Afternoons With Teta

She reaches into the cabinet behind her and pulls out two wafer bars, one for me and one for my sister. “There you go,” she says with a smile. “Thank you teta,” we reply in unison. “But teta, you know I’m trying to watch my snacking,” I add. “Never mind, keep it. You’ll have something…

The Highlights of Our Trip to Sri Lanka- Part One

To call Sri Lanka amazing would be an understatement. There’s so much that we saw and experienced as we made our way across the island, and yet much was left for several new trips. I cannot even do this country justice by writing about our journey, so instead, I have picked some of the highlights in…

Small Talk, The Lebanese Way

Anyone who has ever engaged in small talk with a Lebanese person will know that it is an interesting sequence of events that always concludes in the same way. No matter the age group or the location or the subject at hand, the conversation shifts to a single topic like that theory that any internet…

My Top Posts From The 24th Project

Putting myself through a yearly challenge meant that I came out of it with over 400 posts. If you’ve read all of them, I’m really amazed because even I didn’t read everything that I put up here. Like I’ve said time and time again, it wasn’t easy and sometimes the posts weren’t the best, but…

You’re Doing It Wrong

Sometimes, I don’t understand the society around me. A society where a woman who is going out to dinner with three other females finds it so urgent to get hair extensions, in addition to changing her whole (already overdone) makeup in record time. I won’t even get started on the outfit. I mean, who are…

None of Your Business

Today’s random thought of the day comes in the form of yet another random stranger at work who stopped me just to ask if I was expecting. I don’t understand. Our own parents are not nagging for grandkids, even though that’s the usual route things go in Lebanon. I wish it ended there. That very…

The Wrong Idea

When someone comes up to you and asks you how marriage feels and you answer that it has been great so far, you would expect them to say something nice or stick to a formality just to get the conversation going. You would not expect them to reply that you’re only feeling that way because…

Katb Kteb Souvenirs

It’s a tradition in our culture to hand out a box with a trinket and some dragees to those in attendance. It’s just something to mark the occasion but often (much like the weddings) people will go to lengths to make it as fancy and as decorated as possible. I can’t even begin to tell…

Lest We Forget

This is the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. As you can see, it’s a pretty striking structure, and not because of the new construction right next to it or that I happened to take this shot on a rather sunny Autumn day in the German capital. It is quite remarkable because this church was…

Getting to Know Berlin

There is just too much to see and do in the German capital- we couldn’t have picked a better place to spend our honeymoon than Berlin. Like any city or place, it has its own characteristics that sets it apart from anywhere else. We are slowly discovering these from spending our time getting to know…