ehugging

According to this Guardian article, we may well be on the way to ehug each other.

So, if your computer starts getting all touchy feely on you, don't panic! this is the latest technology ;-)

Mai

wouldn't it be nice?

I was checking out information about the Etha Theatre Company whose performance of Calderon de la Barca's The Constant Prince I just missed. They were recently on a successful tour in Egypt, which is interesting. But what is even more interesting is this:

"Captivated by the vibrancy of Egyptian musical and theatrical traditions, Etha has integrated artists from Egypt into the ensemble, including an Arghoul player (one of the few people alive still playing this Pharaonic instrument)".

I would love to see and listen to this Arghoul player, that would be quite an exciting experience to listen to a musical instrument which was actually used by ancient Egyptians. Also, after reading this, I kept on thinking how nice it is for someone to be decribed as "one of the few poeple alive" who can do something. Wouldn't it be nice if there is one thing I can be said to be one of the few people alive who can do it? (is this a good structure? not sure) Ideally, that would be something important and interesting as one of the few people alive who can speak this language, or maybe one of the few people alive who can understand any language, or perhaps one of the few people alive who can analyse referring expressions in all languages :) I guess any of these options beats the hell out of being one of the few people alive who can't make soup :-}

Mai

you don't say!

Standing today waiting for the train, freezing cold, right beside a big ad that says: "catch some winter sun in Sharm el Sheikh" :)

Mai

the dos and donts of the english

A chat with an Egyptian who just came to study in the UK and asked about the most important things to know about the English led to this:

The English don't have friends, they have mates
The English don't watch tv, they watch the tele
The English don't go to the toilet, they go to the loo
The English don't smoke cigarettes, they smoke fags
The English don't kiss, they snog
The English don't use the pound, they use the quid

A little bit of linguistic knowledge could be useful :)

Mai

justice and martial arts

According to this article in El Mundo, the first monument in the world dedicated to Bruce Lee, the legend of martial arts, was unveiled in Mostar, Bosnia! The Urban Movement of Mostar, who is responsible for this, says that they are setting up this monument in the religiously and ethnically torn city because it's a monument for justice and Bruce Lee was a fighter for justice! Does this sound a little bit strange? I mean, is Bruce Lee the best symbol of justice they could think of?

Mai

no animals have been hurt in winning this ipod!

Why is it the case that all the pop-up ads for winning a new iPod involve hurting an animal of some kind? I come across a lot of those and it's either shoot the duck, kill the dear, or squash the spider. Why should winning an iPod involve the bloodshed of an innocent animal? That is, if any of those stupid pop-ups actually gets you something other than annoyance and waste of time. But maybe this anti-animal violent trend is beginning to come round. I've just came across one of those pop-ups which is slightly different: it's pin the tail on the donkey kind of thing, where this time it's the donkey which actually kicks you when you try!

Mai

talk about signs

Now that's what I call positive attitude :)

Mai

am i being ironical?

The weather today has been 'great'! More 'great' weather is coming on the way this weekend! The whole winter is expected to be 'great' this year! For other reasons, I was checking how the weather is in Dubai and it turns out to be 'great'! Then I checked how is it in Cairo and it was also 'great'!

At the same time, the 'great' voice of Bon Jovi started singing in my ears:

It's been a cold, cold, cold, cold night tonight
And I can't get you off my mind
God knows I've tried
Did I throw away the best part of my life
When I cut you off, did I cut myself with the same damn knife

Ok, it may be less dramatic than that, but I still can't think of a better place to be now than home. As the full force of winter comes in, I'll probably start thinking of places closer to the equator :)

Mai

can computers understand human language?

This was the title of a talk I went to today. The lecturer was Prof. Ruslan Mitkov who is one of the prominent figures in computational linguistics. So, what's the answer? Well.. it depends on what do you mean by 'understand' and what do you mean by 'language'. If you are talking about human-like intuitive understanding of unrestricted language with all its complex interrelations with world knowledge, then the answer is no. But if you are talking about the ability to analyse and generate language on various levels and you are letting in the idea of restricting grammar, genre or vocabulary, then the answer is a very enthusiastic yes.

Throughout the talk of course there were all the reminders of how complex human language is. The basic goal of computational linguists is to find solutions to make machines overcome the morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse ambiguities in language. Automatic anaphora resolution is, of course, one of the interesting challenges which requires more than the knowledge of linguistic rules. So, for example, unless a computer has the sufficient knowledge base about the world (plus the ability to differentiate between humans and, say, ostriches :) ), it would face a problem with assigning the correct reference for "it" in this utterance:

If an incendiary bomb drops next to you, don't lose your head. Put it in a bucket and cover it with sand. (WWII leaflet)

But work on making computers do things with human language has really gone a long way. Among the latest developements is Prof. Mitkov's work on the automatic generation of multiple-choice tests, the automatic identification of cognates, and the automatic simplification of complex sentences for dementia patients. And of course there has been huge progress in the world of machine translation since it started in the forties of the twentieth century.

Anyway, the talk ended with the interesting remark that computers are not trying to replace humans, they just want to help. Well, so far.. ;-)

Mai

i think i'm a lib dem

After reading this, I will be a Lib Dem supporter from now on :) Sorry Labour, Galaxy beats Cadbury any day of the week.

Chocolate politics...mmm, yummy.

Mai

the corpus and i

Order corpus licence for myself: check

Receive corpus cd: check

Install corpus on my laptop: check

See that it's working fine: check

See that the 'thes', 'thats', 'thises' and 'its' are all there: check

Sing to the corpus:

Today is gonna be the day
That they're gonna throw it back to you
By now you should've somehow
Realized what you gotta do
I don't believe that anybody
Feels the way I do about you now
-----
There are many things that I
would like to say to you
But I don't know how
Because maybe
You're gonna be the one that saves me
And after all
You're my wonderwall

Oasis, "Wonderwall"

Check :)

Mai

it's all about language

I spent most of my weekend translating from English to Arabic a 50+ page-report for a Dutch-managed, German-funded project in Egypt that I've been working for for over a year and a half. Not exactly interesting to be reading about drinking water and wastewater systems, but at least I am expert on the subject now :) Despite having lots of other language-related things to do, a little extra money won't hurt, right?

Actually, it has been taking me a longer-than-usual time as it has been a while since I last typed in Arabic (plus I have been all the time simultaneously finishing up a bag of chocolate raisins which at some point became too distracting when, for example, I choked on one). So basically I started off by employing the boring two-finger typing method, but that got better with time. It soon turned out that I still remember where all the letters are, and I also still hate the fact that the letter (ذ) is banished up there to the left just under the escape button. I kinda feel sorry for it, it's not fair for this letter and it's annoying for me. But that's not the only problem you can have in typing. The tricky thing about having a keyboard with the letters of two languages on is that if you slipped into the habit of focusing on the wrong ones it can slow down your work considerably. But it's almost done, and now I can start thinking how I'm going to spend the money (as if I hadn't already :) ).

Now to the more exciting news: I finally got my very own copy of the corpus in the mail today. Can't wait to go home and try it on my computer. Fingers crossed that all goes well. I just thought to blog you about it now just in case I go home and begin to install it then my laptop explodes or something :)

Mai

notting hill, with a twist

Isn't Notting Hill one of the best happy-ending movies of all time? :) I was just watching it on tv and I have to say that among the zillion times I watched this movie, this time was definitely special. I mean it's a totally different experience when you are watching it in London, living in a flat just round the corner from Notting Hill, having actually walked in the area and recognising the places mentioned in the movie. I don't think that it happened anytime before that in the scene near the end when they are all crammed in the car trying to figure out the fastest way to go to the Savoy to catch Julia's press conference and someone says "let's go through Bayswater" I actually shout excitingly "I know that place, I know that place, that's very close" :)

It's a very nice movie, "surreal but nice". Oh, and there are very nice songs too. Just one catch though. The only line I don't like in this movie is when Julia is mad about the press finding out she's in Hugh's place (who runs a travel book shop, in case you don't remember) and accuses him of maybe exploiting this incident for publicity so she says: "buy a boring book about Egypt from the guy who slept with Anna Scott".. ehm.. excuse me, no book about Egypt can be boring ;-)

p.s.
the more I watch this movie the more I like Spike. He's weird but nice :)

Mai

2b?nt2b?=???

If you can read this, then you are really uptodate with the world of text messaging. If you can't, well.. this is the mobile text version of Shakespeare's "to be or not to be that is the question". The issue discussed these days is about the project to render some of the greatest literary works into text messaging speak. You can read about it here in the Independent or here on CNN, among other things. It's a debatable issue of course, with supporters like John Sutherland, professor of English literature at UCL who is said to be behind the project, and opposers like the author Oliver Kamm.

The idea is that it provides important educational opportunities to students by helping them to remember the basic elements of the literary works they're studying through summarising them in a language they understand! Personally, I don't see how this service can be of any real use to students, other than being a new cool fad that they will play with on their phones for a while. After all, the important thing is to interpret and understand the original text and not to memorise a couple of lines. I mean surely a teacher talking about Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice can describe him as "fit&loadd" instead of "handsome and wealthy" and get a few laughs out of this in class but that's not the point. Call me old fashioned but I think that a BIG part of why we study literature in the first place is that we get to read some of the best work written in English and that is the beauty of it.. the language. Students at some level may sometimes resort to simplified versions of the work they're studying to help them understand it, but the textification output is just too simplistic to be meaningful and in the end you have to get back to the original text anyway. It just seems like a waste of time and effort to me.

Mai

what is Bush's only merit?

It's that without him many linguists would have been really bored. It seems that every time Bush opens his mouth, a piece of linguistically-interesting flow of words, or rather an inarticulate, disfluent, and at times unintelligible, bunch of words, comes out. Just now I have been enjoying this and this on the Language Log.

And it also seems that even when he doesn't open his mouth at all, Bush can be inarticulate too. Just now now I was watching on the news how he failed to go to the right exit after a press conference in China. It was hilarious as he didn't notice the apparently open exit space and went straight to a closed door, tried to open the right side, failed, then tried the left one, also failed then he stood there facing the audience for a minute with a smirk on his face. But then of course he had to open his mouth eventually to say: "I was trying to excape. It didn't work". Well, a lot of things that you try don't work, do they?

Mai

the sun, the moon and other celestial bodies

What do you understand when someone says "x is the sun"? What kinds of associations do we make between the sun and a human being? How does cultural background reflect on this? And how does the moon come into the picture, if ever? I came to think about this when I was reading a paper on metaphor the other day for the reading group I mentioned on Wednesday. The main problem from the linguistic point of view is whether metaphorical meanings are to be considered part of 'what is said' or 'what is implicated', but, lucky for you, I won't go into that :) The example discussed in the paper is the following (presumably said by Romeo):

• Juliet is the sun

Now look at the range of associated meanings that have been mentioned to be communicated by this metaphor and tell me if you don't think some of them are really weird (I listed them in an ascending order of weirdness):

1. Juliet is the warmth of Romeo's world.
2. Juliet is the brightest thing Romeo knows.
3. Romeo's day begins with Juliet.
4. Juliet is without peer.
5. Juliet is the object around which Romeo's world revolves.
6. Only in Juliet's nourishment can Romeo grow.
7. Everything else is lit by Juliet's presence.
8. The moon, which other lovers use as an emblem of love, is merely Juliet's reflected light and dead in comparison.
9. Romeo is inevitably drawn to her although he knows this to be dangerous.

I don't know about you, but when I think of the sun metaphor I primarily think of it in romantic terms and, as you can see, the more scientific elements that have to do with astrology or physics get in the way, the farther this meaning is from my mind. And what brings the moon into all this? I don't think I ever think of the moon when someone describes a lady as the sun, certainly not in the negative way in (8). More generally, I think that in Eastern cultures, the meanings associated with describing someone (whether you can say that about a man as about a woman is another cultural issue too I guess) as the sun won't go beyond number (4).

How about this metaphor:

• Juliet is the moon.

I wouldn't be surprised if the first meaning that comes to mind from describing Juliet as the moon (which is to say that she is beautiful) turns out not to be as universal as I would've thought. How about "Juliet is a star"? This certainly does not get us thinking that Juliet is a self-luminous source of energy, just like the sun, but it's much farther away.

Mai

ground zero

I have been on campus today till about 7 pm. Not that I have been desparately waiting for something to arrive by mail or anything ( ;-) hopefully will tell you all about it Monday), but everytime I say to myself I should go, I think how cold it is outside and decide to stay for a little while longer. At this rate, I'll probably stay overnight one of those days :)

So not only have we entered ground zero in terms of temperature, but even the subzero level. Technically, I did experience winter in this country since I actually came in February, but this time I am living it from the very beginnings. And it seems this is going to be one looooong coooooold winter. But, on the bright side, spending the long cold winter nights shouldn't be much of a problem: thank God for heaters, books, hot chocolate, dvds, microwaveable soup and, of course, blogging :)

Mai

lots of weird blue balls

Just saw them on this link, which I found on Dug's blog, which you can find on Billy's blog (don't you just love hypertext?)

Apparently, the purpose of this remains undisclosed, but I think that if you stare long enough you will actually end up being hypnotized. The question is what do you do afterwards? :)

Mai

pop words and whatever

Check out this article which talks about this book.

I like the title.. ka-ching.

Mai

connecting

Two very nice connections today. Just before starting the reading group at UCL, Tim tells me he has been reading my blog and liking it (maybe with the exception of the fact that I am a Man Utd fan, which was the first thing he read on the blog, sorry Tim :) ) Of course everyone who stumbles on my blog becomes hooked right away, what can I say? I am an interesting person with an interesting blog :) This is not the first virtual connection Tim and I had, being one of the instructors in the online course I did last year. But the most important time we connected, as he was reminding me today, was when we met in one of the chatrooms and I was telling him of my dream to do my PhD in the UK. Wow.. a lot has happened in my life since then, luckily all good things :)

Then after the reading group I have been connecting with Hanna, the Middlesex graduate who's now doing the MA in Pragmatics at UCL. So there we were, two Middlesexian girls gossiping about our university and the people there (saying all nice things of course :) no really, they are nice). It's great having a fellow Middlesexian there, it feels like we have things in common.

Ok, that's all for now. I have to go connect with my cooker, maybe I can convince it to make dinner on its own :)

Mai

b&b

A wireless internet connection somewhere near suddenly came into existence, or so my computer tells me. Yes it's not a secure way of being online, but the idea of having my very own b&b, as in bed and blog upstairs where the wires can't reach, is very appealing. You know what would be awesome with that? room service :)

Mai

going nonverbal

It's a nice coincidence that on the day I did this seminar on nonverbal communication, I get this interesting picture in an email. It's from our beloved Cairo and it clearly illustrates an intriguing combination of indexical and symbolic signs. The title, by the way, says: "the earth is round". I am sure you can tell why by now :) So the Arabic sign says that the direction to Salah Salem Street is to the right, while the sign in English says it's to the left. Well, I'm sure the one who decided to put the signs that way wanted to demonstrate his linguistic knowledge about the way Arabic is written from the right and English from the left. Or maybe it's more than that, maybe it's a symbol of union and solidarity so that Arabic-speaking people would go right and English-speaking people would go left only to meet again after circling half of the earth. After all, the earth IS round :)

Oh, and here is another example of nonverbal communication, although it's a bit more scary. I am making it a habit for some time now on my way home from university to take the tube to King's Cross station then walk from there till Euston station (about 15 minutes walk) then get a bus from there (instead of changing tube lines and taking another train). It's kind of nice to walk on this busy road as it gives me a feeling of liveliness before staying home for the rest of the day, especially that it gets dark really early (sometimes I also like to think of it as a cheaper way to go home, that is of course if I don't stop at Starbucks on my way and get myself a large cafe mocca, or even a small one :) ). So, I was walking as usual today when my hand wrongly touched the iPod in my pocket causing it to start playing suddendly in a very loud volume. Close to having a heart attack, not to mention possible permanent damage to my hearing ability, I suddenly stopped, both my hands on my ears, head bent forward, producing a short scream of pain and shock. I must have looked stupid to other people walking by. And the funny thing is that the loud voice penetrating my ear drums was that of someone screaming "Atención" in a loud, but lively, Spanish song :)

p.s.
on the bus today, I noticed that the guy standing opposite my seat is talking in Egyptian Arabic on the mobile. But when he looked towards me and the man sitting beside me asking us in a not-very-good English if the bus won't turn left, he was absolutely thrilled when I replied in Arabic and asked him about where he wants to go. Not that I know my way around all the time of course, but at least I didn't tell him something close to the sign above ;-)

Mai

cexi

Q: If you are going to compile a translation corpus of adult fiction and non-fiction in both English and Italian, what are you going to name it without being too obvious?

A: CEXI

Q: What the hell does the "X" stand for?

A: cross, so it's a bilingual and bidirectional Corpus of English and Italian.

Don't linguistics people have an answer for everything?

Mai

moustafa al akkad dies

Another tragedy strikes and claims the lives of the innocent, this time in Jordan. Among the victims, the renowned Syrian director Moustafa Al Akkad. Such a loss. Best known in the Arab World for his masterpieces Lion of the Desert, aka Omar Al Mukhtar, and The Message as well as its Arabic version Al Risalah, and less known for producing the Halloween movies, he was a truly gifted director who dared to deal with controversial and sensitive issues in his movies which others avoided.

Mai

family concerns

I was just chatting online with my parents, and they were both worried about me. My mum expressed her concerns over my physical health in this cold weather, while my dad expressed his concerns over my mental health after he read the questions I ask myself when I'm listening to music. Don't worry folks, I am hanging in there :)

Anyway, here is something interesting. Nowadays there is a history theme running on BBC with two shows: the one about Egypt I told you about before, and another on Rome. A friend just emailed me about this article in Mirror comparing and commenting on the two. One nice point is right at the end when the writer says: "The Romans were more likely to pinch Cleopatra's bottom than put her on the throne." :)

Mai

legends of the fall

The biggest legend is that technically it's still the fall. Well, what do I know? I come from a different continent, so for me this is as wintery as it can get. Anyway, I am feeling much better as I have been resting in bed since I last blogged. Somehow I wasn't in a mood to listen to anything except one song: "The man who sold the world"

Oh no, not me
We never lost control
You're face to face
With the man who sold the world

I listened to Nirvana sing it, then I listened to David Bowie sing it, then I listened to Nirvana again, then David Bowie again.. I like the Nirvana version more.

Mai

miss grumpy

One of the worst things that can happen to me is to have a bad sleepless night then be disappointed during the day then be coughing and sneezing my way back home to spend another bad night with a big pack of tissues beside my bed only to wake up this morning on the horrible loud noises from the maintenance work done across the street.

Mai

communication failures

A series of communication failures to report.

Last night, I failed to communicate with the world of dreams as I only had 3 hours of sleep. Potential reasons: I'm in love (I wish), I am working (partly), I worry too much (most likely)

Today, I had a problem accessing the corpus. Potential reasons: technical network problems (hopefully treatable), UCL sold Middlesex a flawed copy (academic prank?), I was never meant to use this particular corpus (hmmm..)

Washing my hands in the loo (aka restroom/ladies room in most parts of the world), I heard the following case of reference assignment failure:

(two girls talking while in separate toilet cabins)
A: B.. do you have a break?
B: yeh
A: (short pause) how long is it?
B: what is?
A: the break, how long is it?
B: uh.. 5 minutes

Potential reasons: B just didn't hear A properly (likely), a more complicated linguistic reason that has to do with the pragmatic effect of the pause and its relation to the cognitive status semantically encoded by it (tell you all about it in two and half years), B has more important things to attend to ( :} )

Mai

wordy words

Does it sound weird that I have developed a habit of asking myself strange questions while I'm listening to songs?

For example, why can James Blunt say: "My life is brilliant / My love is pure / I saw an angel / Of that I'm sure" while he can also say "Of this I'm sure" but he can't say " Of it I'm sure"?

And how would we understand Savatage differently if instead of saying "Is this the answer to our prayers? / Is this what god has sent? / Please understand this isn't what we meant" they used that?

And why the heck do they keep saying "and all that jazz"?

And why on earth is there a band called "Take That" and there is no one called "Take This"?

And WHY..

Ok.. I'll calm down. Taking a deep breath... I need to listen to something with more music than words. Jazz then. After all, "it don't mean a thing / if you ain't got that swing".. (ehm, what exactly is "that swing"?) ahhh.. :)

Mai

it worked

Man Utd beat Chelsea 1 nil. Cool.

Mai

cross your fingers

Just had this message trying to access my gmail:

"Google is temporarily unavailable. Cross your fingers and try again in a few minutes. We're sorry for the inconvenience."

So they actually need our help to solve their server problems? What happened to the all-powerful domination, I mean googlisation, of the web? Weird.

Anyway, I'll be saving all the crossing of fingers I can do for later today when Man Utd. plays against Chelsea. They obviously need it.

Mai

fireworks

Just came back from watching the fireworks at Alexander Palace. It was awesome :) I loved it. I've never seen fireworks so big and so close before. And the great thing is that I had my new cool mobile to take lots of pictures and 3 short videos too :) Isn't this a nice picture? What can I say, I'm a natural ;-)

There were thousands of people there, and there was music in the background too. I think they did a good job trying to fit the fireworks with the music. One of the nice moments was with the rush of fireworks trying to cope with the lively "Is this the road to Amarillo". The nice thing too is that, standing on high ground, we could see in the background fireworks all over London lighting up the sky. That was a great way to celebrate the third and final day of eid, no matter how cold it was.

Mai

me? popular?

Yep, apparently my blog is becoming popular :) I was just online with Aisha, my ex-flatmate, who said that she was searching for info on the Egyptian restaurant "meya meya" when a link to my blog came up. Days ago, there was also a hint to my blog on My Kingdom, another interesting blog to add to your bookmarks. And a couple of months ago, meeting Vlad Zegarac at the conference in Cumberland Lodge, he told me that someone who was searching for his email ended up reading about him on my blog :) Well, I guess some things are just too good to be unknown ;-)

Oh, and while we are on the subject of me :) Billy also mentioned on his blog today that we had, or actually that we were still going to have, a very sweet bite together today. I am glad he liked the collection of Ramadan and eid sweets. Who can resist the 'kahk' and the 'basbousa'? :) So I spent day 2 of the eid on campus today but I had a mini celebration with Billy.

So what else have I been doing on campus? Well, I was mostly playing with my corpus. It has great potential, although today I was starting to get this feeling of being overwhelmed with examples. It will certainly take some time and effort to get my working methodolgy organized. Oh, and expect that every now and then I will pass an example or two from the corpus your way. Here is one for now, for all those who don't know what linguistics is all about :) :

Two friends talking about their other colleague who's doing a PhD in linguistics (rings any bells?):

A: Oh, Laura's spelling is awful
A: Remind me to tell her that actually
A: So embarrassing with my supervisor
B: Why?
A: What bloody linguistics
A: She can't even spell
B: (laugh) That's not what linguistics is about
B: It's about talking not spelling

Mai

late thoughts

Just came back 20 minutes ago. From 5 am till 9 pm, I was celebrating the eid for 16 straight hours with a very nice group of Egyptians and half-British half-Egyptians, some only know Arabic, some only know English, some understand Arabic but talk in English, and to make it more culturally and linguistically interesting, there was one who is half-Algerian half-Italian who could also fake an Egyptian Arabic accent. I can't tell you how great it was or how tired I am. And this is only day 1 ;-) Actually it's the first day that matters.

p.s.
I got to listen for the first time to a sermon both in Arabic and in English. It was interesting that, in the English version, the sheikh was talking in 'normal' English throughout, then towards the end where he prays to God for forgiveness etc. he then says "for thou art the most gracious and the most bounteous". A dramatic 'formal' shift, isn't it?

Mai

early thoughts

I am up and I am excited. Actually I just had 5 hours of sleep but that's ok. I am having my coffee and breakfast now. There is still no morning light, though. Anyway, since I'm here, let me ask you this. I was reading this bit from the Communicating report I told you about before, in which Jane Goodall, a very famous person who studied the life of chimpanzees for a long time (the technical name is primatologist) talks about Why words hurt. So she starts by saying:

"I think we’re still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate."

Well, I wouldn't say 'harder' but maybe 'more complicated' since you can convey a lot more with words than with gestures. But then she goes on to say:

"And as you’ve probably experienced, it is much harder to forget a word than it is a slap."

Do you think this is true? I have been thinking about this, but it seems to me that I would forget a particular nasty word that someone said to me but I would never ever forget that this person slapped me! I can't say that I have a personal experience of being slapped (which is nice :) ) but I can't help but think that it's more likely for someone to retell a particular incident that happened in the past as: "and he called me something then slapped me on the face".

Not exactly happy eid thoughts, I know :) but it's interesting. Anyway, got to go.

Mai

happy eid everyone :)

Doesn't it look nice in Arabic? :) Happy eid to all of you.

So those of you familiar with our eid traditions know that you are supposed to buy a new thing in the eid, which when we were kids was nothing less than a whole new outfit and then tends to be more selective and more expensive as you grow up. So what did I get? (of course it's much nicer if someone else buys something for you, but.. ) Well, I figured that since I can't do anything about the technicalities of email breakdown, nor can I do anything about my occasional clumsiness, at least I went out and got myself a new mobile phone :) This is my eid celebration. I haven't started to play with it yet, maybe tomorrow will try to take some pictures, and of course I will have at some point to begin transferring all my contacts to it.

Anyway, will try to do a bit of work tonight before going to bed early. I have to get up really early tomorrow, around 5:30 am, to get ready to go for the eid prayer (of course I'll make myself a nice big cup of coffee first :) ) I know this is the only thing that will make it feel like a proper eid. Well, maybe not the only thing, there are also the "kahk" and "ghorayeba" :) yummy..

p.s. 1
hey, I can see fireworks from my window yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay :)

p.s. 2
a nice case of English-Chinese bilingualism was sitting beside me in the bus today going on the phone (in an angry voice): ".. and he was like 'wan chi tao tong bla bla' and I was like 'son wi wao chong bla bla' .." while the rest of the conversation was in Chinese. it seems that this expression is really handy. I wonder what was that all about! :)

Mai

technicalities

First, I have been having trouble accessing my university email since yesterday. Then my mobile phone have gone absolutely crazy today. Then, since the time I last blogged I haven't been able to get online at all and started thinking the bloody broadband provider is doing a lousy job only to discover minutes ago that I actually accidentally kicked the ADSL line out from its plug. Well, I'm not going to get annoyed over technicalities :)

Mai

oops, Q3 ANNIVERSARY: 9 months and counting

I should have done this yesterday but I completely forgot. Maybe it's the Ramadan effect, maybe because I was too excited to blog about my teaching experience and forgot everyting else, and maybe, just maybe, because I am used to life here now that I don't think of anniversaries as much as I used to? Well, it's probably a combination of all of the above.

Anyway, I am sitting now alone in my flat, eating the fastest iftar I could prepare in the last days of Ramadan and blogging to anyone who will read this instead of talking to real people. Not exactly my idea of a typical Ramadan day. But the interesting thing about this quarterly anniversary is that it divides itself nicely into 3 phases: the first month is Cairo month, the second is conferences month, and the third is registration month. So here are the highlights:

• Best days: 1st of August as I was flying home and meeting my family at the airport (I love airport scenes with all the emotions and the tears), 19th of October when I had the official registration panel.

• Worst days: the whole last week of my vacation in Cairo culminating in the last day, the 29th of August, and the night before the first of Ramadan.

• Exciting things: attending the conference in Cambridge, attending the conference in Cumberland lodge, teaching at Middlesex.

• The people: knowing the very nice Egyptian couple Rehab and Mostafa and their cute baby Rooshy with whom I had my best days in Ramadan.

• Cairo extra: the best thing about my vacation in Cairo is, of course, spending time with my family and meeting my friends. I can't forget the Nile cruise at sunset that my bro arranged for me the very next day of my arrival. I also really enjoyed driving a lot, especially that day I was driving at night on the highway listening to loud music. Oh, and of course the excitement of seeing our new house.
  

• Ramadan extra: in the beginning I thought I could actually have iftar with people every single day, this didn't exactly work out. Although I was more active in the first half, it was inevitable that many times I had to stay home and eat all by myself. This is when it kind of stopped feeling like Ramadan at all. It was just like any other day except that I don't eat or drink or work properly before 6. The only faint Ramadanish reminder at this point were the sweet pieces of 'basbusa' or 'konafa' I had. But at least I got to see some Arabic tv at Rehab's place and, as usual, we got to trash almost all of the stupid series we watched.

• Best definition of an 'idea' I heard so far: a headache with pictures (Fry on Futarama) :)

• What I loved about this period: the fact that it literally started in a great way and ended in a great way, so whatever happened in between, I won't think about it anymore.

• What I fear in the coming period: the winter depression symptoms which already started as I look now outside the window and it feels like it's midnight, and to have nothing exciting to do during Christmas vacation.

• Best way to celebrate this anniversary: well, the eid is almost here, isn't it? :)

So, this is it. I know I could write more but I am too tired. In those last days of Ramadan I feel like I am energy-drained. Anyway, this has been an exciting period and I enjoyed a lot of things in it. Ok, it's time for coffee now and a small piece of basbusa. Actually, I have a headache, a real one ;-)

Mai