zombies, mosques, and rappers oh my!

i have already told you how i discovered firefly fanfic, now i have discovered zombie online fiction. hog heaven. oh its so good. right now i am on this website with three story trilogy about the end of the world it is a different take on the zombie genre with the zombies being all linked together in one unit. there is no mall last stand at least in the first book and there are undead mummies. totally cool you should check it out. http://www.brokentype.com/davidwellington/ if youre looking for the zombie trilogy the first one is monster island.

i went to aikido for the first time in a week after being sick. i have finally understood and accepted my place there. i am a beginner. i have realized this and happily accepted it. it has allowed me to take advice from those who have had less time in aikido than me and actually use it and appreciate. after all they have been there longer than i have. today's class was good we did a bokken class (sword) for two-two and a half hours. i have a feeling i will be getting more weapons experience than i have gotten at umbc.

i have had another cultural realization, this time about myself. I was in the pottery cafe and american style cafe where they serve good spaghetti and was planning my english class with my coteacher another american girl. its a hip place and they were playing music videos on the flatscreen tv. i was watching for a few minutes and they were playing a video by some rapper with almost naked girls dancing or dancing with each other mostly in aqua environments. i felt distinctly uncomfortable watching within myself and within the prescence of the others there both american and egyptian. back home i would be in the gym and these videoes would not bother me, either i would tune them out or watch them while working out. no problem. but here they were getting to me. i mentioned it to my coteacher and she was said she had a friend who was in morocco or maybe it was her my memory is kind of fuzzy on this but she said that when the person be it her or her friend went back to the states she saw all the girls wearing what they normally wear and thought they were dressing really scandously, slutty was the word she actually used. then she also said something about this is the kind of image being projected to the world, stuff like this in these videoes marketed to the world. that thought depressed my because to some extent it is true in that it is shown around the world but that all of my life has never been and never will be a rappers music video.

this weekend i went on a field trip with my architecture class to a cool area of cairo. we saw the mosques of al azhar (the really famous and important one to sunni islam), al aqmar (a tiny one) and al hakim (a really big but plain one). These were really cool and I love going to them. The archictecture is great and so different than what i am used to seeing when i look at churches. we also walked through khan a khalili during the day not when it was crowded or overwhelming and past the shrine for hussein at the mosque of al hussein. then we walked the streets of this area to the gates and walls of cairo. men-you would like this gates, i can think of the people that would interested that i can name them off the top of my head (pete matt alex eric steve (constantinople) mike, and many more) these walls were about two stories high and when they were built sometime in the 1000s i think they would have probably been twice as high? the ground level has risen as people keep building on top of everything. the two gates i saw were bab al futuh and bab al nasser. they were huge imposing and military fortifications. there were arrow slits and hole for pouring oil. oh and if they had strong doors and the walls around the city were still intact completely it would be good for keeping zombies out.

being on this zombie fix, i now think wherever i am, what would happen if zombies appeared. i look for weapons ways out and places to hide. it is getting to be an obsession. but the good thing is if it ever happens i may have a chance. not really though, i will just end of joining the ranks of millions of undead and then eat you. i'm hungry!

plus, as always, there were cute egyptian girls on the field trip. i talked to them a bit too (didn't mention the zombies though that might have weirded them out) oh and there are cute egyptian girls all over the city. go figure