Exploring London: Day 7

The strangest thing happened today. We woke up early to catch the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace which was supposed to start at 11:30. And although we were there about half an hour early, there was already a big crowd waiting with their cameras. So it started, and there was a band and the usual marching music and everything was ok.. but all of a sudden, the band started playing a new piece when Sita recognised it to be the music from West Side Story!!! I mean, there we were, an Egyptian and a Dutch and hundreds of people from all over the world standing in London watching the changing of the guards while the music was playing "I want to be in America, I want to be in Ameri-ca".. it's a truly globalised world, isn't it?!! Anyway, I guess Mr Blair will be happy with this choice of music :)

Then we headed to the Tower of London, although I think it should be plural since they are not just one. But this was very interesting, especially the Crown Jewels part, very impressive. And I loved the armoury section, I didn't know there were so many names and shapes for what I simply knew as the spear.It turned out that there is a battle-axe, a spontoon, a scithe, a pike, a lance, a staff, a club and what is called a Spanish ranceur. I especially liked what is called the Spanish Morning Star which has pointed blades in all directions and what is called the scull-crusher which is basically like a hammer and used to.. well, crush skulls. I know.. I can be violent at times :) Anyway, I enjoyed this visit.

Then we went to Covent Garden and Leicester Square again, walked around a bit then went to see a movie. Initially we wanted to see "The Merchant of Venice", but it was not playing today unfortunately, so instead we watched "Be Cool". It is a light movie, with a big cast and a fast pace, but John Travolta and Uma Turman were actually cool and the movie was not so predictable so it was good.

The only bad thing today is that it was cold, there was no sun at all. I hope this will change tomorrow.

Mai

Exploring London: Day 6

Today was extra special for me. First we went to visit St. Paul's Cathedral and it was great. Amazing architecture and impressive decoration and it's really big. Of course we had to go all the way to the top and that, ladies and gentlemen, is 533 steps (it says so in the brochure, I didn't have the strength to count them). After I reached the top level, panting and sweating and not feeling my legs, I realised that it is a great view from up there. Then we went down to the crypt, walking around among the great names of dukes, generals and scientists. And, to our surprise, there was a bust for Lawrence of Arabia!!

After sitting for some time to get the illusion of resting our legs, we decided we can't visit the tower of London today, so instead we headed for the infamous Edgware road. I heard about this street from Sherif and Lana, the Eurosafaris group and the Egyptian consulate people and they all told me that this is the place to get Arabic stuff. So we went.. and God, I had the best experience since I came to the UK 2 months ago.. eating Egyptian food. :)) First I bought my first Egyptian newspaper (yaaaaaaaaay), walked around a bit and asked for directions, then finally made it, both of us starving, to the Egyptian restaurant and caffe Meya Meya (literally: hundred hundred, i.e. perfect, excellent). So what did we eat? The very traditional Egyptian dish: Kushari, which is basically a collection of carbohydrates including rice, lentils, macaroni, and humous, topped with tomato sauce, fried onions, and garlic sauce. God, I loved it. Then for dessert we had the famous rice pudding (rice with milk and some coconut topped with nuts and raisins). And not only did I get to eat Egyptian food, but also I got to watch an Egyptian movie on ART (Arab Radion and Television). In other words, it was really 'meya meya'.. :))

I wish I could go there everyday..

Mai

Exploring London: Day 5

Another great day for me and Sita, and two important events:

First, we went to the Kew Gardens. Dad, you would have loved it. The air can't get any fresher, the view can't get any prettier, it was amazing. Of course, for me, the weather today was really cold, but Sita tried to convince me this was a good spring weather. Anyway, we visited a couple of green houses, and that was warm enough, especially the tropical one :)

The best part was when I read this written on a sign in one of the green houses:

The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn;
God's in his Heaven -
All's right with the world.

(Robert Browning)

Amen to that.. :)

Second, my first theatre experience in London, and certainly not my last, and I enjoyed it immensley (despite the fact that it had to rain on this particular day). Of course, the play itself is basically based on a set of stereotypical characters, and it was predictable at times, but I enjoyed it anyway and I think it is a must see. Miro, you must see it one day when you come. I especially liked it when Max says to Leo: "Don't listen to what you hear".. interesting.

A lot of plans still on our list, but we will wait to see what kind of weather we will have tomorrow.

Mai

Exploring London: Day 4

And we are still walking.. today we made two important steps:

1) The British Mueseum.. wow, so many, actually too many, things to see in one day. And we only visited the Egyptian, Greek and Roman, and Europe sections, looking carefully at each piece as we started and then ending up skimming through things. I am defenitely going there again. It has an impressive collection of everything from the tiniest piece of thousand-year old rock to the huge statues and parts of temples. The Egyptian section is especially great, although many times I found myself wondering how in the world they managed to get all those treasures from Egypt till Britain. But when I saw the Rosetta Stone, I was just thinking "hey.., that's ours, this belongs to Egypt, it shouldn't be here".

And from the museum's gifts shop, guess what I bought? A book entitled: "How to Read Egyptian Hieroglyphs" :) This will certainly be fun. I have always wondered about that and hope this book will give me some answers. I will keep you up to date with my Hieroglyphs learning process. Oh, and I had to get something wit the Rosetta Stone on it, so I bought a folder. I know I can't get this cheaper in Egypt.

2) Harrods.. and again wow, not just about the quality of things there, but the prices. But don't worry mum, dad and marwan.. I am defenitely buying gifts for you from there, I just need to go many times more to figure out what exactly I can afford. :) Actually, what I could afford to buy today is food.. The food hall in Harrods is a mouth-watering section that you can't resist, especially if you have been suffering with food for almost two months like me :)

The weather today also cloudy, so our plans for tomorrow depends on how the weather will be like. The only sure thing is the theatre. Looking forward to seeing THE PRODUCERS.

Mai

Exploring London: Day 3

The common activity for today: more walking, and we managed to do the following:

- started walking from Waterloo station down the south bank of the River Thames, which I got to see for the first time since I came here.

- visited the Tate mueseum, loved some of the works of art there, didn't understand some and absolutely hated others. I especially loved the kinetics, the Picasso and the big piece of hanging stone that read "The world has been empty since the Romans". Don't you just love Roman pride? :)

- visited the Clink Prison meuseum for a brief encounter with the horrors 12th-18th century British prison experience.

- walked some more to the magnificent Tower Bridge and went all the way up of course.

- then we had a bit of a tour on a couple of double deck buses till we reached Liverpool Street station.

Finally, of course, we were tired by the time we were home so we decided to spend the rest of the day watching movies. First we watched "Con Air", a typical action American movie in which I loved the name "Sirus the Virus". Then we watched "Pirattes of the Caribbean" and it was great. The screenplay, the visual effects and of course the great Johnny Depp were amazing.

Ok.. hopefully the weather tomorrow will be more springish than the winterish weather we had today.

Mai

Exploring London: Day 2

And today was beautiful as we were on a day trip to Windsor Castle. Also today I met for the first time a group of egyptians members of a larger group called Eurosafaris. They were a very nice group: Inas, her husband Omar, Shahira, Amany, Dina, Ahmad and a Palestinian Amna. We all met at Victoria coach station and went by bus. The tour of the castle was great, the town is so cosy with its streets and shops and cafes, we had lunch at a nice restaurant. The whole day was great, except maybe for the fact that we had to wait for over an hour for the bus on our way back.

We had a lot of fun today.

Mai

Exploring London: Day 1

I didn't have time at all to do any blogging yesterday, but here are the briefs of what Sita and I did:

- had a long walk on Oxford street

- went to the British museum and found it closed

- did some more walking only to find ourselves in a beautiful park called St James's park

- went to Leicester Square, walked around, bought souvenirs and hats, had a bite to eat.

- walked for a long time again till we find ourslves just opposite Big Ben

- went home exhausted

Mai

Tears of joy..

So this day had to end in tears for me.. (technically it's just starting but you know my time zones are different) I was chatting about 11 pm with Niha when she told me that they set the date for signing her marriage contract on 21 April. And I just couldn't help but burst in tears. I mean the minute I knew I am going to the UK, I expected that I will probably miss Niha's wedding. But this night it was just so real to me that I am in fact going to miss it.. and I was thinking: me? miss Niha's wedding? Niha.. my best friend, my sister, my soul mate? It's amazing how one could be so happy and so sad at the same time.

Anyway, Niha.. CONGRATULATIONS from the bottom of my heart. I wish you and Hadi all the happiness in the world.

Mai

Negation and Rasputin

I was just organising my desk space, when I found this jotted down on the back of a piece of paper:

"Negation is the Rasputin of predicate calculus"

I didn't write a name for who said it, I don't remeber where I read it, and actually I am not sure what is the intended meaning! (probably because me and logic don't get along very well)

Mai

Life is 'literally' rosy

This is synaesthesia, i.e. the cross-wiring between the five senses. An interesting article on "Why some see colours in numbers" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4375977.stm) says that some people see colours in letters or taste words. And I thought... ah, so when the late egypian singer/actress said in her famous song "life has turned rosy" (el 7aya ba2a lonha bamby) maybe she meant it literally :) And this may also explain why when you one time finish reading a very good book you feel like saying "mm.. yummy". I don't know how synaesthetic I can be, but I just hope I will have a real 'taste' of London this coming week :)

P.S.
Talking about Netspeak in Arabic, I think that in the English-dominated cyber space, Arabic speakers turned on their creativity lights and came up with some interesting forms of Netarabic. Transliteration (i.e. writing Arabic using English alphabet) of course is the easiest and even preferred to writing in Arabic, besides using numbers for the sounds not originally in English (mostly 7, 7', 2, 3, 3' (like the example above)). But I wonder if this is doing harm more than good for Arabic?!! I guess it's inevitable, and at least it keeps our contact with the online world.

Mai

London, London, here I come

Ok everyone.. this is it. Tomorrow will mark the beginning of my adventures in London. And all thanks to my lovely friend Sita who will arrive tomorrow morning to spend a week with me. Oh, we want to go everywhere and see everything. I just hope we wont spend too much. I know I have to sleep early tonight to wake up early tomorrow to go pick her up from the bus station, but I know I will be too excited to sleep anyway. I hope everyone will enjoy his/her week off. HAPPY EASTER to you all.

Mai

Blackberries?

I read the term blackberries twice today, once in the article Billy referred to in his blog ("Yahoo! News - `Netspeak’ doing more good than harm to English language") and another time in Billy's blog too. And I have to admit: I didn't know what blackberries are!! So I decided to find out and typed in 'blackberry' in google and clicked on search (talk about omnigooglisation!!). The results confirmed my doubt that blackberries have something to do with wireless communication, except maybe for one hit which was mainly about blackberry jelly :) Interestingly, I went on from there to read a piece on "How BlackBerry conquered the world" on http://www.cnn.com/2005/BUSINESS/03/23/blackberry.rim/ and learned that the blackberry technology was actually born in Canada!! But I was not too impressed by it, though, as the article defined the three major signs of a blackberry user as "pursed lips, a distracted look, thumbs working furiously" and thought that writing a PhD in linguistics is enough :)

Oh.. and about Netspeak, I agree that it is actually proving the fascinating creativity of language and language users, but I also have to say that it did add more problems for those who teach English. I myself find it very irritating when I find a student ending his essay for example with ".. and that's how u c that life is 2 precious 2 waste 4 anyone coz its very short, so learn 2 live ur life happily :)". David Crystal says it's important to teach students the importance of standard English, but as more students are getting used to Netspeak at a younger age, it becomes a matter of habit for them. In fact, I think that getting used to typing assingments and essays does affect the way students develop their handwriting and their spelling, especially with the autocorrect and spelling check tools available.

Quick question: you are standing in a queue in a supermarket and a lady behind you tries to start a small talk with you by saying "oh.. you have such clean nails". What would you do? (example mentioned by Vlad Zegarac at the pragmatics reading group 23/3/05) Sounds pretty weird, eh?!!

Mai

New word

I just read a new word on The Times Online: "omnigooglisation" , you know referring to living in a google-dominated world.. I wonder if you heard that before!!

I know some people who will not be impressed by that, because on the Corpora list they had like 20-message long discussion on 'problems with google' (you can check the archives at http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/corpora.html).

Mai

Plotting

So, I made it to Billy's blog.. yaaaaaaaaaaaay. You can see it here http://blogs.pumpernickle.net/billy/


Besides the coming elections and the sports news on Chelsea, I think the most talked about thing in the news since I came here is the Charles-Camilla story. It was particularly interesting to see it referred to as "the wedding plot".. I wonder who is the villain in that plot? And it seems now that she, in fact, will be queen if he becomes king. Ain't royalty grand?!!!

Mai

48 (this is not a sequel to 24 if you know what that is)

So I woke up with this morning and looked outside my window to find it all cloudy and rainy, and I thought: wooooooo, that was a short spring and summer :)

About recapping the 48 days I spent here before starting this blog, it's all about first times I can tell you that. The list of my firsts can be as general as my first time to live on my own for more than 2 weeks or as specific as my first time to do my own laundry; as important as my first time to have a bank card of any kind or as trivial as my first time to use a machine for getting stamps; as happy as my first time to see snow or as sad as my first time to miss dad's birthday and mother's day too; as interesting as my first time to have Maltesers or as boring as my first time to have microwaveable food.. and the list can go on. But, the overall impression, whatever the really really hard times I went through esp. in my first month, doing things for the first time is fun. At least it always means adding to my life experience, which, I might add, I always felt is not quite enough.

I also try to always remind myself, when I am feeling low, that this was my dream. I wanted to do my PhD in the UK, I wanted to come to London, I wanted to live the experience of being on my own. And not many people get the chance to fulfill their dreams. So, above all, I should be grateful for seeing a big part of my dreams come true and I should enjoy the feeling of satisfaction that comes with it. Of course, in an ideal world, I would be fulfilling my dreams with my family next door and a husband to support me, but.. :) there is no ideal world.

Mai

Eventful day

So today I finally met the only other egyptian I know in the UK, who is also a Middlesex colleague. It was nice, especially that he will be my link to other people here. I am starting to have this feeling that soon I will actually have a social life.

And today I went to an internet cafe to talk with my parents, and it was especially nice that they got to see me today for the first time since I came here through a web cam. It was a bit odd for me to keep staring in a tiny little whole on top of the monitor, but as long as mum and dad are happy...

Today I noticed in a shop that there is a brand of cigars called Hamlet.. hmmm, this was a bit strange for me, and thought maybe those who produce them didn't think the name can backfire if people started thinking "To smoke or not to smoke? That is the question".

Anyway, so I was chatting peacefully with my bro after having dinner when suddenly the fire alram went on. To make a long story short, it took 2 fire trucks and about 9 firemen to come and go and then come again and go to stop the alarm. The reason it went on in the first place? No one really knows, it will remain a mystery. I guess this is part of the fun of living in student halls.

Mai

Blogging brotherhood

So the first one I told about my blog was my bro.. and guess what? It turned out that he set up a blog for himself some time before and was just too busy/lazy to start posting. Now we are the blogging bro & sis, this is very cool. You can find his blog at http://kingleoblogger1.blogspot.com

I'll be going out in a while for a long-awaited meeting and will blog you all about later, and in case you're wondering, yes I have been dreaming in my sleep about my next blog :)

Finally its spring here (although I wont totally feel it unless I see some daffodils around here) and now I am having a serious clothes problem. Most of what I packed is winter clothes which actually occupied most of the space in my suitcases, and which I can't use anymore. So I guess I'll have to do some shopping very soon.

Mai

Yep, it's me again

Well.. in my defense, it has been a little more than an hour :) Just want to say that I have been busy organising my blog page, deciding on a template, adding links and stuff like that. This is the best I could do (for now). Now I can't wait to tell everyone about my blog.

I wish I had done that from day 1 I came here, but I will be recapping everything that happened in the past 48 days.

Ok, I really have to go back to my reading..

Mai

An over-excited blogger

Yes, I am over-excited right now, and couldn't do anything since writing my first posting other than thinking of writing another one :)

And since this is the very early minutes of March 21st, I want to tell mum HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY and KOL SANA WE ENTI TAYEBA... (the same thing in Arabic)

Ok, I know this new blog will be my favourite toy and I wont be doing much work now :) (hope not) so don't be surprised if you see postings here every hour.

Mai

My debut to the world of blogging

Hello,

"I have always been a logger, I just added a b", that's what I told myself when I was setting up this blog. Actually, I started out as 'plogger' (i.e. paper logger), then I moved on to being a 'dlogger' (i.e. digital logger) and now I finally made it to the blogger world.. I think this new phase coincides beautifully with starting a whole new chapter in my life that I prefer to call "Mai, the UK and the art of being Relevant" :) Actually, I just thought of this now, but it is kinda of nice, isn't it? I know some people who when reading this will be particularly amused.

One important note is that I owe the idea of the blog to Billy Clark, my supervisor at Middlexex university, whose own blog (which I discovered by pure chance) was the inspiration. So, thank you Billy.

I hope anyone stumbling on my blog will find it interesting, and for those who know me: enjoy.

Ok, I am off to work now.

Mai