Cruisin’ Down the Nile

If you’ve read my previous post you’ll know I’ve been to Egypt recently. Apart from wandering through valleys and temples I was lucky enough to go on a one day Nile cruise. My hotel backed onto the Nile also, so I managed to get quite a few pictures of the famous river (although credit is due to my brother for the better pics of the lot). Hope you like them:

Caves, Coalmines and Mummy Tombs

Whenever I go on holidays by some stroke of luck or misfortune I always end up going underground. I don’t mean tube stations or even the Euro Star on the way to France, but in enclosed, dark and stuffy places that usually aren’t very appealing. I’m not one for caves, the first caves I remember visiting were the Luray Caverns in America where the lights went out half way during the tour thanks to a technical fault up above, so naturally I’ve developed a slight fear of caves. In Dewsbury a couple of years ago I had the bizarre experience of going down a coalmine. If there are any northerners reading this can you please tell me whether coalmines are popular tourist attractions? Because going down a dark shaft deep underground where people dig for rocks is not something I would choose to do if I was given a choice, but on that particular holiday I wasn’t even consulted. Nevertheless once I’d got over the darkness and the heat it was interesting to learn about the working conditions of coal miners in the past, mostly because they were so horrific. I won’t go into details-why not visit the coalmines yourself?! But by far, the most fascinating underground experience I’ve had is going into mummy tombs, on the west bank of Luxor, Egypt.

These tombs are located in a place called the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens, in the stifling heat of the desert. Imagine walking through the valley in 40 degrees Celsius and descending into heated, narrow tombs which are not so different from your kitchen ovens. But once you get over the heat the interior of the tomb is absolutely fascinating. 3000 year old art work by the ancient Egyptians, colours still preserved and visible, patterns and pictures on the walls and celings and columns upon columns of hieroglyphics. I wish I’d been allowed to take pictures because these mummy tombs are certainly sights hard to contest. When you’re in them you actually forget that you’re in a tomb of a dead person in a gigantic graveyard. In reality, that’s what the Valley of the Kings is— a gigantic, extravagant graveyard, all history and embellishments aside. In theory, that’s got to be worse than a coalmine hasn’t it?

Oprah Magazine's Unlikely (but Lovely) Cover Girl

http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Choosing-to-Wear-the-Muslim-Headscarf/1

After the Gaza Flotilla Attacks This Novel Hits Home More

This is just a quick post about a novel that my cousin (thecoverfelloff) gave me to read last week. ‘Where The Streets Had A Name.’ It is written by Randa Abdel-Fattah, author of ‘Does My Head Look Big in This?,’ an Australian author of half Palestinian heritage. She writes about Palestine in this novel, more specifically, about a young girl who lives in Bethlehem and has to deal with life under occupation. She writes about curfews, deaths, checkpoints, refugees, soldiers, peace activists, families and weddings and somehow manages to infuse humour and light heartedness with underlying pain and grief. The story narrates the journey of the young girl Hayaat, as she tries to sneak into Jerusalem illegally, and along the way readers get just a snippet of what living in Palestine is like. It’s enough however, to get bleary eyes by the end of it. If there’s one thing that stands out in the novel more than anything, it’s the complete sense of loss conveyed through the nostalgic descriptions of occupied Palestinian homeland. Read it, and you’ll know what I mean. It may be a teen fiction novel but it’s beautifully done.

Journal Jungle

Those of you on my course at Uni may have noticed that I carry with me at all times a small red journal. It’s tatty and thin and looks like this:

Well the reason for this is in my first creative writing lecture I was told to carry a ‘thoughts’ notebook with me at all times, in case a brilliant idea strikes me when I least expected, like on my way to a Historisim lecture or when I’m coming out of Aldis. It’s also something authors and writers advise— it’s something Jacqueline Wilson advised when I meet her in Year 2 and told her I wanted to be a writer, and it’s what Julie Bertagna claimed she did on her blog (for anyone who doesn’t know of Julie Bertagna she was one of my favourite childhood authors). So anyway I went ahead and brought myself a journal and started to jot all my ideas down. I salvaged as many thoughts as I could, but to be honest, it’s impossible to keep track of them all. Minutes after I’m struck with a ‘brilliant’ idea for my next short story or poem, they are slipping away, second by second as I search for my journal and try and translate these ideas into words.
But anyway I came home at the end of term and stashed my now full red notebook away and found that I couldn’t fit it in my desk draw. After having a good rummage through (I haven’t sorted through that draw in ages) I found that buried beneath my pens, missed-matched felt tips and lids and old Pokémon key rings I had an entire stash of journals and notebooks, looking something like this when they’ve all been pulled out:

They consist of recipe collections (the red flowery one in particular), story drafts, general ramblings, photos, bad drawings and revision notes. One or two are completely blank because they’re simply too nice to fill with revision notes or rough story drafts and I plan to fill them with something more worthwhile eventually. A couple of the rambling ones have ideas that I must have thought of ages ago and with a bit of tweaking would be potential articles or blog material. In fact, now that I’m on holiday I plan to use as them as posts, so watch this space!