guess who's back in town!

i'm a happy girl tonight.

luxor, egypt.

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all dressed up and nowhere to go

i love my roommates so much. we have so much fun together. this is an outdated post, but i had to revisit the past cause i loved this night. 

well, it was megan's birthday, and we decided that birthdays are much more fun when they're fancy, so we dolled ourselves up and went out on the town. 

(me, megan, ginny... we're missing karla, who's engaged, and hence, not here)

we went to mimi's cafe 

which was oh so tasty... 

and when we had finished dinner it was SO windy, so we played in the wind. 

we really had nowhere else to go, so megan suggested we go to this old tunnel thing. 

we did, and it required a little hiking around in high heels, but it was worth it and we ended up having such a funny night, and quite the photshoot. 

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side-note: 

all of this happened on michael jackson's death-day. we honored him by having a dance party, clad in black in our backyard (our tiny 3rd-floor balcony).

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spice cream

i invented something delicious. 

here's how it went down:

basically, i love putting cinnamon on vanilla ice cream. so, today as i was looking through the spices, something occurred to me. if vanilla beans, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and and ginger all taste weird on their own, but delicious when you add sugar, would it not be the same with other spices as well? 

i set out to learn for myself. i tried three spices.

the first was turmeric. i love the color it gave the ice cream, it mixed in very well, and made it look like mango ice cream. it tasted good, but so much like indian food that it was hard to remember i was eating ice cream. 

-

the second was probably my favorite. it was cardamom. i love this spice so much, and i think i will definitely have it again on ice cream... probably mixed with cinnamon. it didn't mix in as well, and looked like vanilla beans, or even black pepper, but boy was it tasty!

-

the last one was red curry. that's right. curry ice cream. it was surprisingly delicious, and somewhat spicey... think mexican candy... the flavor is also so associated with indian food that it was hard to mentally mix the two flavors of vanilla ice cream and curry. the spicey-ness remained in my mouth long after the ice cream was gone, which was a fun little treat.

 

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i loved the way the spices brought me back to the old streets of jerusalem. i think we should all be a little more bold in our usage of spices. why not throw some saffron in your rice next time? or sprinkle that salmon with some sumac? 

i think i shall.  

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just seven days...

...till this handsome devil comes back to provo. 

i can't wait!

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(i took this picture on our very last day in jerusalem)

a promise of matrimony? again?

guess what i caught tonight...

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challah!

my friend and i recently made jewish sabbath bread (challah). 

i was impressed with how beautiful it turned out.

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a delicious idea

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mix up some cake batter... 

put it in a waffle iron... 

watch magic happen...

cover it in ice cream etc...

taste a little bit of heaven.

a promise of matrimony?

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my dear friend/former mission companion, shelissa, got married last week... 

and guess who caught the bouquet! 

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hafla!

(fabric and ottoman purchased in egypt... aren't they lovely?)

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"hafla" or حفله means party. 

and that's what we had. 

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i studied arabic almost everyday for the past 2 months with these girls. 

(kelly and cecily) 

they are awesome. 

we had this little arabic party, well, just us three, and it was just so fun. i sometimes feel like no one understands me, because i'm so obsessed with all things middle eastern, and it's sometimes all i want to talk about, and i sometimes talk about it in arabic, and then people literally just don't understand me. 

these girls get it. 

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we had thai food, which is not middle eastern, but since cecily knows how to make it so well, we made an exception. 

after dinner, i introduced them to these girls:

i found this belly dance workout video on youtube, and i love it. it's so fun. it comes in four parts, and i highly recommend it. the girls that teach it are egyptian, so it's even more fun. i'm always trying to get people into belly dance, and my dear friends were willing. it was so funny.

we danced in the kitchen, milkshakes in hand. 

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it's such a good work out, and it's getting me so excited for the middle eastern dance class that i'm taking in october!

there's a recital in november.

you're all invited.

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a little bit modern

i made this in jerusalem with my friend sandee. it's very modern, strange, and strangely captivating. well... no, it's not really. it's rather silly. 

enjoy.

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allahu akbaar!

that's my arabic name (a3ziza... and yes, you must pronounce the three)

i can't believe i just finished my arabic summer class.

wow. it feels strange. and in the words of maha... ash3ur bilwahida... (i feel lonely). i have had class monday-friday for two hours over the last two months, and then about 6 hours outside of class every single day. that's eight hours a day of arabic... trying desperately to learn hundreds and hundreds of words in both fusha and amiyya (i think about 700), trying keep up with the complicated grammar, like trying to remember the seven ways to negate (mish, mash, lem, len, la, laysit and ma) and remembering which tenses follow them, the different reasons to take off that final nun (for heyya, hom, and intum) when it's subjunctive, or 'mansub', the five different ways to make a conditional sentence, all the different ways to use ba'a/yi'ba, how to conjugate those blasted hollow verbs, not to mention the 10 verb forms and their musdars, and on and on and on and on. 

this has been my life for the last two months... well, really 8 months, and it will be this way for at least another year and a half... and hopefully more. i am in love with this crazy language, and i'm kind of sad to have two weeks off. 

i'm going to go listen to amr diab and tamer hosny to ease my troubled little heart. yeah... that should do it.

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avonlea

today i was hungry when i came home from church and the first thing i saw was a big container of popcorn that sits atop my fridge. so i made some. as i stood there turning the handle on my old-fashioned stove-top corn-popper, i suddenly had a craving for hot chocolate with my popcorn, and then, all at once, it hit me. 

i felt like i was ten again, and all i wanted in the whole wide world was to watch The Road to Avonlea. i honestly haven't even thought about that show for maybe ten years. i got myself all settled in with cocoa and poppy-corn and watched a whole episode of it on youtube. 

you may find yourself wondering why... although my siblings should understand... 

i think that one of my strongest memories of sunday as a child was just that. every sunday night everyone in the whole family would go to the family room, and we'd turn off the lights, eat popcorn and drink hot chocolate as we waited with anticipation to see what would happen to sarah stanley, aunt hetty, olivia and jasper dale, gus pike, alec, janet, felicity and felix king!

as i watched this episode and heard all those names i was brought back about a decade and a half. well, the show's not as awesome as i remember, but i definitely enjoyed the memory of thinking it was awesome. i was also reminded of some resentment that i felt at always being compared to sara polly, the actress who playes sara stanley. i didn't really like her, and i wish they (especially brooklyn) would have compared me to felicity. but alas.

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this is jasper and olivia dale. i always thought she was so beautiful.

oh gus pike... always getting into trouble... and felicity... i also thought she was beautiful.

aunt hetty and alec king... i think they were brother and sister. aunt hetty always bugged me.

ok, i LOVE that i found this picture, cause i distinctly remember this episode. it aired in 1991 or 1992. i was in first grade, and i remember coming to school on monday and quoting the funny parts with my friend mark. this is sara, who i didn't like to be compared to. 

poor america. canada has such good tv.

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thai curry

i finally learned how to make amazing curry. it's been a goal of mine for years. i couldn't be happier with the results. 

+

=

oh how i love it. 

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kip

our assignment in my arabic class today was to pick a scene from a movie, translate it into arabic, and act it out for the class. i haven't laughed so hard in a long time. speaking in kip's little wimpy voice in arabic, and saying to naboolioon ('napoleon' in an arabic accent) "don't be jealous that I've been chatting online with babes all day" in a butchered arabic translation was one of the funnier things i've experienced. i even made myself a mustache. my classmates told me that i looked surprisingly like him... i took it as a compliment.

 

we did the scene where... well... this one (i edited it to be just what we actually said):

Napoleon: Stay home and eat all the freakin' chips, Kip!

Kip: Napoleon, don't be jealous that I've been chatting 

online with babes all day.

[Doorbell Rings] 

Napoleon: I'll go get it.

Deb: Um, hello. Would you like to look like this?       

Napoleon: This is a girl.

Deb: Well, maybe you'd be interested in 

some home-woven handicrafts.

Napoleon: I already made, like, infinity of those 

at Scout camp.

Deb: Well, is anyone else here? I'm trying to earn 

money for college.

Kip: Your mom goes to college.

*** 

for anyone out there that may speak arabic, i just have 

to share my lines... 

we had to simplify, and we cut out a lot, 

but it was still just so funny to me. first, i said:

نبوليون... ماتغيرش عشان انا اتكلمت مع كتكوتات في الكمبيوتر كل اليوم 

and then at the end i said:

والدتيك بتروح الجامعة

haha... it still gets me.

by the way, i think it's been long enough, and i've forgotten most of the lines i used to have memorized. 

i think i need to watch napoleon dynamite again soon.

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