eid shokra sa3eid!عيد الشكر سعيد

Is my badly spelled version of Happy Thanksgiving in Arabic. Yay!
Today was filled with procrastination, coffee shops, essay writing, and too much food. It was pretty amazing though.
For starters, I actually got real words written for my essay. It's amazing how two pages is almost nothing in NaNoWriMo, but seems like such a victory for a term paper. I guess that's the difference between letting whatever's in my brain out onto the page and writing something with structure and substance. I much prefer the former. Anyway, NaNo and this essay are 'due' the same day, so that should be fun.
Tonight, I had a real Thanksgiving dinner with lots of AUC friends at Maadi House, and had a great time. The food was amazing, and I wish I had gone back for more. I could eat those mashed potatoes every day, I swear.
There wasn't really the opportunity to mingle with important people from the State Department or the Embassy like most AUC kids there thought there would be. We all dressed up fancy to come to a buffet dinner that was mostly just small families. But I had a great time anyway, mostly because I was in it for the food and not the networking, although that would have been nice.
The cab ride home was ridiculously long because of traffic and getting lost, but we eventually made it. Then I came back to my room, where I Thanksgiving-Skyped with my family, including my little sister, who retains the ability to annoy me even when we're halfway around the world from each other. Then it was time for NaNo, which I have to admit, I didn't do so well on today. I'm more than a day ahead, and since I was falling asleep on my keyboard a little bit, decided to just write for a while, and not worry about the word count. Maybe I'll make up for it tomorrow when the essay writing gets tough.
NaNo word count: 43744

un-pumpkin pie

Who in their right minds would ever boil a sweet potato? Well-meaning Egyptians would, that's who. I attended the Thanksgiving lunch for American students today, with a few hundred of my closest American friends. It was a really nice effort that they made, and I had a great time. There were some interesting choices made with the food, though. Although I didn't try it, my friends reported that the sour cream was probably in fact whipped cream with salt. Most interesting of all, the much awaited for pumpkin pie very definitely contained no pumpkin whatsoever, which all of us found very confusing. Pumpkin pie spice alone does not a pumpkin pie make.
The rest of the day was fairly average. I got my new term paper topic approved by my professor, which was good, but which also means that I really do need to start actually writing it tomorrow.
Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving for reals, some friends and I are planning to accept a very generous offer that was made to us by an American club called the Maadi House. Their membership is limited to U.S. State Department employees working in Cairo, and other American diplomat types, but for Thanksgiving, they're hosting American AUC students for dinner as well, which is very exciting. I hope everything goes as planned, and it will be time for Thanksgiving number two tomorrow!
NaNo word count: 43108

coffee bean tuesday 2.0

I had a much less productive trip to Coffee Bean today than I did a few weeks ago. To start, I wasn't even done with my reading, so I couldn't get to work on my essay right away.
Then, part way through my research, I realized that the essay topic I had chosen and gotten approved wasn't really what I wanted to write about at all. I figured out a new, much more interesting topic, and plotted an outline for it.
I tried to buy a few hours of internet from Coffee Bean, but apparently they were 'out' so I had to come home to do more research. So, basically, I'm no farther along on my paper than I was this morning, but writing it will definitely be much easier now that I'm actually interested in my topic.
NaNoWriMo went amazingly today, and I wrote way more than I needed to to meet my goal, but it didn't drag on at all. Unfortunately, I pretty much know for certain now that the novel itself won't be finished when it hits 50,000 words. That's better than the alternative, I guess, but rather dramatically increases the chances that I won't ever finish it. I'm kind of thinking about skipping ahead and writing some major plot points, just to have them done and the story all tied up, so it will be easier to go back and fill in the blanks, rather than have to finish the whole story cold. I'll let you know.
Essay research and planning took up most of the day, except for the fifteen minutes or so in which I made my video for the week, and the three hundred minutes or so that video took to upload to youtube. Really, Zamalek dorms? Really?

NaNo word count: 40876