Long time since I last blogged...been in horrible maths exams, but now I'm free! To celebrate I went to our Red Sea beach house for the weekend, I spend so many beautiful weekends there, but this one was extra special as I just finished exams. Here are some glimpses of the beauty of the place...Yes this IS Egypt in the wintertime!

                                               Arriving at the breezy beach house

 No time to waste...straight off to the beach!

                                                 Beautiful village walk among palm trees

                                               So close I can smell the sea...

                                                      Almost there....

                                                   ...and I've reached paradise

                                                           No this is not photoshopped

                              Beach life: the smell of seawashed wood, simple bamboo huts, and palm tree silhouettes

                                    A romatically rugged walk where the crispy wind swirls the corridors

                                          A fisherman boat quietly drifts in the breeze....

                                          primitive...yet just what my eyes needed

                                          sandy terrain perfect for a barefooted run

                                       going out fishing in sailor hats, sunglasses and shorts...yup Egyptian winter!

                   spanish style: my favorite corner where I sit for hours to clear my thoughts everytime I visit

                                                     a  hauntingly misty sunset

As nightime sets in, the best place to sit is under that encirled hut and to let yourself be twisted and turned by the cuurents of air that haunt the place.

                         Then run home to cuddle up in my warm chair, reading with a creamy cup of hot chocolate!

Raise the white flag

We all experience those day where everyone just seems to enjoy giving you a hard time?..In my case, this seems to happen on days where I am already as frustrated as a facebooker with slow internet. Luckily I discovered the only way to getting what I want is to act like a caffine injected lunatic i.e raise hell...hey, it works! I just didn't like it when people began looking at me as though I needed to be strapped down and put in an asylum...Well one of those days I was going to ask the secretary of the sociology department at my university about a course there, and received a rude response together with disrespectful body language and no answer to my question...here we go again, just blow your top off and she'll point her finger the right direction..but I just looked at her and she was so old...I thought to myself, what if today were a day she discovered she has cancer, or the day her son went to hospital, or the day she realized her, justifiably, small salary will never allow her that breath of comfort we all let out at the end of a hard day....Top this off with constant student concerns and well, you can't blame her...I started to apply this mentality, rather than raise hell, I raised the white flag. Ofcourse I am not saying you should go hug someone who has just insulted your mother, we still have to draw the line when it comes to exploitation and direct insult. What I'm saying is that maybe we can all learn to turn a sympathetic eye towards those who deliberately ignore us, provoke us, eye us degradingly and seem to worship bureaucracy. Whether they are cruel by nature or were forced into cruelty by fate, we should always be grateful under our breath that we are understanding enough to see beyond their cruelty.

Today I longed so much for the beach, I slept in a beautiful breeze and suddenly remebered those summer mornings in a small, simple breezy beach house overlooking a vast mediterannean sea , kids piled over each other in the beds, grown ups having early coffee chats in the white balcony, the smell of breakfast minutes away, dozens of cousins walking in and out of rooms as the sea breeze sweeps through nightgowns and bed sheets...The kids then get all restless, they finally get their way as suddenly eveyone is zigzagging through the house, putting on bathing suits, the smell of sunscreen flowing through my nostrils; buckets, raquets, balls of all sizes, drinks, brightly coloured beach bags and weightless sarongs all mingle together as the family invades the beach that is only 10 metres from the house. A primitve gathering on the soft warm sands is formed, as the men struggle to fight the wind with the umbrella and the children enter into unarmed combat with the waves. Teenagers are playnig raquet, showing off  biceps, running with ipods, playing football with more teenagers who suddenly appear out of no where, and tanning the day away, while the wives and moms sit to read vogue magazines while discussing the same new year resolutions they have had all their lives....The same skinny man who has been selling arabic sweets on the beach for the past lifelong years, whose smile and face seem to be inseperable, marches profesionally along the sand yelling "freska" ...the kids are hooked...Its suddenly close to sunset, our boys have won 4-3, the girls have turned a golden sun-kissed brown and the kids have burried granpa...The grown ups suggest fish and in a snap blue lips, rumbling stomachs and cranky siblings turn into uncontrollable laughters, a warmly lit restaurant, loud waiters  that smell of shrimp and chequred table cloths. We sluggishly drag ourselves to walk home, while the heavy stomachs and sea wind combine to force deep secrets out of our mouths...we have all just become closer. Sweet cups of tea with milk at home prepare the youngsters for a donzen games of cards with the neighbours' kids, fuelled by the night summer winds swirling through the opened windows and fumbling the sunstroked hair, the joyous screams of youth get louder and louder until the match is on TV...one by one the young eyes close and very soon cousins upon cousins lie braided head in leg, sunken in the couch caressed by the same sea wind that forms this dreamland and that puts us softly to sleep so that we may do it all again tomorrow...

Welcome! A welcome for you and for me, and a reminder that whenever we enter this blog, we are suspended in those few precious moments of twilight, a time too beautiful for work or sleep, but perfect for dreaming, hoping, and startin afresh