Manal and Alaa's bit bucket

yet another airport, this is the second time in my life i travel on my own (first time was in 1995), oh well this calls for another blog post

i want to write about how women are different, i mean look at these two leggy blondes sitting so comfortably with their arms and legs all over the place taking off their shoes playing with their hair all the time

i can never be that comfortable in a place like an airport never seen a man that comfortable (OK there is this guy who is scratching his ass but that's different)

but i am not that kind of blogger so lets just talk about my aunt and tea

my aunt is Ahdaf Soueif who is a sometimes controversial novelist who writes in English (and who btw has no WikiPedia page, better fix that soon)

almost every year she has a talk, a panel, or whatever in the Cairo book fair, the audience always asks about her non existant identity crisis (if Edward Sa'id had one then surely she has one too is how the logic goes), her reasons for writing in English etc

this year she had a very interesting answer to the questions about the difficulty in presenting Egyptian topics in English and about the differences between her original work and the Arabic translation (which she supervises)

she said her only problem was with words carrying cultural baggage and thus having different meanings

her example was the word tea, you say tea to an Egyptian and she would typically imagine black tea with a bit of sugar being served alone in clear glasses.

say the same word to a British and the mental image is totally different, probably tea with a spot of milk no sugar being served in china cups with biscuits

makes sense to me, but i cant see why it matters she is like that though when describing a scene with cloths hanging on lines she makes sure to tell you it was a white wash