Wake up call

  So I'm sitting in the living room, I've just finished watching Doctor Who, I've checked emails and replied to the important work-related ones, checked and updated my lesson plans for the week. My head is killing me due to a combination of a lack of sleep, the start of a cold, not taking a break all day and a re-emergence of my motion sickness. By this point I've been home for ages, had dinner and I'm absolutely ready for bed, I look at the clock and find...it's 8:20!!

   What??? How can it possibly still only be 8 o'clock? Why is it still too early to go to bed? And that is when I realised, I need something to do in the evenings. I'm spending all my free periods at work planning and grading and such so that I don't have to bring anything home but I'm not taking advantage of the free time I have in the evenings. So I'm making a resolution; I'm going to have productive evenings (I admit it won't be every night, I still need my lazy days). No real idea what I'll do exactly, but I'm determined to do something dammit! 

The joys of being single.

   When I say I'm enjoying being single I get looks which range from pitying to disbelieving.

   It's true though and I'm not saying it to be different or to play hard-to-get. I like being able to be selfish sometimes, I enjoy being able to treat myself to something and not have to explain to someone why I didn't ask them to get it for me. I love being able to decide to go out with friends and not have to tell someone or worry about them feeling abandoned and unloved.


   I also feel I've grown so much more as a person these past two years I don't feel ready to give up on the woman I am becoming just to pander to other people's  expectations!

   I believe in love, companionship, marriage and all that jazz but I also believe that it happens when a person is ready and that there's really no set time frame to determine when that may be. There's a great line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BTW I'm pretty sure this show has a quote for any occasion) where Buffy likens herself to cookie dough ": I'm cookie dough. I'm not done baking. I'm not finished becoming who ever the hell it is I'm gonna turn out to be. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day, I turn around and realize I'm ready. I'm cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat m- or enjoy warm, delicious, cookie me, then that's fine. That'll be then. When I'm done. "


 Once I am as fully formed as I can be as an individual(or a cookie) I'll meet someone is also fully  formed and we will compliment NOT complete each other.

On the other hand if Richard Armitage or Gerard Butler were to propose to me tomorrow I would be planning a wedding ASAP :)

Mini-Michelin Men

   Maybe people would be more apt than men, but I'm in the mood for alliteration.

  One of the first things you should know about Egyptians is that when it's winter, the coats go on. And stay on. All day. Inside or out. Of course under the coats there's usually a jacket (maybe two) a sweater or two and a vest. Of course this makes sense to a degree, unlike in Europe there's no central heating or insulation and all buildings are designed to stay cool and keep the heat out. Great in the summer, not so much in the winter.

   It's not the fact that people wear several layers that gets to me, it's the fact that once inside they will not take anything off! Coats or jackets stay on indoors and then people complain that they're cold when they go outside again! Of course you're cold, you've got warm inside and then gone outside without adding an extra layer!! Grrrr!!

  Nor does this look to be a generational phenomena that will die out as the next generation grows up, in class students more often than not, refuse to take off their big winter jackets 'because my mum told me not to'. The result is that they sit in class looking like mini-Michelin men and can barely move their arms!

Out in the cold?

     You know that feeling you get sometimes, that people are talking about you or keeping secrets behind your back? You probably felt it the most when you were between the ages of 11-13 when everyone had secrets that you weren't included in. Most of the time it was just your imagination and there was probably someone else saying the same thing about you, on the other hand, if you're a woman, chances are some of those girls really were being mean. We can't help it and it's a sign that you've started growing up when you realise that you are-unintentionally- hurting people around you and you begin to reign in some of those comments. Not all the time though, sometimes saying those couple of comments to someone who you know will agree with you is all that gets you through the day!!  So imagine the frustration of people who walk into a room to find people speaking a language you can't understand and not feeling welcome to share in a conversation.

     Being considerate and switching languages won't endanger your national identity or language, nor will it make you look like a show off to your fellow countrymen, who knows, you might even enjoy talking to someone with a different point of view. You could even learn something and broaden your views. 

Tree Massacre!

I like trees. They give us oxygen-need that for breathing last time I checked, flowers, fruits and what's that other thing? Oh yeah. SHADE! So why, oh why in this hot and sunny country do people insist on cutting trees into ridiculous shapes or, as happened recently where I live, practically hack them to death and leaving them with stumps for branches and no leaves at all?!

I can understand the need to trim, trim mind you, branches that dangerously overhang the street or if the tree is diseased. But other than that, there really is no excuse, and yet all around Cairo, you see round trees, square trees and at one point on the airport road, you could even glimpse the elusive lesser-spotted pyramid tree!

If the tree wasn't diseased before, chances are it is now. Birds live in trees. Bugs can make trees sick. Birds eat bugs. Tree is healthy!

Birds can't live in round trees. Bugs can. Birds can't eat bugs. Bugs make tree sick. Tree dies. The moral of the story? Leave the trees alone! We need shade, temperatures in the summer often reach the high 30s C and being able to walk in the street or wait for a taxi under a tree in a bit of shade would make life much more pleasant. Is that too much to ask?

Myself.

Introduction and first mini rant.

Hello!

I'm typing this by candle-light as my neighbourhood has just plunged into darkness; an auspicious start for my blogging alter-ego! It's quite a romantic setting I suppose, although I do wish the unpredictable Egyptian electricians had found a way of having the country's air-conditioners wired so that they were never affected by these power cuts! BTW the unpredictability of Egyptian electricians, plumbers etc. is a topic for another day. It would be fairly long!

After that -slightly random- ramble allow me to introduce myself; my name, as you may have guessed, is falafel (no, really). I'm a British-Egyptian girl in my mid-twenties, born in England (Cheltenham), raised and currently living in Cairo. I graduated from the faculty of Pharmacy in June of 07 and by September had realized that none of the career paths available in the field appealed to me at all; so in October I applied for a position as a co-teacher at an international school, started the same day and haven't looked back! In fact before the lightswent out I was looking up MA courses in education in the UK, suffice to say, I'm in it for the long haul!

That's all for now,I'm sure it will be easier to get to know me as you read my blogs; whether they be in the form of a ramble, a rant or a fangirl 'squee!'

Myself.