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.