Found this really cool infograph on MarketingHub.me:

Was just thinking about how amazing it is how the simple things can make people really happy. Here’s what made me smile today:

1. Finding a kick ass new route back home from work. I’ve been looking for an alternative route to Shmeisani that’s not Gardens Street nor Rabyeh, but all the streets that branch off Gardens seem to be deadends. Today, I finally found what I was looking for.

2. Finding Pop Tarts at Safeway, and them being REALLY yummy.

3. Eating really yummy knafeh bi2eshta.

4. Using an automatic coffee machine at home. I’ve always wanted one, though I’m pretty unpicky with my coffee. I ended up getting the wrong kind of coffee though.

5. Finding tiny hair pins at Safeway while looking for Pop Tarts. I’ve been looking for some for years, and they’re always either oversized or overpriced.

Once a blue moon, I start craving frosted Pop Tarts, with the delicious looking frosting sprinkled with the rainbow.

I can taste the stuff I used to love as a child just thinking about them, though my head reminds me that the last few times we got Pop Tarts they tasted like sugared paper stuffed with rotten fruits.

From previous musings, dated April 2006:

A few nights ago, I dreamt I was eating Pop Tarts. Pop Tarts! I haven’t had Pop Tarts since the 4th grade.

Naturally, I woke up with an extreme craving for them, and after a trip to Cozmos, I was standing in the kitchen microwaving the iced and sprinkled delicious-looking slices of pastry, stuffed with “natural” strawberry, remembering a day when I was a child sitting around the kitchen table waiting for my Pop Tart to be served. Ahh… for that precise instant, I could almost remember the sweetness of the icing (I love icing) and the juiciness of the fill.

Of course, the deliciousness of Pop Tarts turned out to be nothing more than a figment of an overfertile imagination. Or maybe Pop Tarts don’t taste the same anymore. Or maybe I’m too old for Pop Tarts. I really don’t know.

What I do know though is that they were way-too-sweet, artificially flavored to the degree that it feels like you are eating chemicals, and quite dry.

What a disappointment.

God, the most annoying thing? Everytime I want to blog about something and I start googling for references, I find that I had already blogged about this a few years back. Damn.

If you, like me, have spent a good few hours of your life zipping stuff up and down trying to figure out the mechanism of zippers, here’s a GIF you will love.

It’s a month of sightseeing. A month of cultural tourism. A month of reviving what is absolutely un-cool during the other 11 months of the year.

It’s Ramadan, and for some reason, Ramadan in popular culture is about kicking the Western lifestyle in the balls and going back a few hundred years in our own lifestyle. It’s about drinking too much amardeen, giggling at grown men wearing clogs while they serve nargilehs, and weird ass tents with fortune tellers discovering the future through cups of Turkish coffee.

Middle Eastern cities themselves turn into Vegas-like Arabian-Nights themed spaces. Amman, for example, shines with the (neon) lights of a million lanterns, imported from China, hanging from every window. The restaurants and coffeeshops adjust their menus and decorations to go with the Ramadan theme of hard-core Arabic food (I love how the really funky and kitschy silks, coppers, and woods make an appearance every year, only to be put away). Supermarkets and malls turn into souqs, suddenly providing certain goodies, like atayef, that are not available during the rest of the year. Entertainment too is affected, as you can see from long running shows that look at the dark ages of our civilization with longing eyes (Bab El-Hara being a good example), or crappy plays that are suddenly the funniest thing in the world.

It’s so fascinating, because Ramadan seems to be that time of the year when the Muslim world decides to go through an intra-cultural tourism trip, way back in time. We become our own tourists, consuming our own culture with blind enthusiasm, sans the historical guidebooks and the pleasures of witnessing that which is new.

Mind you, I am not complaining, though I must admit that I find it really annoying that all restaurants – whether Chinese, Italian, or junk – suddenly serve the same “Ramadan menu” of jallab, stuffed lamb, and 3osmaleyi. My taste buds and visual preferences aside, the cultural tourism aspect of Ramadan is something to think about.

On Facebook.

My grandmother (in white) and my aunt (in black).