I couldn't be happier that I have a week off from school starting this afternoon, even if it will be a break mostly consumed by work on senior project and college apps. I'm going into the break with some significant milestones reached. Earlier this week, I completed BOTH essays I have been working on! I feel immensely relieved that I can finally label all 20 pages as finished.

The rest of the week was really busy, and I was overwhelmingly tired through much of it, but I managed to do some pre-writing work on my third essay: The Cityscape of Cairo as a metaphor for Egyptian History. My process folio is now filled with photographs I took I might want to use a jumping-off points, along with a map of the downtown I broke down into pieces representing specific eras and trends. I've been mulling this essay over in my head for practically two months, so although it will be a complex piece, I'm hoping to finish it fairly quickly. Ideally, I want to be done with it by the end of my first week back.

And, last but not least, pictures. Here's some of those urban landscape images I've been inspired by:
View from the top of the Cairo Tower.
The Islamic Quarter. Although beautiful and historic, the cleanliness and orderliness of the neighborhood is very unlike the rest of the city. I think of it as something like EgyptoDisney.
The Khan el-Khalili, the famous centuries-old souk/tourist trap. I like the contrast between the market itself, which embodies the typical image westerners have of the Middle East, and the people visiting it, such as my camera-wielding friend. While Western money keeps places like Islamic Cairo protected, it comes at the cost of some of its original character. I'm not sure what, if any, balance can be reached between the two.
This was also taken in the Islamic Quarter. I'm not sure what it says about Cairo. I do know, however, that this is one of my favorite pictures I've ever taken.

I just wrote this post and it managed to disappear! Oh well, here it goes again...

This was a very productive week. I am currently on my 6th (and I hope final) draft of my essay on the headscarf. My essay on media is in its 3rd draft and, although more work remains, I'm fairly happy with it as of now. The drafting process has gotten markedly faster as I get better at anticipating what my mentor will say about my work and adjusting accordingly before handing it in.

I played around this week a little with my final product format. I threw together a test cover page in photoshop, but am not terribly thrilled with it. I also thought about what I should title all my pieces. I'm thinking about just keeping them short and sweet ("The Headscarf", "The Television", etc.), instead of givning them more academic-sounding titles, but I'm not dead-set on any one idea.

Goals for next week:
1. Be done with my essay on hijab, hopefully.
2. Be near-finished with the media essay.
3. Have a clear idea of/start writing my third essay. I'm considering one idea about the cityscape of Cairo as a metaphor for Egyptian history, and another about shopping malls vs. traditional souks. I'll see what happens.

Finally, I realize I've been drawing a lot of inspiration from my photos of this summer. I'm going to start sharing a few every week, I think.

This week: Food and Drink. It's a component of Egyptian culture that can't be overemphasized. Egyptian cuisine is delicious and highly varied. Hospitality involves offering huge amounts of food and very forcefully demanding people eat more.
This woman is baking fiteer. Fiter is a soft bread of many flaky layers, eaten plain or topped with tahini, cheese or honey. Having it fresh out of this oven with some honey from the nearby bees ranked among the simplest, and best, meals I've ever had.
Koshary is Egypt's answer to fast food. It consists of rice, lentils, chickpeas and macaroni topped with spicy tomato sauce and caramelized onion. It's great with some lemon juice sprinkled on top. It's popular, dirt cheap, tasty and filling, and thus is something of a staple food.
Tea, or shay, is an essential component of socializing. I also had it every morning for breakfast. Surprisingly, the tea is often plain old lipton, but the Egyptians like to add in their own spices.
These sacks are filled with hibiscus leaves, steeped in water to make a cold drink called karkade (similar drinks, I later learned, are present in many parts of the world). Fruit juices are ubiquitous at both restaurants, shisha places and stand-alone parlors. Other favorite drinks are assab, made from sugar cane, mango juice and moz w leban , literally banana and milk, essentially a banana smoothie.

The last two weeks seem to have gone by pretty quickly. My major accomplishment since I last blogged is the two more drafts I wrote of my essay about hijab, or Islamic dress. I hope that the 4th draft I just emailed to Ms. Clark to take a look at will probably be my last major revision. As things stand right now, the essay is just under 10 pages long, with two whole pages of citations after that. It is probably the most well-researched thing I've ever written! There's a part of me that worries that, a week into November, I only have one essay I consider nearly finished, but I am going for quality over quantity. I feel I really have put a month of work into my final product.

Since I've been concentrating wholly on my first essay, my second, about media in the Middle East, has not advanced too much. I am only partway through writing a second draft, which I hope to complete this weekend. I think I understand better now what sort of caliber I should be aiming for in my writing, so I expect the drafting process won't take as long. Personally, I believe the essay I've completed was the most complicated, and that also contributed to the timeframe.

So, to recap, one goal in the coming days: have a 2nd draft of the media essay done this weekend. My ideal schedule for the coming weeks is to have my second essay near completion in the next two weeks and to return from Thanksgiving break with at least a good draft of my third piece.