New Year's resolution!

At the beginning of every year I keep hearing people saying “a new year a new me”, honestly I believe they’re overestimating their will power and giving themselves one more reason to increase their stress level over the next few weeks which is how long a new year’s resolution lasts! I believe that we don’t need a new year to come to try and improve ourselves, everyday is a chance to change and become a better person because it’s never too late nor too early to improve, something that I’ve learned from reading Tuesday’s with Morrie.

 From my personal point of view, there’s no such thing as a new year’s resolution, people convince themselves at the beginning of each year that they will accomplish a certain goal but it’s only a matter of weeks before they forget all about it. In fact I do believe that with every year it gives us a chance to reflect on the mistakes of our past and do our best to avoid them in the future.

2011 may not have been the best year, in fact it has shown us that it is one of the worst years we’ve all been through, but as I said bad experiences is only a chance to learn and improve so I think that this past year was a good lesson for everyone but 2012 is a new start, a new chance to learn and an opportunity to achieve new personal milestones! Honestly, when our teacher informed us about this assignment, I started listing the things that I would like to improve and change, things that I’d like to see from other people. I thought about many things that I’d like to do, but since I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, I could start with baby steps, I thought I could at least make one change and stick to it, I think smiling more is absolutely necessary and easy to achieve :D

GLOBALIZATION!

Who would’ve ever thought that a 10^th grader would ever need to know what globalization is? Apparently our teacher does. Anyways, after reading this long article that I found a bit hard to understand and incredibly boring, I was able to pick up on a few things; I’m just hoping they are the important ideas. So here’s what I understood, many many years ago started this agreement between different countries that involved exchanging each countries’ best products in order to help each other rise and develop even more, basically globalization is the act of trading and exchanging products also to spread multinational companies globally! In my opinion, I believe it has more benefits than losses, on the other hand multinational companies such as junk food restaurants for example are the reason a country’s culture fades, if we take our country Egypt as an example, when a person gets hungry and they want to order take outs the first thing that pops in his head is definitely not “koshary” or any traditional meal instead they order Mcdonald’s or Hardee’s for example, the majority of people nowadays stopped eating out in Egyptian restaurants, they prefer international food! I still believe globalization is a good thing since it introduces a lot of countries about all the different cultures in the world, people aren’t surrounded by only one culture, their own. Although multinational companies take advantage of under development countries, we can’t deny the fact that they are useful and that we are benefiting from them, at the end of the day a population can’t live with only it’s own resources, they need the help of other countries’ resources and vice versa, so globalization isn’t so bad in my point of view, people can live in ignorance and obscurantism if they are not exposed to other cultures and that is exactly what globalization does! People shouldn’t be so opposed against it, at least that’s what I think.  

My winter break

During my winter break, i spent most of the time at home but the highlight of my break was at the beginning. My friends Hana and Malak and I were headed to Dahab for Malak's personal project, she needed to take photos and we went along to keep her company. It was such an amazing, peaceful and relaxing weekend in the desert. We started the trip at 7 in the morning by a fun road trip that ended us in Dahab, after a five hour drive we rested in a cafeteria for a drink then we continued our journey. The next part was the reason I went on this trip in the first place. It was THE CAMEL RIDE! At first I was scared but the ride was an hour or so eventually I had to get used to it, my camel’s name was “Saggr”, he was one of the lazy camels. After getting off the camels we were all tired to a point where we just needed to lie down and relax, but we were not there yet we then took a twenty minute ride by car to get to the lagoon where were going have dinner and sleep. We then arrived after a very bumpy road in the desert, tired and sleepy; it was such a long day! The phone services were very bad and Malak was going crazy, I myself was kind of enjoying the technology free weekend. We had a very “Bedouin” dinner and they kept serving us those mini tea cups that tasted incredibly good. Finally we took our sleeping bags and turned in. The next morning was also an early one. We started the day by trying to figure out how we were going to wash our faces and brush our teeth; we figured it out at the end! The day went on we had breakfast and got ready to complete our journey, we got back on our camels and got back to Dahab, finally we arrived in Basata, it was such an amazing place, for a minute there I think I fell in love although we had to prepare our own meals except for dinner but it was fine because I didn’t do the cooking nor wash the dishes. :D The next day we got back on the road and arrived home and it was all back to normal.