12 May
If there is one food that is essential to most Arabs, it is bread and nowhere is it more essential than in Cairo which I like to call the city of bread. Wherever you go, you will see bread being baked, or sold, or consumed or simply carried home a little like the ubiquitous French baguette, except that in Egypt it is aysh baladi or shami that is the national loaf. Aysh means life indicating the importance of bread — elsewhere in the Arab world bread is called khobz — while baladi means local; it describes bread made with wholewheat flour while shami which means Levantine describes bread made with regular white flour.
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2 May
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyVyRCFBKvM[/youtube]
I have a new favourite belly dancer. She will not replace Tahiya of course but I just found her on youtube and I love her. I love her perfectly formed body and her sexy yet elegant movement. And I love the mise en scene and how her gorgeous body is shot en silhouette before it appears on the stage of what must have been a very upmarket night club, in the film at least. I wonder why she never became a big star. She appeared in only a dozen films. Perhaps she married and had lots of children and decided to devote her life to them. Our loss!
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11 Feb
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5ZV8dVeF8U&feature=related[/youtube]
Everyone is celebrating in Egypt (well, not Mubarak and his cohort!!) and many must be dancing. It is a momentous day, for the Egyptians and for the rest of the Arab world. And to celebrate with the Egyptians, I am turning to one of their greatest stars and my favourite belly dancer, Tahiya Carioca. Mabruk Egypt and mabruk to the Egyptian people. You make us all proud :).
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23 Aug
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhwuwkEfwdI[/youtube]
A French friend once told me that dancing was the vertical expression of horizontal intentions. I can’t dance. So, if I need to express such intentions, I have to resort to other means! But Tahiya Carioca sure can. And the way she expresses it is beyond sexy, and without being in the least bit vulgar. The more I watch her videos, the more I wonder why I ever thought she was. It must have been my silly French convent school in Beirut that made me seriously prejudiced against belly dance then. Too bad. I missed out on seeing her in real life when I could have.