AP exam on Friday ( of course i said it in a nicer way ;)) so he proceeded to clank the fork on the pan! you are probably like, "umm where did the pan come into this, ahh what a lamo comeback" but if you know me the sound of metal on metal is like ear-stabbing-nails on a blackboard sound to me. i ignored it once but the second time around i splashed him with the soap and water i was doing the dishes with, he in turn threw a cup of water at me, and then my mom stepped in and the fun was over! and so i had to clean the stove. The end.

seeking a ...

so I'm probably insulting someone out there on the wide world web and beyond but it's just funny the way these things are put. what am i talking about? you ask. well you know, those matrimonial thingies at the back of those Islamic magazines. well, its not the fact that they're there. just the fact that they always seem to be saying the same things, using the same exact words, not mentioning that they're many times degrading. come on now! just today i was flipping through a Muslim magazine and i happened to flip to the back and one of them was asking for a resume! what is this a job interview? and pretty much all of them were asking for " a fair and beautiful woman" or it was the parents saying their daughter was "fair and beautiful" and they were specifically seeking " a doctor or engineer" seriously? maybe that's why they can't find a husband? parents need to calm down a bit. rarely have i seen anything mentioning a good Muslim.


"A man marries a woman for four reasons: for her property, for her rank, for her beauty, and for her religion (and character). So marry the one who is best in the religion and character and prosper". ( same for the ladies as well)
( Marriage quotation from Bukhari and Muslim)

I'm back on solid ground, can i get an ALHMDLLAH!

I made it. After 14 hours of driving one comes to appreciate walking on land. you'd know what i mean if you've been through it. actually you don't even have to go through it to know that that is an awfully long time to be in a car. Usually though on these trips i see the beautiful, amazing, breath-taking, and down right weird. so they're like mini adventures, you know without all the stopping.

One amusing thing that i saw was of two people riding a moter bike and whenever a truck passed by they'd shake their fist at them. yah i dunno why either.

i saw Alot of Amish people, many of whom were driving horse pulled wagons which i think is freakin cool. I'm pretty sure no Amish person is going to be checking this blog or any other for the matter but just in case, i think its hella awesome that you people ride wagons, i would totally do it, well maybe not if i have to drive 14 hours cause then it might take me days

I saw lots and lots of farmland, i noticed a couple of burnt ones which was sad

While driving in Virginia and West Virginia we were driving in between mountains, i dunno if it was the fact that it was raining, or if it was clouds, fog, or a mist or what it was, but the top of the clouds looked like there was smoke coming out of them. i theorized that maybe the trees on the mountains caught fire and as a result the smoke, but then all the mountains were like that. then i was like OMG its the mist all over again.(seriously that was one freaky movie)

we were so high up in the mountains and our ears were popping, it was so silent, it felt like it was only us, the car, and the mountains. it was breath-taking, the only thing i could say was SubhanAllah; so maybe the drive was worth it after all.

( these are not my own photos, but these are the VA mountains and thats pretty much how they looked)

The henna's revenge! or something like that.

yahh so i made the biggest mistake of my life when i decided to by that henna design thing and *experiment* with it. First, i should have known it would be trouble when i couldn't get the cone thing to squirt any henna out, like seriously how hard could it be! apparently, harder than it looked. so after figuring out that there was a layer that was supposed to be taken off, i peeled that only to find that it still wouldn't squirt! a while later a find a nail coming out of the damn thing and no it still wouldn't work, i push on it bursts open from the other side... all over my room. so now my pillows and carpet have a henna makeover





That's how my henna turned out.




ohh wait never mind that was what i hoped it would look like...







this is my actual attempt at it! I'm not even include how my feet turned out lest someone get a heart attack.