Personal Project

Scents of Arabian nights just float in the air taking you on a trip to the past. Colorful artifacts that shows the splendor of the Islamic art. Shops are scattered everywhere presenting their exotic artifacts of handmade jewelry, carved mirrors, jewelry boxes, colored glass lanterns and handmade traditional galabeyas. All that combines to put you in the atmosphere of the unique traditional market place called “Khan El-Khalili”. There are two layers of Khan El-Khalili where the first layer consists of the art works of craftsmen and artisans. The second layer is not visible at the first glance because the workshops are always set apart from where the artifacts are displayed though that you are allowed to enter to see the actual process of making these handmade displays. Khan El-Khalili is one of the rarest traditional markets in Egypt and in the world for handmade products. People from all over the world come to visit this magical place to enjoy the unique atmosphere of Khan El-Khalili. Tourists are everywhere window-shopping and buying souvenirs and jewelry. The tourists doesn’t just visit Khan El-Khalili to buy souvenirs, but also they want to enjoy the traditional cafes as known as “ahwa”. One of the most famous cafes in Khan El-Khalili is “Fishawi”. Groups of foreigners gathered around minted tea and even some of them trying the adventure of smoking hookah. My personal project is a booklet describing Khan El-Khalili and could work as a guide for someone who wants to know about the mystical market and its fantastic relics that gives Khan El-Khalili its unique spirit.   

The Qualities Of A Good Friend

      

Normally, when we start talking about friendship and qualities of a good friend we keep mentioning the things we would like to have in a good friend but we forget the things that we should avoid. Friends influence each other in a major way, which can be negative or positive. A wise person would choose carefully whom he hangs out with and spot the pros and cons in his friend because everybody has good and evil inside of them in different percentages. What makes a person a good friend; a good human, is that his good side over weighs his down side. It’s a true dilemma because sometimes people may fool themselves with things that don’t exist just to convince themselves of a person because they may like him too much to let him go. I’m not gonna mention the good qualities of a friends such as being supportive, sincere, honest, straight forward etc., because it would be too lame. Don’t you sometime feel strongly about someone when everything that person does repels you from him but you still want to be a part of his life. Sometimes we fool ourselves by saying this person may be the inconsiderate but he wont be that way with me. Or even he could be a backstabber and you see that for yourself first hand but you keep on misleading yourself that he/she could never do that to you because you’re friends. Eventually, you hit rock bottom when you find this person turning against you and being all the things you never expected to do to you. Choose carefully and be real because a friend is your mirror and the people you are with judge you.     

The Constitution

Gentlemen! Question of the hour, the chick, or the egg? Right now Egypt is a turbulent times and everybody is calling for stability and security. Having a president and a written constitution can provide that. The dilemma is in the question how to write a constitution without the existence of a president and how will we have a president elected without a constitution. A president has certain power jurisdiction stated in the constitution, while having a constitution without a president monitoring.

           

            In the past, the first constitution wasn’t called “constitution”. A leader of an ancient civilization called “Babylonia” created a set of laws that govern the daily life of people living in the city of Babylon. This leader was called Hammurabi and his set of laws was called “Hammurabi’s code “. It did almost the same job of the modern day constitution. Modern day constitution « the system of fundamental laws and principles that prescribes the nature, functions, and limits of a government or another institution.»[1] It simply governs the role of the government’s and the president’s jurisdiction. The constitution organizes the relations and authorities between the three major government branches «executive, judicial and legislative » to make it simple executive branch catch criminals, it sends it to judicial branch, which sets the punishment using the rules that legislative branch sets.  

            Egypt nowadays is governed by SCAF (Senior Council of Armed Forces), which apparently doesn’t have any experience in politics and how to run a country. Further more, SCAF literally belongs to Mubarak’s regime, which puts a lot of questions marks around its integrity. Consequently, it is not a safe thing to have a constitution formed under its authority. Finally, having a president will guarantee that the majority party will not tailor a constitution to serve their one purposes and secure a safe exit for SCAF.    

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[1] http://www.thefreedictionary.com/constitution

The New Year's resolution

Maybe a person should not wait for the New Year to change, but the turn of the New Year psychologically symbolizes a fresh start in our mind, besides delaying things for the last minute is a lame excuse for not changing. It is considered to be sort of procrastination. People reach certain resolutions when they confront it or actually getting through certain experiences, which give the person a better perspective of what they should do.

I considered myself a mean person to many reasons such as being rude or disobedient to my parents. We tend to hurt people who care about us the most because we take them for granted since we expect them to accept our abuse. The fact that sometimes I can’t control myself and I just snap is due to the accumulation of pressure through out time till something triggers me and then I completely freak out. We treat others in a mean way or act strangely or just even contradict others for no reason because of pride or for the sake self-preservation. I felt scared and threatened when my father once told me that I won’t have anyone in my life and I’ll become lonely because of the way I treat other or react which was like a wake up call to me because I started realizing why should these people accept these attitude I’m giving them unless they care about me and they are doing it out of love. I felt I am pushing away the people who care about me the most.

I have to push myself to the furthest limit of self-control. I must force myself to be in the shoes of others to understand they may feel when being treated abusively by me. I must remind myself that these people are the people that care about me the most. The New Year has become my way of starting my new me. I’m not waiting for the New Year to reach a resolution but I’m considering the New Year as a mark of change, I resolute that change doesn’t happen because I want it. Change doesn’t happen over night but it’s a matter of time and experiences. My resolution for the new year is that I will never go back to what I was before and empathy towards others will bring me peace of mind.

  

Globalization: Overview

The controversy surrounding globalization lies in the manipulation and attempts to control developing countries by corporations forcing their political views that serve their purposes, which lead to the loss of identity and domestic dominance of these developing countries.     

Globalization has several advantages and at the same time disadvantages, but in my opinion the advantages of globalization exceed the disadvantages. One of the most important advantages of globalization is that it allows countries to fulfill their need of necessary supplies, which are not available domestically. One of the disadvantages of globalization is the manipulation of corporations on developing countries.

From my opinion I believe that globalization can slow down the development of developing countries because globalization supplies already made goods which makes the developing country unable to build its infrastructure or even try to improve their factories and machineries. It also threatens these developing countries to be controlled by external forces.

Corporations abuse poor countries to increase their profit on the expense of these countries, which make these countries lose their resources without benefiting from it, eventually, the depletion of these natural resources. Also, corporations made sure that they make it impossible for small domestic companies to compete with them since corporations have a better ability to purchase raw materials to control the market and thus control the prices of manufacturing good. This leads to slow down the national growth of these developing countries that don’t stand a chance of development to reach a better rank among more developed countries.     

Book report: The Diary of a Young Girl.

The Diary of a Young Girl

By: Anne Frank

Genre: Diary

The book tells about Anne Frank’s experience, hiding from the secret police of the Nazis, which was called The Gestapo. It is full of vivid details that puts you the mood as if you are actually there.

The diary was set in Holland during World War II, in an apartment hidden from view behind an old office building. Anne called it the “Secret Annexe”. The Franks family consisted of Daddy and Mummy, Margret the older sister and Anne. Another family hiding with the Franks was the Van Daans in the same hiding quarters. The Van Daan family was made up of the father, the mother and their son Peter who Anne didn’t much like at the beginning then later on they developed a crush.

 The Franks were trying to flee the Gestapo, which wanted to capture them and send them to the concentration camps where the Jews were being tortured till death. They’re hiding place was discovered and raided by the Gestapo because of her father’s friend betrayed them. Her father’s friend was called Koophuis. The whole diary was made up of letters addressed to an imaginary friend called Kitty. It was Anne’s way of relieving herself of the emotional stress. The two families were under constant fear of the threat of being discovered by the Nazis. Anne is always grateful that they had food and shelter and above all safety from tortured and murdered. She was feeling guilty for not sharing her friend’s fate and she always wished to be able to relief or help them by any means. This tells us how kind hearted and sincere person she was. She cared about others more than herself. She tried to be strong in front of her family. She pretends to laugh and let things go but at the end of the when she goes to bed and become all by herself she cries herself to sleep.

Finally, after 2 years of hiding the Gestapo discovered there was about and took them to concentration camps, which was a tragic ending. The diary was found by mere chance in the premises of their hiding.