So, I was sitting down checking out some latest feeds on my Tumblr dashboard when an animated picture came up with ‘Hey there Delilah, how’s it like in New York City?’ written on it. I am not sure about you, but for me, whenever I read some lyrics to any song I used to know I start automatically singing the song. It doesn’t matter whether I remember the lyrics or not, and if I don’t even remember the song - which is just awful - I spend all day trying to search for it, and then its stuck in my head on loop. This song was thankfully an easy one, so I just started singing when I realized something was wrong. I started off with:

Something clearly didn’t add up. What would a ‘Delilah’ be doing in Baghdad city anyway? That’s when it hit me! I wasn’t singing the original song! At some point, I did hear the original song, but for some reason the parody of it is what stuck. I guess since it was funny and a bunch of the guys in my class were singing it, so that’s the version I could remember.

Has any of you heard the parody of it? “Hey there Khalilah?”

Of course, me being me, I didn’t listen to the original again to remember it, I listened to this version. At some point I should really remedy that.

I was having a speaking exam soon - as I mentioned I am an Italian major at university. But sadly they don’t concentrate on speaking and stuff, which is such a shame. Many people I know can write way better than I can even imagine, but just force them to speak and BAM! They’re flushed. I thought, since I suck at all the other aspects in my major, might as well practice this one. So I chose to speak only Italian for a whole day. I even opted to only listen to Italian songs, only watch Italian movies and dubbed series, and if I read, then it had to be in Italian too!

I even chatted with a bunch of friends on Facebook and MSN and refused to use anything but Italian. People had 4 different reactions to this. The first group of people got ticked off at me and told me to talk to them when I can use English again. The second tried to understand what I was saying but failed so they just faded off. The third group of people actually spoke Italian and LOVED the idea. The last group of people - my favorites really - wanted to show their support and agreed to continue the conversation with them using Google translate on their end!

I won’t lie and say the day was 100% successful, it was only 75% so. My sister, who doesn’t speak a word of Italian - Ok wait, she knows a word, that’s not accurate, doesn’t speak it in general would be a better way of putting it - refused to humor me, and I was forced to on more than one occasion resort to English (yes my sister and I don’t speak Arabic normally to one another, I really don’t have a good explanation why). BUT to compensate for this lapse, I had one-hour skype-dates with two of my really cool Italian e-pals; so two hours of talking in nothing but Italian. I made a bunch of mistakes -hey, how else does one learn? Yet I managed to keep the conversation going, and by the end of the day I was even THINKING in Italian. If this isn’t a success of sorts, I don’t know what is!

“Talk with your mind full”

As you all know, there’s a lot of issues and lack of understanding -basically barriers - between many countries in the world and the middle east. A lot of things are misunderstood, yet with the Arab uprising and the revolutions going on, many things have changed and many people are willing to understand more about the Arab world and not just stick to stereotypes or the media. I’ve recently made a new friend -Eric - who’s in the middle east trying to help building bridges of understanding and friendship between people from different countries around the world. He had created this project called  ‘The Virtual Dinner Guest’. Basically, you have dinner with people from a different country via Skype and just chat, whilst forming some sort of bond, and trying to understand the other person. I’ve joined 3 of his events and really loved the idea and the people I got to talk with. He’s currently in Tunisia but is in need of donations to help keep the project going, so if you guys are interested, here’s the project’s fanpage:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Virtual-Dinner-Guest-Project/142986095769267

And the donation page:

http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Virtual-Dinner-Guest-Project?c=home

Here’s a documentary on the last one I’d been at:

http://cnettv.cnet.com/look-who-coming-dinner-skype-guests/9742-1_53-50124158.html

As many of you know - or well if you don’t know I will explain it anyway - Egypt is going through an election process which all of us are hoping would be into a new democratic world. Sadly, due to the ‘freedom’ many Egyptians have been aspiring too, we all had a similar enemy.. like when USA and USSR both wanted the end of Nazism, so they collaborated with one another until it was over and the second world war was won. Sadly, when you no longer have a mutual enemy you start to notice how you actually don’t like your ‘ally’ thus came the Cold War. Here, we have a similar situation, we all wanted the president gone. Now he is. Yet, we all have separate and different political beliefs, many believe religion should take over, many believe it should be liberal and many have moderate views between both. So, this was a summary on the goings on in Egypt. The Bizarre thing would have to be the Muslim brotherhood’s candidate for said campaign:

The person in Said photos had accidentally used copy + paste on his presidential campaign posters and wrote vote for “Khairat El-Shater” as president instead of his name “Mohammed Morsi”.

…my dearest Tumblr! I know I’ve been cheating on you with blogspot for the past week, but I had my reasons, I honestly did. I also felt horrible, does that help? Knowing that I’d prefer you all the way anyway? That and I missed you, A LOT!

So don’t get mad okay?

I am not sure if I happened to mention this before, but I published a book last year! Sadly it’s in English so I am in the wrong country for it to sell well, but still I am a new author and it is my first book so I am kind of happy whenever someone reads it and likes it! So yeah, I just thought to share this with you guys!

Anyhow, here is the fanpage:

http://www.facebook.com/Against.All.Odds.Book

GoodReads page:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13617448-against-all-odds

If you want to order it:

http://www.lulu.com/shop/alia-el-nashaar/against-all-odds/ebook/product-15939994.html;jsessionid=0FBD9A8490511847C14F7B9776726AFA

http://www.books.com.eg/index.php/en/against-all-odds.html

If you DID or will read it, let me know what you think! ^^