Ramadan Kareem

Happy Ramadan. كل سنة و انتم طيبين. رمضان كريم. 

The first day of Ramadan is tomorrow. Ramadan is a month in the Islamic calendar. This is the month where Muslims fast for 30 days. It's also believed that the Quran was revealed in the last 10 days of Ramadan. 

I will try to fast for a week. I will be here for 8 days of Ramadan (day eight I leave at like 10 am). It will be hard, but it's one of those things that it will be good to experience, especially in a Muslim country. 

Rules (from what I understand):

1. From dawn until sunset no food or drink. 

2. If you are sick, work physical labor, have heat stroke/dehydration, and/or are on your period you don't have to fast. 

3. If, for whatever reason, you don't fast certain days in Ramadan, you should fast throughout the year to "make it up". 

4. Be nice. Don't gossip, think bad things, or otherwise be a jerk. 

5. Help the poor. Volunteer your time. Be generous. 

6. Don't freak out if you mess up. Everyone is human. 

Since I am in a Muslim country, Ramadan is kind of a big deal. Companies start selling Ramadan themed products, stores deck out in Ramadan style decor, even fashion designers start making Ramadan clothing lines. 

Ramadan decorations in the Lebanese restaurant I ate at today. 

Ramadan Kareem is the greeting you give during Ramadan (along with the standard "kol sana wentom tayibeen"). It literally translates to "Ramadan is generous", but you say it as "happy Ramadan". 

Ramadan is the time when Muslims try and put themselves in poor people's shoes. By not eating and drinking, they will know what it's like to be poor and hungry. Also during this time, Muslims help the poor. They give the poor food, volunteer with charities, etc. By saying "Ramadan is generous" it's kind of reminding them of why they do it. (I think). 

Small Fanoos and other decorations. 

My favorite part, so far, is the decorations. They are really colorful and very... Ramadan-y. They also put out lanterns that are specifically for Ramadan, called fanoos. Some of them play music and they play during the sunset letting everyone know it's time to break the fast. 

My friend's Fanoos. (Thanks, Farrah for the pictures). 

That's a quick background of Ramadan. I'm sure once I actually experience it I'll have much more to say. 

That's all I have today. Thank you for reading. 

Learn something today. 

Byeeee

Corie. 

Miscellaneous Pictures Of Life Abroad

As most exchange students do, I take a lot of pictures. I decided to post a blog post containing just a bunch of random pictures I've taken over the past couple weeks of just chilling in Egypt. These are pictures that didn't need a whole blog post but I wanted to share them so here we go. 

This is a picture of donuts. Donuts aren't super common here and my friends and I went to a really nice bakery and we ate these beauties. 

Karim, a very good friend of mine, and me in the bakery. 

(L to R) Monica, Maria, me, Maria at the bakery. 

Maria left on 10 June to travel so this was the last time I saw her. I absolutely adore her and already miss her very much. 

This is Roanoke a stuffed animal (kind of) my friend gave me. 

A movie channel played a different Harry Potter movie everyday for a week and I LOVED it. 

I got ice cream with friends. So in Egypt the portion sizes for ice cream are super small and the same as American prices which sucks. But this place makes big portions for like $2. They do vanilla ice cream with ANY adding you want. This is M&Ms. 

Amira and me trying on hats at H&M. 

Boosy made me a shirt at the T-Shirt Factory. This is the machine. 

This is the shirt. 

This is a lot in Tahrir. Under this is an underground parking garage. 

This is from the top of Cairo Tower. You can see all of Cairo from here. 

The pose. 

The selfie

The top. 

The pyramids (if you can see them). The tower was awesome. One of my favorite places. I definitely recommend it. You can see the Citadel then walk to the other side of the tower and see the pyramids. It was so great. Plus it's windy which makes it great if you're trying to beat the heat. 

The Auntie Anne's Pretzel and me at the mall yesterday. 

This picture came from the Goodreads email newsletter. It's now the wallpaper on my phone; it makes me really happy. 

That's all I have for today. My sister was promoted from middle school to high school. Fairouz is coming in a few days. I am in the process of wrapping everything up. 

Thank you for reading. 

Learn something today. 

Byeeeee

Corie. 

Koshary, the National Dish of Egypt

Koshary is delicious. It will forever be one of my favorite things about Egypt. It's not just the actual dish, but the whole experience of a koshary shop. 

First things first, seating. There is no host or hostess, you seat yourself. Unfortunately, since koshary is both cheap and Egyptian, shops are often crowded and it can be hard to find seating. If people leave and the table still needs to be bussed, sit down anyway, someone will come and clean the table. 

What take-out Koshary looks like

After you sit, there's no menu. The only options are koshary (small, medium, large), roz belaban (aka rice with milk aka rice pudding aka rice, sugar, vanilla, and milk), and bread. The best way to describe it is oiled pita, baked until crunchy, then salted and peppered. It's good. 

Blurry selfie of some of my favorite people in a Koshary shop. 

Koshary is really simple. It's rice, spaghetti, macaroni, lentils, chickpeas, tomato sauce, and fried onions. You can then add a garlic sauce and/or hot sauce. Warning: the hot sauce is VERY spicy. Koshary is good. It's also began which means it's healthy. 

The kitchen area has big containers of each container. The cooks then scoop it all into one bowl, really quickly. 

Koshary and Corie posing for #nationalbestfriendday

At the table, there are the garlic sauce and hot sauce. There is also normally a pitcher of water and cups. Note that the cups are communal and the pitcher is filled with tap water so I don't suggest you drink from it. That said, you can order soft drinks and water with your meal. 

After you eat, you pay and leave. It's that simple. 

Picture of my actual best friends. (We aren't in a Koshary shop but I love them)

Koshary is the national dish of Egypt and I suggest everyone try it. Not eating koshary in Egypt is like not having pizza in Italy, sushi in Japan, escargot in France, etc etc. 

Koshary is part of the Egyptian experience like the call to prayer, the traffic, and the people selling travel packs of tissues on the side of the road. 

So freaking delicious. 

Thank you so much for reading. I hope y'all have a wonderful weekend. I'll post again soon. 

Learn something today. 

Byeeeee

Corie. 

Pre-Return Jitters

I leave in less than 16 days. For those of you on the metric system that's two weeks and two days. TWO WEEKS AND TWO DAYS. Time has never, ever gone this fast. I find it unfair that the one year I want to go slower than a snail's pace went by in two seconds. Wasn't it September, like, yesterday?

I volunteer with AFS in the Bay Area frequently. I go to most of the orientations. Last year, I was helping at the Pre-Return Orientation. They talked a lot about getting gifts and packing and saying goodbye. I remember walking up to my mom and saying something along the lines of, "I haven't even left for Egypt yet, and this orientation is making me sad to leave Egypt." Poor, naive, childish Corie. Thinking about leaving Egypt when I'm actually going to leave Egypt is so. much. worse.

I'm a really emotional person. I hear stories from other exchange students and they'll say something like, "Oh, I rarely cry but when [insert event that happened while abroad] I cried my eyes out." And I just sit there and laugh because I cry at everything.

People shouldn't even really take my crying easily because Disney's Brave made me cry. I ate a really good sandwich the other day and I almost cried. One day I was thinking about how once people thought the Earth was flat and I fell into a fit of uncontrollable sobbing.

I hope you all understand that I'm kidding. I don't cry that often. Still, I am emotional. So, times like this when I have to leave my second home and my second family it's hard. Knowing the best year of my life is over, is hard.

Another big thing on my mind is going back. For me leaving Egypt and going back to the US are two different things for me. Leaving Egypt will be sad, but for me going back to the US is the harder of the two for me.

Going back to the US terrifies me. If it weren't for my family and dogs, I wouldn't want to go back. I love my friends and my community and everything, but Egypt.

All of my friends and the people I go to school with essentially go through the same things. We all have different experiences, but we all know what elementary school is like, we all went through the hell of middle school, we're all worried about high school and college, but I don't know anyone my age that has gone abroad.

I'm really scared my friends and family aren't going to understand. This year has been amazing and I feel like no one is going to get that.

I'm also scared everyone will get sick of me talking about Egypt after like a week. "Okay, Corie, we get it Egypt is amazing. Shut up."

 I'm also not really looking forward to answering the same four questions over and over. And packing without my mother is going to be a nightmare and I'm glad I bought all the souvenirs and saying goodbye will be hard and I still need to eat pigeon and


I got this from reddit.

If my feelings bored you, sorry. This is just a post I felt needed to be posted because as I said, I only have a short time left.

Nonetheless, I hope you enjoyed this post. I mean, it has a Mean Girls GIF so how could you not enjoy it.

Learn something today.

Byeeeeee

Corie.

Egyptian Antiquities Museum

The other day, I went to the Egyptian antiquities museum. The price difference between foreigners and Egyptians is ridiculous. But it was well worth it and the museum was amazing. 

A tour guide took us through the museum. The bottom floor is a lot of the same kind of statues and hieroglyphs you see in Luxor, but the biggest thing is upstairs. The mummies. 

There were mummies for all of the King Ramses (I, II, etc), another I couldn't remember and my queen. I saw my queen, Queen Hatshepsut. I love Queen Hatshepsut so I was so excited to see her mummy. 

Some of the mummies (all were 3000+ years old) had hair and most had teeth. They didn't look like rotting corpses at all. 

Also, they had all of King Tut's stuff. They found his tomb complete and untouched. He died at 19, so a lot of his stuff was child stuff. Most of it was covered in gold. 

His body was found in a coffin, in a coffin, in a coffin, in a box, in a box, in a box, in a box, in a cave, in a mountain. 

Ancient Egyptians things are very beautiful. There's a lot of gold, but a lot of paint too. Jewelry and coffins and all kinds of things like that are gold, and blue, and red. It's so awesome. 

So, when a king or queen dies, all their stuff is buried with them to use in the after life. Their slaves and servants live on, obviously, so they put statues in the tomb and then they will go to the second life when the king calls them. 

I couldn't take pictures in the museum, but I was so so great. Like everything in Egypt, it's incredible. All of this stuff is so old and so beautiful. I'm so lucky to be here. 

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed. 

Learn something today

Byeeee

Corie. 

American Sniper Discussion

*This post may contain spoilers. If you want to watch the movie without being spoiled, I suggest you go watch it then come back to read this post.*

American Sniper is an American film based on the autobiography of Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL sniper. Chris Kyle served four tours in Iraq, had two children and a wife, and died in 2013. The movie was nominated for several Oscars and other movie awards. It won the Oscar for Best Achievement in Sound Editing.

This film has had lots of controversy surrounding it. Some say it is a pro-war propaganda film. It's also been said to be very racist against Arabs, and historically inaccurate. I watched this film because of the controversy and because I can't judge a film, book, TV show, song, etc. without experiencing it myself.

Having watched the movie, I can now judge it for myself. This movie was... a movie. I am very anti-war and anti-violence (for the most part). I am not against America and I'm not against freedom. I'm not pro-terrorist, but I am pro-Arab (I guess). So, let's discuss this violent war movie that is racist against Arabs, shall we?

At the beginning of the movie, there was this whole sheep, wolves, and sheep dogs metaphor, that I didn't like. I thought it was dumb, and a bad excuse for violence. It's not really that important to the story so I'll just skip that because this is already going to be long enough.

The story of "American hero" Chris Kyle is not itself bad. The way the story is told in the movie is bad. I guess that's how propaganda works.

The movie is very, very violent. It's over-violent, in my opinion. The story could be told just as well, if not more enjoyably if the violence was taken down several notches. I can handle a lot of violence. One of my favorite series of all time is the Hunger Games, but it was really hard for me to watch this movie. Part of it was because I knew this was real (ish).

That's how I could tell that this was some sort of propaganda. They weren't using the violence to tell the story, they were using it to convince you that their story is the right story.

Along the same lines, there was excessive swearing. I have no idea why. It was basically just constant swearing. Sometimes it felt that every other word was a derivative of the f bomb. Again, I can handle swearing, I swear occasionally myself, but this was over doing. It made me a bit uncomfortable.

Throughout the movie, Chris Kyle was called a "hero", a "badass". He killed over 160 people. Personally, I don't find this heroic or badass. I find it troubling. If a normal person killed that many people, they would be a psychotic serial killer.

At one point in the movie, when he was home, a veteran came up to him and said Chris saved his life, he's very grateful, yada yada. He even told Chris Kyle's son that his dad was a hero and all that jazz. By this scene, I was already fed up with Chris Kyle and the movie, but this scene irked me. the way Chris handled the whole encounter angered me. He was so cold and it seemed like he didn't care that he saved this guy's life. It was frustrating.

Every. Single. Arab. In this whole gosh darn movie was evil. EVIL. They actually used that word. Every Iraqi in the film was an "evil savage". There was a scene when they took over an Iraqi family's home and the father said "Tonight everyone is welcome at my table." I was like, "Finally! A scene that portrays Arabs as I know them: welcoming, kind, generous." NOPE. During dinner, Chris notices something suspicious, searches the house, what does he find? A giant effing stash of weapons. And we all thought this Arab was different, but no. All Arabs hoard weapons and plan to kill Americans. Good to know.

The beginning of the movie started with the Adaan aka the call to prayer. I hear it every day, four or five times a day. It was obvious they weren't using it to include the culture in this movie, it felt like they were using it as like a cult gathering song and that pissed me off.

Finally, there was a scene where on of his friends say that he bought a ring (for his girlfriend, he was gonna propose). Chris Kyle asked if he bought it from Iraq; his friend said yes. Chris then says something along the lines of "How do you know that's not a blood diamond?" (A blood diamond is a diamond sold to fund an armed conflict, rebel group, or war.) This made me mad because at this point in US history, many blood diamonds were sold in the US. Some are still even sold in the US. So even if he had bought the ring in the US IT STILL COULD HAVE BEEN A BLOOD DIAMOND.

This entire movie pissed me off. From the way they pronounced Arab names, to the graphic, unnecessary violence, to the scenes between Chris and his wife. From the beginning to the end, it was not enjoyable to watch.

The worst part, in my opinion, is how this movie affected people.














There's been a lot of tension going back and forth, including celebrities. Seth Rogan said the movie reminded him of Nazi propaganda (he later said it just reminded him of a movie because of the sniper aspects). My friend, who watched it with me, said it reminded her of the film they show at the reaping in the Hunger Games.

People have been using this movie as proof that America is the greatest country in the world because we fight for freedom. I love America, I do. It's given me great opportunities, and my family great opportunities. I'm lucky to be from America because so many people want to be there. However, America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.

In a class on social injustice I took we watched a clip from the TV series "The Newsroom" you can watch it here. It talked about how America is not the greatest country in the world.

American Sniper is exactly the reason we need things like AFS. Things like American Sniper fuel comments like "anywhere but Egypt" and "are you sure she'll be safe there". Things like AFS fuel things like "Egypt and the Arabic language are two of the greatest things that ever happened to me."


If you've seen the movie, let me know what you thought of it. If you haven't seen the movie, tell me what you think of this in general.

I will have another post for you soon about Egypt and happier topics.

Until then, learn something today.

Byeeeee

Corie.

What to Wear and Where to Wear It in Egypt

Sup! I received a comment on my last post asking about swim attire in Egypt and what it was like to wear a swimsuit versus a hijab etc. So I thought it would be a good time to post about Egypt and clothing in general.

One of the biggest questions I had before going to Egypt was clothing. Egypt is a conservative country, it's also a Muslim country. Being here, however, has opened my eyes. Egypt is definitely not as conservative as I thought it would be.

Everyday Clothes

The clothing people wear varies quite a bit. Men can wear normal pants and shirts or even shorts. Some men wear what are called"galabeyas" which are long shirt dress things. Women wear regular pants and shirts as well. A lot of people wear hijabs, and some are fully veiled.

For men, it's much easier. Boys can literally wear whatever they want (as long as it's guy clothes). Women have to be more conservative, at least in Cairo.

Even if you aren't Muslim, or you don't follow Islam rules, in Cairo, it's good to dress on the conservative side as to not attract attention.

I tend to stay conservative just out of respect for my family. These are the kinds of things my friends and I wear.

Swimsuits

I have only been in two situations when I've swam.

The first was my school trip to Ain Sokhna. You can read about it here. While normally my friends wear two pieces (or one pieces depending on the person). On the school trip, we weren't allowed to wear bikinis because we were going with boys. (I could be wrong about the reasoning but this is what I heard). We also couldn't wear short shorts.

The second was my recent trip to Hurghada, which you can read about here. At resorts, it is mostly tourists. Here, you can wear whatever swim suit you want, whatever clothes you want. It doesn't matter because it's a tourist resort. Full body suits and loose clothing were not allowed in the pool at the hotel.

Muslim women have special swimsuits that cover your whole body and hair.

From pintrest 

When I was packing, I had no idea what kind of swim suit to bring. I just brought the practice suit I had that covered the most skin. I also brought athletic shorts to wear on top if I needed to. 

Swimsuit vs Hijab

My host family is Muslim. Because of this, I can't wear shorts or a tanktop or antything like that when my dad or brothers are home. If they are home and it's ridiculously hot, I wear shorts in my room only. If I happen to be in my room wearing shorts and they come in, I have to like throw my blanket over my legs or something.

So, naturally, after this, it felt a bit weird to be in front of my brother and dad in my swimsuit, as not revealing as it is. Not only this, but after nine months of long pants and skirts, and high cut tops, it feels weird to wear swimsuits, shorts, and lower (not that low but still) cut tops. Despite this, I can't wait to wear shorts and tanktops when I get back to America.

If you are coming to Egypt and you need inspiration here are the three outfits I tend to wear the most:

These are loose cotton pants. They are really light weight (and mom, they're 90% cotton and made in Egypt. Egyptian cotton? Idk) I just have a t-shirt on top. 

This is just a t-shirt and jeans. I don't actually wear my SnapBack that often. It's mostly of I'm at a tourist place, or it's hot, or I want to look cool. 

Finally, in this lovely modeled picture, is a 3/4 length flowy shirt and jeans. This shirt is light weight and I wear it all the time because I stay cool in it. J


That's all I have, if anyone has any questions, please leave them below, I will try and do my best to answer.

Hope you are all having a great week.

Learn something today.

Byeeee

Corie.