let it be

today was my day off and i had a whole bunch of things planned out. i was going to go to the gym, copy all my grammar notes into one notebook, finish my homework, make note cards for new vocabulary, make dinner and do my laundry. what did i accomplish today? just dinner. i must admit though, i did make a nice hearty soup with carrots, potatoes, green beans, eggplant, onions, tomatoes, green peppers, kidney beans, white beans and noodles. yummy! cow enjoyed it. we have this thing...whenever we cook, we make an intention that we are preparing the meal to help nourish us in order to worship Allah. (actually, this is something that should be done with everything we do.) anyway, alhamdulillah, all our meals have been turning out sweet. but then again, our standards have gone down so it doesn’t take much to please us.

it’s common in egypt to have a cleaning lady come clean your apartment. it’s usually the bawaab’s (doorman’s) wife, sister, daughter, ect. the cleaning lady came today to clean our apartment. she speaks hard core ‘amiyya (local dialect) which is so different from fus-ha. she would ask me stuff all the time and i didn’t want to appear stupid so i would just say, ‘na’am’ which means ‘yes’ even though i had no idea what she was saying. and then she would look at me waiting for me to do something. but of course, i didn’t know what she wanted. ugh! where’s bikey when you need her! she also has a tendency to play interior decorator whenever she comes to our place. like she put the table that was in the hallway in my room probably because she didn’t like that i used my suitcases as tables, displayed the ugly metallic horse statue that we always hide in the cabinet on the table counter probably ‘cause she thought it matched with the t.v. and today, she took the dirty bed sheet from the hamper and spread it on my bed probably ‘cause she thought it matched with the pillow cases! it took her 6 hours to clean the whole place. you’re probably thinking, ‘dang! the place must be so dirty to take 6 hours to clean!’ well, maybe....but things get dusty real fast here in egypt so the cleaning lady spent a long time beating the rugs, window screens and curtains to get rid of the dust. for 6 hours of work, we paid her 25 egyptian pounds. that comes out to less than $5! i feel so bad for giving so little but that’s standard so maybe i shouldn’t feel so guilty. plus, i thanked her so much and told her the place looked beautiful. that’s worth more than 25 egyptian pounds, no?

yesterday was cow’s birthday. little cow turned a measly 19 years and she kept complaining about it being her last year as a teenager. ha! so young and so much to learn. anyway, she wanted to treat us (me and rania) to some chocolate molten cake at chilis. how sweet of her. but we ended up treating her as it should be done. on the way back, while we were walking home at night, i got startled by a cat that appeared out of nowhere. then a few seconds later, i got startled again by a dark image that kept following me. turned out, it was just my shadow.

naveed’s been gone for a few days now. she went to dahab with her friend who is visiting. since she left, it seems like the apartment has gone crazy. the first thing rania did was buy eggs and cow and i ate a chicken sandwich at chilis. such daredevils we are.