#big islamic wall clock

[lingshanhermit]

Lingshan Hermit: They Have Always Been Exploring the World in a Clumsy Way

Mathematics originated in ancient Babylon, physics in ancient Greek philosophy, and chemistry in medieval Islamic alchemy, later developed and expanded by Europeans. Thus, some say that mathematics, physics, and chemistry were all invented by Westerners, considering this a symbol of Western civilization's advancement. I have always believed that the emergence of physics and various inventions in the West is unrelated to their intelligence or advancement, but directly linked to their values, cognitive systems, and lack of quicker methods to understand the universe. In my view, Western society has been exploring the world in a clumsy way since the time of Thales in ancient Greece. Using this clumsy method to explore the world, they gradually derived mathematics, physics, and chemistry, yet even today, they have not truly understood the rules and reality of the universe.

Physics tries to understand the laws governing the world by observing phenomena, summarizing the world's rules through one phenomenon and experiment after another. However, this approach lacks the ability to see the big picture, and the scope of observation is very limited. Often, their observations are confined to the realm of tangible matter. Therefore, they cannot understand invisible qi, cannot comprehend magic, and even less can they understand miracles. All of these are attributed by them to illusions and delusions from humanity's ignorant period.

Most people do not realize that all conclusions of modern physics are only temporary. So when many people discuss scientific conclusions, they don't know that what they're talking about are just temporary conclusions, merely the current understanding of the scientific community. They treat these as final conclusions. But if those were truly final conclusions, physicists would no longer need to work.

Unlike the ancient Europeans, the ancient sages of China and India also observed the laws of the universe and explored the reality of the universe and their own minds, but the methods they used were vastly different from those European counterparts. They started from investigating things and extending knowledge, beginning with the inner mind. The pioneers of exploring truth in ancient China didn't need laboratories, petri dishes, or large electron colliders; sometimes they might only need a meditation cushion. Through meditation and observing the inner mind, they gradually discovered the rules of the universe, found that everything is cause and effect, discovered the invisible connections between all things that cannot be seen with the naked eye, found that nothing is as we imagine or define it, and discovered the eternal rules of the universe. So if you have the right lineage and teachings, and you can practice correctly, with strong determination and perseverance, you might understand reality in just ten or twenty years. The difference between this approach and the Western approach is this: The Eastern way is like curing a blind person and letting them see with their eyes; in an instant, everything in the room can be seen clearly - the sofa is on the left, the clock is on the wall, a black cat is lying in the corner of the room. So you know where the door is, where the hallway is, and where the cat is. The Western way of exploring the universe's rules is like a blind person stumbling around the room, groping. You must reach out and repeatedly feel your way forward, guessing what it is after touching it. It's an enormously huge house with millions of items. And they've only just touched a few. Usually, what we call physics, chemistry, and mathematics are the products of Western society in this groping process. Some have said that Chinese society hasn't given birth to science in thousands of years, which is like criticizing a person with good eyesight for not using a white cane or walking on a tactile paving.

The exploration of India and China, being entirely based on personal experience and occurring completely within the mind, is unknown to outsiders, and the results of exploration are too special to be replicated and verified in a laboratory. If you really want to replicate it, you must find a true teacher, then accept their teaching and training, and spend decades or even many lifetimes to verify. So this is much, much more difficult than replicating an experiment in a laboratory. Moreover, for ordinary people, the realms of those who have attained enlightenment are too lofty, and their writings are completely mysterious to ordinary people, so it's hard to be recognized by the general public. Also, in the Eastern-style exploration process, there won't be by-products like cars, electric fans, or vitamin B that can bring practical benefits. Many explorers don't appear successful; some even live by begging. From the perspective of ordinary people, their exploration seems to be of no help to their own lives. The achievements of Western-style exploration, on the other hand, are the kind that can be seen and verified by ordinary people. After all, compared to a dryer, the merit of dedicating one's practice is not so intuitive.

The Western exploration was initially also to understand the world, but later they discovered a huge gold mine in the process of exploration, finding something more attractive than truth. So although many respectable scientists are still persevering, many research purposes have shifted towards pragmatism and commercial interests. Today, most people don't care about what the laws of the universe are (although this is closely related to each of them; if you don't understand the rules of the universe, don't understand how the world operates, even if you can earn a mountain of gold, it will be emptied overnight). They care about practical issues like how to lose weight, how to retire, how to profit from this AI wave.

That being said, although I think their method is not smart, it doesn't prevent me from respecting their exploration and achievements, doesn't prevent me from respecting the pioneers of Western physics, because what they did is also one of humanity's efforts to understand the universe. And even if their method is not smart, it has to some extent touched the edge of truth, which provides the best corroboration for the Dharma.

Written by Lingshan Hermit on October 7, 2024. First published on October 9, 2024.

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灵山居士：他们一直都是在用一种笨笨的方法在探索世界

数学最早起源于古代巴比伦，物理学起源于古希腊的哲学家，而化学则起源于中世纪伊斯兰的炼金术，后来在欧洲人手上发展壮大。所以有人说数学物理化学都是西方人发明的，并且以此认为这就是西方文明先进的象征。我一直都认为物理学和各种发明创造之所以会出现在西方和他们聪明与否先进与否无关，但是与他们的价值观、与他们的认知体系、与他们缺少更快捷认知宇宙的方法有直接关联。在我看来，西方社会从古希腊泰勒斯时期开始就一直都在用一种笨笨的方法在探索世界。他们用这种笨笨的方法探索世界，所以就慢慢衍生出了数学物理学和化学，而且至今他们也没有真正了解宇宙的规则和实相。

物理学通过观察现象来了解世界运行的规律，他通过一个又一个现象和实验来总结世界的规律。但这种方式缺乏综观全局的能力，而且观测范围非常有限，很多时候他们的观察只限于有实体的物质领域。所以他们无法理解看不见的气，无法理解魔法，更加无法理解神迹。所有这些都被他们归结为人类蒙昧时期的幻觉和妄想。

大多数人并不了解现代物理学的所有结论都只是暂时性的结论。所以很多人在谈论科学结论的时候并不知道他们所谈论的那些只是暂时性结论，只是科学界到目前为止的暂时认知。他们会把它当作最终结论来谈论。但如果那真的是最终的结论，物理学家们就不需要继续工作了。

和古代欧洲人不同的是，中国和印度的古代圣贤也在观察宇宙的法则，也在探索宇宙和自心的实相，但是他们所使用的方法却和那帮欧洲人大相径庭。他们是从格物致知开始，从内心下手，中国古代探索真理的先驱们不需要实验室，不需要培养皿，也不需要大型电子对撞机，有时候他们可能只需要一个蒲团。经由禅定和观察内心，他们慢慢发现了宇宙的规则，发现了一切都是因缘果，发现了万事万物之间那些肉眼看不见的关联，发现了没有任何事物是我们所想像所定义的样子，发现了宇宙永恒的规则。所以如果你有正确的传承和教授，而你又能正确修行，凭借强大的决心和毅力可能十几二十年就能了解实相。这种方式和西方人方式差别在于：东方的方式就象是治好了一个眼盲的人让他用眼睛去看，屋子里的一切一瞬间就都能看的清清楚楚，沙发在左边，闹钟在墙上，屋子的角落里卧着一只黑色的猫。所以你知道门在哪儿，知道过道在哪儿，也知道猫在哪儿。而西方探索宇宙规则的方式就像是一个瞎子在屋里跌跌撞撞地乱摸，你必须伸着手反复试探着往前摸索，摸到之后再去猜那是什么。那是一间巨大无比的宅子，有上千万件物品。而他只是刚摸到了几件而已。通常我们所说的物理学化学和数学就是西方社会在这个摸索过程中的产物。以前有人说中国社会几千年没有诞生过科学，这就像是指责一个眼睛完好的人不走盲道不用白手杖一样。

印度和中国的探索由于完全是基于个人的体验，探索过程也完全发生在内心，所以外人不得而知，而探索成果也因为过于特���而不可能被实验室所复制和验证。如果你真的要复制，你就必须寻找一位真正的老师，然后接受他的教授和训练，花上几十年甚至很多辈子来验证。所以这比在实验室里复制一个实验的难度大得多得多。而且对于普通人来说，那些证悟者的境界太过高远，他们的著作对普通人来说完全就是个谜，所以很难为普罗大众所认可。而且在东方式的探索过程中不会出现如汽车电风扇维生素B之类可以带来现实利益的副产品。很多探索者看起来并不成功，他们有些甚至以乞讨为生。从普通人的角度来看，他们的探索对自己的生活毫无帮助。而西方式的探索所取得的成绩则是那种可以被普通人看到和验证的。毕竟，和烘干机相比，回向的功德并不那么直观。

西方人的探索最初也是为了了解世界，但是后来他们在探索过程中发现了巨大的金矿，发现了比真理更具吸引力的东西，所以虽然很多可敬的科学家还在坚持，但是很多研究的目的已经偏向于实用主义和商业利益。在今天大多数人完全不关心什么是宇宙的规律（虽然这和他们每个人都息息相关，搞不清楚宇宙的规则、搞不清楚世界是如何运行的，即便你能挣到一座金山，也会在一夜之间被搬空。），他们关心的是如何减肥如何养老如何在这波AI浪潮中获利这样的现实问题。

话虽如此，虽然我认为他们的方法并不聪明，但并不妨碍我尊重他们的探索和成果、不妨碍我尊重西方物理学的先驱，因为他们所做的事情也是人类为了解宇宙而做的努力之一。而且即便他们的方法不聪明也在某种程度上触摸到了真理的边缘，这为佛法提供了最好的佐证。

灵山居士写于2024年10月7日。首发于2024年10月9日。

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 8.15 (after 1960)

1960 – Republic of the Congo (Brazzaville) becomes independent from France. 1961 – Border guard Conrad Schumann flees from East Germany while on duty guarding the construction of the Berlin Wall. 1962 – James Joseph Dresnok defects to North Korea after running across the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Dresnok died in 2016. 1963 – Execution of Henry John Burnett, the last man to be hanged in Scotland. 1963 – President Fulbert Youlou is overthrown in the Republic of the Congo, after a three-day uprising in the capital. 1965 – The Beatles play to nearly 60,000 fans at Shea Stadium in New York City, an event later regarded as the birth of stadium rock. 1969 – The Woodstock Music & Art Fair opens in Bethel, New York, featuring some of the top rock musicians of the era. 1970 – Patricia Palinkas becomes the first woman to play professionally in an American football game. 1971 – President Richard Nixon completes the break from the gold standard by ending convertibility of the United States dollar into gold by foreign investors. 1971 – Bahrain gains independence from the United Kingdom. 1973 – Vietnam War: The USAF bombing of Cambodia ends. 1974 – Yuk Young-soo, First Lady of South Korea, is killed during an apparent assassination attempt upon President Park Chung Hee. 1975 – Bangladeshi leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is killed along with most members of his family during a military coup. 1975 – Takeo Miki makes the first official pilgrimage to Yasukuni Shrine by an incumbent prime minister on the anniversary of the end of World War II. 1976 – SAETA Flight 232 crashes into the Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador, killing all 59 people on board; the wreckage is not discovered until 2002. 1977 – The Big Ear, a radio telescope operated by Ohio State University as part of the SETI project, receives a radio signal from deep space; the event is named the "Wow! signal" from the notation made by a volunteer on the project. 1984 – The Kurdistan Workers' Party in Turkey starts a campaign of armed attacks upon the Turkish Armed Forces with an attack on police and gendarmerie bases in Şemdinli and Eruh. 1985 – Signing of the Assam Accord, an agreement between representatives of the Government of India and the leaders of the Assam Movement to end the movement. 1989 – China Eastern Airlines Flight 5510 crashes after takeoff from Shanghai Hongqiao International Airport, killing 34 of the 40 people on board. 1995 – In South Carolina, Shannon Faulkner becomes the first female cadet matriculated at The Citadel (she drops out less than a week later). 1995 – Tomiichi Murayama, Prime Minister of Japan, releases the Murayama Statement, which formally expresses remorse for Japanese war crimes committed during World War II. 1998 – Northern Ireland: Omagh bombing takes place; 29 people (including a woman pregnant with twins) killed and some 220 others injured. 1998 – Apple introduces the iMac computer. 1999 – Beni Ounif massacre in Algeria: Some 29 people are killed at a false roadblock near the Moroccan border, leading to temporary tensions with Morocco. 2005 – Israel's unilateral disengagement plan to evict all Israelis from the Gaza Strip and from four settlements in the northern West Bank begins. 2005 – The Helsinki Agreement between the Free Aceh Movement and the Government of Indonesia was signed, ending almost three decades of fighting. 2007 – An 8.0-magnitude earthquake off the Pacific coast devastates Ica and various regions of Peru killing 514 and injuring 1,090. 2013 – The Smithsonian announces the discovery of the olinguito, the first new carnivorous species found in the Americas in 35 years. 2015 – North Korea moves its clock back half an hour to introduce Pyongyang Time, 81⁄2 hours ahead of UTC. 2021 – Kabul falls into the hands of the Taliban as Ashraf Ghani flees Afghanistan along with local residents and foreign nationals, effectively reestablishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

[shophupwallartuk]

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[newstfionline]

Monday, August 16, 2021

U.S. Air Force veteran comforts children plagued by gun violence (Reuters) Like many cities across the United States, Washington has seen a spike in shooting-related deaths during the pandemic. Homicides were up 19% in 2020 compared to 2019, according to the Washington Metropolitan Police Department. This month’s data shows that the city has already clocked more cases than at the same time last year. “It’s like a war zone. It’s like being in the military,” Jawanna Hardy said. Frustrated by the senseless loss of life, Hardy, an Air Force veteran and now a 34-year-old high school English teacher, launched ‘Guns Down Friday,’ an outreach program to support neighborhoods plagued by gun violence—including the one she has lived in since childhood. She has raised money for shooting victims’ gravestones, advocated for more streetlights, and trained people how to treat bullet wounds themselves. She drives her van—adorned with photos of young gun violence victims—through the streets to greet youngsters. On a recent Friday, she arrived with water balloons. “Put your guns down and pick your water balloons up!” Hardy cried through a megaphone as children outside an apartment complex in southeast Washington laughed and scrambled to drench one another. She knows her Friday night street parties will not stop gun violence but hopes they can at least provide children a brief respite from the constant fear in which many live.

Haitians scramble to rescue survivors from ruins of major quake (Reuters) Haitians labored overnight to pick through shattered buildings in search of friends and relatives trapped in the rubble after a devastating earthquake struck the Caribbean country on Saturday, killing 1,297 people and injuring at least 5,700 more. The 7.2 magnitude quake flattened hundreds of homes in the impoverished country, which is still clawing its way back from another major temblor here 11 years ago, and has been without a head of state since the assassination of its president last month. Churches, hotels, hospitals and schools were badly damaged or destroyed, while the walls of a prison were rent open by the violent shudders that convulsed Haiti. Access to the worst-hit areas was complicated by a deterioration in law and order that has left key access roads in parts of Haiti in the hands of gangs, although unconfirmed reports on social media suggested they would let aid pass.

Want to stay long term in France? First come the classes on how to be French. (Washington Post) In France, la vie en rose comes wrapped in red tape. Foreigners hoping to stay here long term must sign an “integration contract” and agree to uphold French values. The contract requires four days of civic education, yet what’s taught is more akin to a government crash course in how to be French. There are discussions about Marianne—the symbolic embodiment of the French Republic—and about classical culinary dishes, such as duck confit and escargot. France 101 covers both the cultural (how to visit museums) as well as the practical (how to navigate the national health-care system). The classes, plus language lessons for anyone whose fluency doesn’t measure up, help determine whether an applicant gets a multiyear visa. Every year, an average of 100,000 people take the courses, in cities across the country. The contemporary agreement explicitly states that receiving an extended residency visa is conditional on abiding by its terms, a key one being deference to French values. After an applicant signs the document, the language test is administered and 24 hours of classes scheduled.

Taliban sweep into Afghan capital after government collapses (AP) The Taliban swept into Afghanistan’s capital Sunday after the government collapsed and the embattled president joined an exodus of his fellow citizens and foreigners, signaling the end of a costly two-decade U.S. campaign to remake the country. Heavily armed Taliban fighters fanned out across the capital, and several entered Kabul’s abandoned presidential palace. Suhail Shaheen, a Taliban spokesman and negotiator, told The Associated Press that the militants would hold talks in the coming days aimed at forming an “open, inclusive Islamic government.” Kabul was gripped by panic. Helicopters raced overhead throughout the day to evacuate personnel from the U.S. Embassy. Smoke rose near the compound as staff destroyed important documents, and the American flag was lowered. Several other Western missions also prepared to pull their people out. Fearful that the Taliban could reimpose the kind of brutal rule that all but eliminated women’s rights, Afghans rushed to leave the country, lining up at cash machines to withdraw their life savings. The desperately poor—who had left homes in the countryside for the presumed safety of the capital—remained in parks and open spaces throughout the city. Many people watched in disbelief as helicopters landed in the U.S. Embassy compound to take diplomats to a new outpost at the airport. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected comparisons to the U.S. pullout from Vietnam.

From hubris to humiliation: America’s warrior class contends with the abject failure of its Afghanistan project (Washington Post) Twenty years ago, when the twin towers and the Pentagon were still smoldering, there was a sense among America’s warrior and diplomatic class that history was starting anew for the people of Afghanistan and much of the Muslim world. “For you and us, history starts today,” then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage told his Pakistani counterparts. Earlier this month, as the Taliban raced across Afghanistan, retired Lt. Col. Jason Dempsey, a two-time veteran of the war, stumbled across Armitage’s words. To Dempsey, the sentiment was “the most American thing I’ve ever heard” and emblematic of the hubris and ignorance that he and so many others brought to the losing war. “We assumed the rest of the world saw us as we saw ourselves,” he said. “And we believed that we could shape the world in our image using our guns and our money.” Both assumptions ignored Afghan culture, politics and history. Both, he said, were tragically wrong. Michèle Flournoy, one of the architects of President Barack Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan in 2010, said, “In retrospect, the United States and its allies got it really wrong from the very beginning. The bar was set based on our democratic ideals, not on what was sustainable or workable in an Afghan context.” Flournoy acknowledged in hindsight that the mistake was compounded across Republican and Democratic administrations, which continued with almost equal fervor to pursue goals that ran counter to decades—if not centuries—of the Afghan experience.

Afghanistan’s collapse leaves allies questioning U.S. resolve on other fronts (Washington Post) The Taliban's stunningly swift advances across Afghanistan have sparked global alarm, reviving doubts about the credibility of U.S. foreign policy promises and drawing harsh criticisms even from some of the United States' closest allies. And many around the world are wondering whether they could rely on the United States to fulfill long-standing security commitments stretching from Europe to East Asia. "Whatever happened to 'America is back'?" said Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the Defense Committee in the British Parliament. "People are bewildered that after two decades of this big, high-tech power intervening, they are withdrawing and effectively handing the country back to the people we went in to defeat," Ellwood said. "This is the irony. How can you say America is back when we're being defeated by an insurgency armed with no more than [rocket-propelled grenades], land mines and AK-47s?" As much as its military capabilities, the United States' decades-old role as a defender of democracies and freedoms is again in jeopardy, said Rory Stewart, who was Britain's minister for international development in the Conservative government of Theresa May. "The Western democracy that seemed to be the inspiration for the world, the beacon for the world, is turning its back," Stewart said. Rivals of the United States also have expressed dismay. Among them is China, which fears that the ascent of an extremist Islamist government on its western border will foster unrest in the adjoining province of Xinjiang, where Beijing has waged sweeping crackdowns on the Uyghur population that have been denounced by the West. The United States' Arab allies, which have long counted on the U.S. military to come to their aid in the event of an attack by Iran, also have faced questions over whether they will be able to rely on the United States.

Torrential rains lash wide areas of Japan, three feared dead after landslide (Reuters) Torrential rain lashed much of Japan on Sunday, flooding roads and buildings in the western part of the country, while three people were feared dead after a landslide in central Nagano prefecture. Large parts of Japan, particularly the southernmost main island of Kyushu, have seen record levels of rainfall, causing rivers to overflow and triggering landslides. While the rain had stopped in much of Kyushu as of Sunday morning, Tokyo and other parts of the country were pounded by the downpour. Japan “will continue to face conditions in which a large-scale disaster could occur at anytime, anywhere,” Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said at a ministerial meeting on Sunday. He called on local municipalities and relevant organisations to cooperate and act with speed on rescue missions and aid.

More military personnel deployed to enforce Sydney Covid restrictions as entire state locks down (CNN) Additional Australian military personnel will be deployed to enforce tighter Covid-19 restrictions in the greater Sydney area next week, authorities announced Saturday, as the entire state of New South Wales (NSW) prepares to go under lockdown. Stay at home orders will be applied across the country’s most populous state, with people only permitted to leave home to shop for essentials, receive medical care, outdoor exercise with one other person, and work if residents cannot work from home. Schooling will also be moved back online. Sydney, the capital of NSW, has been under lockdown measures for more than seven weeks now, and they will likely be extended further; they were set to end on August 28 but the state government has indicated restrictions will remain through September.

Fuel explosion in Lebanon kills 28, wounding dozens (AP) A warehouse where fuel was illegally stored exploded in northern Lebanon early Sunday, killing at least 28 people and injuring 79 more in the latest tragedy to hit the Mediterranean country in the throes of a devastating economic and political crisis. It was not immediately clear what caused the explosion near the border with Syria. Fuel smuggling operations have been ongoing for months. The Lebanese Red Cross said a fuel tanker exploded and its teams recovered 28 bodies from the site in the border village of Tleil. In a statement, it said it evacuated 79 people who were injured or suffered burns in the blast. Hours after the blast, Lebanese Red Cross members were still searching the area for more victims as Lebanese soldiers cordoned the area.

'Once the best in the Middle East,' Beirut hospital pleads for fuel as it faces shutdown (The Week) A once-famed Beirut hospital is now pleading for international aid to avoid running out of essential resources. The American University of Beirut Medical Center in Beirut, Lebanon, is making an urgent appeal to the United Nations and its specialized agencies, the World Health Organization and the U.N. Children's Fund, to supply the hospital with fuel before it's forced to shut down by Monday. Lebanon is mired in an economic and political crisis, and the nationwide fuel shortage is currently the most dire consequence. That's perhaps most clearly reflected in the plight of AUBMC, which said 40 adults and 15 children living on respirators would die immediately and many other patients will be at great risk if the shutdown is not avoided. The medical center said it's been rationing fuel and electricity for weeks, but is running out of both. Liz Sly, The Washington Post's Beirut bureau chief, notes that the American University hospital "was once the best" in the entire Middle East region; the announcement shows that the country is "truly heading to disaster," she writes.

[travelmalaysiakualalumpur]

Kuala Lumpur Heritage walking tour

KUALA LUMPUR is such a historically rich Metropolitan city despite its young age, about 165 years old, compared to many major cities around the world. It’s yesteryears had interesting sagas, full of ups and downs. So you need a local to tell the local story. Local tour guide Johnson was born about 3 Km radius from independence square and his father was a paper boy in China town area so I have something personal to share.

Buy or DIY

My city KL with it’s river banks Klang and Gombak is the capital of Malaysia. When you are in my tours, you may feel like the pass has come to present. If you want to buy any souvenir I can suggest DIY Malaysian batik.  

Free walk ceased 

KL City Hall formally had conducted Free Heritage Guided Tours of Dataran Merdeka but it was discontinued but no worries JohnsonMalaysia is Heritage guide for Kuala Lumpur city Hall and I was one of the guide for OLD KL walk hence by GOD’s mercy and grace my team and I’m glad to do the tour for you but there is a reasonable value for money, fee.

The British enclave

Dataran Merdeka or independence square in English is an iconic attraction in the city, people do self guided tour but may not be able get more broader view of this great building’s background. If walls have mouth they can many stories so we guides become something like their mouth piece Ha ha. The buildings here aged over 100 years most of the buildings were constructed in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, with a blend of Moorish, Tudor, Neo-Gothic and Islamic architectural. The styles have stories to spare here… like Eskimo want to live in Sahara desert that but using Igloo it may sound to much but something like that, by the way there is a great middle Eastern restaurant called Sahara Tent in KL Jalan Ampang.

The Sultan Abdul Samad Building

This is the same or more in fame like Petronas Twin towers today back then. My grand pa’s department was in the building according to my mom. He was a simple man but with very interesting job that does not exist anymore. The Grand building was constructed between 1894 and 1897, it is the good example of Moghul architecture with other added element, not forget, KL have our own BIG BEN. The 41m high clock tower. The Ministry of Information, Communications and Culture, is using. The highest Courts was here. Now moved at Putrajaya in Palace of Justice some 18 years ago.

Old City Hall built about 1896

The Old City Hall, today we call it Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur (DBKL), built in 1896. She a beautiful building stands out from other buildings with its black Domes and interesting roofline and arches. On one, it is the Theatre used to play Kuala Lumpur history called MUD but since there is major renovation is going conjunction with River of Life (ROL) project. When it’s reopened, she is going to be one of the most beautiful classic ladies in City.

The Government Printing Office

John Russell a typical gentleman with flawless printing typeset arrangement skills. I really respect him for the contribution to Selangor history documentation but not forgetting others like Pascal. His moustache is like bicycle handle shape. He was planner and inspired the interior of this building. Built in 1898 to meet the printing needs for British Malaya Administration. Government reports, official government books and even train tickets were printed here. Today, it is called the KL City Gallery with I love KL signage for memorable picturesque shots.

Federated Malay States FMS Railway Station 1905

This building is fashioned like bandage with blood, alternating red bricks and white plaster bands and who will believe the railway track was until here. The building today houses the National Textile Museum if you love Batik book about tour for batik painting with JohnsonMalaysia.com

The Cathedral of St Mary 1895

This is the first brick church in the Federated Malay States and it is also one of the oldest Anglican churches in the area. It was reconstructed in English Gothic style by A C Norman. The church’s pipe organ is a masterpiece from 1895 built by one of the greatest organ makers, Henry Willis-and it functions well after restoration even survived Kuala Lumpur floods.  Check out one of JohnsonMalaysia article later for pipe organ in Penang restored church of Assumption.

Victorian Fountain

The fountain, estimated to be more than 100 years old, was brought in from England and assembled in Kuala Lumpur, it features lovely Art Nouveau, tile work it was put as memorial for a fine Police inspector Steve Harper.

Guy don’t forget if coming to Malaysian in any Malaysia tour Package to contact JohnsonMalaysia for memorable heritage tour, be a traveller not a pass byers in the OLD KL. Bye

EARLY ANGLICAN CHURCH, KL CITY GALLERY TOUR, KL MUST DO CITY TOUR, KL TOUR, KUALA LUMPU TOUR PACKAGE, KUALA LUMPUR HERITAGE WALK, MUST DO TOUR IN KL, ROL, ST MARY CATHEDRAL KUALA LUMPUR, TALLEST FLAG POLE IN THE WORLD 

[roundtheworldrambles]

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Day 144 – Singapore to Kuala Lumpur

My final day in Singapore was packed with life-admin, complete with many visa arrangements, accommodation, ferry and flight bookings for the rest of my time in South East Asia. I bounced around the little shops in Chinatown, picking up everything from a replacement tripod and medications, to Tiger Balm for my still-recovering knee. I figured this was a good time to stock up on the essentials before I began hostel hopping through Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam over the following 7 weeks. After a final hawker centre meal, I packed up my bag and headed back to Changi Airport, boarding a 7:30pm Air Asia Flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

After a short, 1-hour flight North, I arrived in KL in the early evening, easily passing through customs and boarding the metro from KL Sentral to Pasar Seni. Arriving in Chinatown after dark, I headed to my nearby hostel, Mingle, which had come highly recommend to me from a fellow traveller I had met in Morocco. The air in Kuala Lumpur was thick with humidity, and I was immediately drenched with sweat after only a few minutes of walking. Even after dark, the pre-war architecture of Chinatown was fascinating. Multi storied shophouses were on every corner - some tastefully restored and painted, some weather-beaten and water stained. Large flickering billboards hung over the streets. It also felt like a neighbourhood that never sleeps! Restaurant and bar customers spilled out into the streets, sitting on bright plastic stools and eating at low tables set up on the sidewalks. My hostel for the next 3 nights, Mingle, was in a historic building, the white walls streaked with black stains, having weathered years of colonial rule and World War 2. Inside, the hostel itself had been tastefully refurbished, while also keeping many of the historic touches from the century-old original construction. I immediately crashed for the night on arrival, gearing up for a busy few days of travelling around the lively capital of Malaysia.

Mingle Hostel in Chinatown

Day 145 – Kuala Lumpur and Batu Caves

Enjoying breakfast on the rooftop terrace of my hostel, I met Jannes, a German traveller who had also recently arrived in KL. Since we were both planning on heading to the Batu Caves that day, we joined forces, hailing a Grab (Asia’s counterpart to Uber) and setting out to our destination, 30 minutes north of the city. It was fascinating to get a sense of the scale of Kuala Lumpur as we drove – the greater city area - called the Klang Valley - is home to over 7.5 million people, and is one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in Southeast Asia, both in population and economic power. The Malaysian capital is also known for its multicultural population, made up primarily of Malay, Indian and Chinese residents – resulting in a fusion of cultures and religions, vibrant events and festivities, and incredible local cuisine.

Streets of Kuala Lumpur

The morning sun was already furiously beating down as we arrived at the Batu Caves, located in a large limestone hill. This 100-year-old Hindu temple is an important religious landmark, with three massive, naturally formed limestone caves which have been turned into shrines.  As we approached the entry gate and took in the massive limestone hill, I caught sight of the colossal, gold statue of the Hindu deity Murugan, towering 140 feet high in front of the staircase leading to the caves. Passing underneath the statue, we began to ascend the 272 steps towards the grottoes. Hundreds of curious macaque monkeys scampered around the limestone cliffs and darted along the stairs next to us. We kept our belongings close to us – as these monkeys are notorious pickpockets!

Macaque Monkeys

Arriving at the top of the stairs, we entered the gigantic, limestone cavern, with craggy rock formations hanging from the vaulted ceiling, and smaller crevices and caverns leading away from the main “Cathedral Cave”. We spent the next hour wandering through the enormous caves, scattered with numerous Hindu shrines, dedicated to different deities. Swirling plumes of incense followed us as we wandered along.  The towering limestone ceilings had a few large holes, letting in the sun and illuminating the caves in a mesmerizing way.  The caves were a truly impressive sight.  

Batu Caves

Jannes and I hailed another Grab for a ride back into the city, ready to tuck into to a delicious Malaysian lunch. We were directed to the nearby Old China Café – a cosy Peranakan café serving delicious Chinese Malay dishes such as Char Kuey Teow (flat noodle stir-fry), Lemak Nenas (pineapple prawn curry), Teh Tarik (a hot milk tea prepared with condensed milk), blue coconut rice, and Nasi Lemak (a dish cooked in a pandan leaf with coconut milk). My first venture into Malaysian cuisine certainly did not disappoint – with Malaysia ultimately ending up being my favourite country for food throughout all of my travels!

Returning to our hostel, we met up with other travellers Jannes had previously befriended– Bart from Brussels, Caroline from London, and Egle, a true citizen of the world, who had lived across Europe, Shanghai, and was in the process of moving to Byron Bay to study yoga. In the afternoon, Jannes, Bart and I set out to explore Chinatown. We first visited Sri Mahamariamman Temple, the oldest Hindu temple in Kuala Lumpur. A ornate, 5-tiered Gopuram tower rose above the entrance, sculpted with colourful depictions of numerous Hindu deities. Taking off our shoes, we wandered the edge of the main prayer hall, quietly taking in the relaxed atmosphere and colourful murals while trying not to disturb the worshippers.

We continued onwards to Petaling Street Market. Formerly the location of a tapioca mill, modern-day Petaling street is a flea market, chock-a-block with shops, food stalls, selling everything under the sun – fake branded items, Malaysian cuisine, fishmongers, souvenirs, and local goods. At night, the whole area transforms into a vibrant night market, with vendors selling countless discount items for only a few Ringgits. Heading a few blocks over, we walked through Central Market, also known as Pasar Seni, which is a handicrafts market, and the former location of a wet market. We spend some time poking around the different stores, with items such as batik prints, paintings and Chinese herbs, to palmistry booths and pearl vendors from Malaysian Borneo.

Sultan Abdul Samad Building

Leaving the markets behind, we walked along the banks of the Klang and Gombak rivers, taking in the spectacular architecture along our way – in particular the Sultan Abdul Samad Building, a 1800s heritage building which originally housed the offices of the British colonial administration prior to Malaysia’s independence in 1957. The long building hosts several impressive architectural features, from onion-shaped copper domes and dozens of pink and white bricked archways, to spiral staircases and a central clock-tower designed to echo London’s Big Ben.

At the confluence of the two rivers sits the Masjid Jamek of Kuala Lumpur, a century-old mosque. Built with red brick and marble, the striking designs of the mosque incorporates Moorish and north Indian Islamic architecture.

Masjid Jamek of Kuala Lumpur

As we continued along the river, we became gradually more fatigued from the overpowering heat, finally stopping for a cold Angkor beer on a covered patio. Relaxing in the shade, we recharged our batteries before heading back to our hostel, meeting up with Caroline. Our group headed out for dinner in Chinatown, sitting on tiny red stools along the sidewalk and sharing Malaysian dishes, including Hokkien Fried Noodles, Beef Char Kuey Teow, and even trying a Fried Frog and Ginger dish! For my second meal out – I continued to be blown away by how good Malaysian food was.

As night fell, we haggled with a taxi and caught a ride to Kuala Lumpur’s City Centre, (or “KLCC”), the modern epicentre of the city, complete with futuristic skyscrapers, office towers, upscale shopping centres, luxury hotels and dining. The most famous landmarks in the centre of KLCC are the Petronas Twin Towers, 88-storey buildings with a bridge joining the towers at the 41st and 42nd floors. At night, the towers are lit up, giving them a dazzling, spaceship-like aura.

Petronas Towers

We walked to KLCC park, a 50-acre garden with man-made lakes and fountains, located directly across from the twin towers. We were just on time to catch the final musical fountain show, where fountain displays are choreographed to music and lights, set against KLCC’s impressive skyline.

Capping off a busy day in Kuala Lumpur, our group of four headed back to Chinatown, where we set up camp at our hostel’s rooftop cocktail bar, swapping stories late into the night.

Day 146 – Kuala Lumpur

Given the overpowering heat from the day before, Caroline, Bart and I decided to go on the hunt for a rooftop pool for a day of R&R. We were lucky that Mingle had a sister hostel – Sky Society, and our host was able to get us passes to the rooftop pool on the 37th floor for free. Not quite knowing what to expect, we jumped in a Grab and headed out of Chinatown to the neighbourhood of Putra, packing a lunch, towels and drinks for the day. After going through many layers of security, (where we were certain we would be turned away!), we finally made it to the rooftop infinity pool. Considering we hadn’t paid for anything aside from our transit, I was stunned by the city view along the horizon. We had a perfect view of the Petronas Twin Towers, The Menara Tower, and the distant hills beyond the city limits. We jokingly told ourselves that we had found the backpackers’ answer to Marina Bay Sands! We spent the remainder of the afternoon soaking up the sun and plunging in the pool to cool off, all while admiring KL’s impressive skyline.

In the late afternoon, we boarded a train back to Chinatown, showering and changing before heading out for another streetside dinner of delicious Malaysian food. As the evening fell, we caught a Grab to Heli Lounge Bar, located next to the Menara Tower. Heli Lounge Bar is essentially a fully functional helicopter pad by day, which at night converts into the coolest rooftop bar I have ever seen. Unbelievably, there was nothing by retractable rope separating us from the edge of the helipad, and we had unobstructed, 360-degree views of the surrounding cityscape. We found lounge chairs on the edge of the helipad, and enjoyed several aviation-themed cocktails, watching the daylight fade over Kuala Lumpur. As night fell, a sea of twinkling lights stretched as far as my eye could see. It was truly a night I will never forget.

[jeremystrele]

A Day In The Life Of Artist, Designer And Small Businesswoman, Rachel Castle

A Day In The Life Of Artist, Designer And Small Businesswoman, Rachel Castle

A Day In The Life

Sasha Gattermayr

Rachel at the CASTLE studio with Sydney the sausage dog. Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

A morning walk around the neighbourhood with Sydney. Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

Rachel starts a morning at the office with a coffee from Ona in Marrickville. Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

Rachel and the team! Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

The ever-bubbly, gorgeous Rachel Castle! Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

The studio slash office is filled with prints, inspiration and works-in-progress. Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

Chatting with Design and Production Manager, Simone. Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

There is no shortage of colourful paints to play with lying around! Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

There is always time in Rachel’s day for sketching, painting and drawing. Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

A true artist’s space! Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

Rachel started embroidering in the evening when her kids were little and in bed. Now, she has to do it in the early hours of the morning before her team arrive at work! Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

Rachel gets into the studio early to sew, and catch up on TV! Her current favourite is ‘Ramy’. Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

Swathes and swatches of fabric in rainbow shades. Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

A piece in construction. Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

It’s the mark of a true creative spirit when they spend every spare second making something for the sake of it. This was how it all began for Rachel Castle, who picked up embroidery in the early hours of the evening when her young kids were in bed, the only time she had to herself during their childhood years. It was here that her true calling revealed itself.

But before she was an artist, designer, and the director of her own small business, Rachel’s professional life meandered from PR to marketing. She and friends Alex Willcock and Russell Pinch used to run a branding company in the United Kingdom, but when their second child was born, Rachel left the business to become a full-time mother. She considers this the best decision she ever made.

‘I believe you can definitely have everything in life, just not all at once,’ she says. ‘I was never conscious of a path, I just worked with people and product I loved, and the rest worked itself out.’ Though the meandering route she describes is encouraging for others who might be in the same working-it-all-out boat, it undersells the seriously hard work Rachel has done in establishing her cult lifestyle brand. Between her firm focus on keeping her business small and practice-based, and the overtime hours she clocked developing her distinct artistic style over the years, Rachel is a tenacious, self-made professional.

Rachel took TDF around her heavenly Marrickville studio where we spent a day in her sunny, colourful world. Her creativity knows no bounds!

FIRST THING

I’m definitely a morning person.  My husband recently retired which means (hallelujah!) for the first time in a decade I can go to work whenever I want. For years I had to scramble around to find the time to work, but now I’m free as a bird, which is an amazing feeling.  If I wake and can’t sleep at 5am I go to work, but generally, I’m in the car by about seven. I don’t do social media in the mornings, I’m too old and can’t handle the early morning scramble to find my glasses and get three sentences together that make sense, so I just amble around quietly and slowly, a way better and nicer way to start each morning.

It’s a half-hour drive to work so lately I’ve been listening, for the first time in my life, to a really good AM radio station. During the protests its had some really diverse speakers, activists, writers, artists, poets. I’m converted! Also, I can’t work out how to change it back to FM so I’ll leave it here until the end of 2020 and see what else I can learn.

As soon as I arrive in Marrickville I grab a coffee from Ona down the road, and get straight to it.

MORNING

Emails and DMs…. Omg there are so many.  I check all the inboxes and delegate where necessary and then, best part of the day, I sew and watch TV until the girls arrive at 9.  The earlier I get to work the longer I can spend watching anything from Homeland to Ramy to The Real Housewives; this is my junk time and I LOVE IT.  Sewing for me is like getting a massage or going for a run or doing yoga, it’s my outta body knock-knock-there’s no-one home time.

The girls slowly start to arrive and its the normal chit chat (‘Where did you go last night? Did the NBN guy come? Where’d you get your pants from?’) and then we all move into getting the orders out for the day, getting the artworks signed, the tea towels sewn and the commissions sorted.  I potter around watering the plants, and mid-morning try to sort something with our Wholesale and Web Content lead, AJ, for socials, a little video or pics for our stories or a new wall for our studio. FINALLY having the space in our studio for a bed has transformed the way we spend our days as there’s so much bed-making and wall painting to be done!

There’s really no routine to the morning, I just go creatively wherever I feel the need, I might try to cut up some new embroideries, or prepare some canvases for painting, or do some little watercolours on paper. So by lunchtime, I’ve generally got 7,000 things started and not a single thing completed (not joking) every single day of the week.

AFTERNOON

Generally at around 3pm we all have a heart attack and realise, ‘OMG! It’s 3 o’clock!’. The girls get some lunch and I get ready to spend some time with Simone, CASTLE’s design and production lead. No two days are the same, but this week we’ve been working on our new towel shoot with Stephanie Somebody, and an upcoming collaboration with Gorman, some new sweater designs and our next Spring/Summer range. In between there are all the usual production issues!

During COVID-19 the Indian ports were closed for a month and a lot of our suppliers are on skeleton staff, so it’s been a very challenging period for us and for them. It’s very slowly getting back to normal, and we hope and pray things for India start to improve soon. Over the years we’ve become very close to our suppliers, they are as much a part of our family as our customers, we send them love.

LATE AFTERNOON

From the minute I wake up I start chanting my mantra….. ‘I will do more painting today, I will do more painting today.’  It only ever happens around 5pm and recently I’ve been coming to terms with this. I’ve tried LITERALLY everything to get more time painting but I just can’t do it. So I’ve started reframing the narrative, and now I’m grateful that I get an hour to do it at all.  The advantage of having grown children with no more play dates and park visits is I can go into work on the weekend, where I can smash out a thousand brush strokes in an hour. Time stops in the studio on the weekend, it’s an incredibly peaceful place to be.

EVENING

I’m home every single weeknight by 7.15pm. I love my drive home, this is my time to ring my mother and speak to my friends on the phone. It’s just me and the boys at home, so we eat together and Lucas goes off to study (apparently). He’s in Year 12 so a big year for him where we all try to be as quiet and gentle as we can. Cleo moved home too during  COVID-19, and I have to say the family time has been nice!

I don’t cook or go to the supermarket anymore (SOUND THE TRUMPETS) and it’s the best part of my new older life, so the evenings for me are spent eating and then doing my social media… then falling asleep reading with my glasses on and then trying to find all the right creams for my face at 10.30pm. Then snooze and sleep like a baby.

Photo – Alisha Gore for The Design Files.

Right now I’m listening to/watching/reading…

Watching Ramy I laugh and cry from one scene to the next, it’s teaching me a lot about Islamic culture and religion. It’s hilariously funny and, equally, really tackles the big issues, it’s really good.

Reading A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. It’s a beautiful Indian tale covering the country’s growth over the past 30 years. Knowing the history of this beautiful country is really important to me.

Listening to any podcast I can get my hands on, and always a daily dose of Dan Savage!

One important thing I do every day is…

Eat dinner with my family. Every weekday of our lives, it’s a deal breaker for me.

I get my best work done when…

I’m in the studio by myself with my music on and my phone switched off.

A philosophy I live and work by is…

Touch it once.  Emails, DMs, designs, products. Going back to something we discussed yesterday doesn’t work for me. We resolve it on the spot, or resolve it to a point where we can pick it up later.  I never say ‘Let’s sleep on it’, which means I make mistakes, but we need to keep moving because inertia is the DEVIL!

My productivity tip/tool is…

Definitely the above, touching it once.

Something I learned the hard way is…

Don’t put a whole range on pre-order just before a pandemic… note to self!

[amalforelias-blog]

The War (SKAM fanfic)

Pairing : Mikael Overlie Boukhal and Adam Malik

Characters : Mikael Boukhal, Adam Malik, Even Bech Næsheim, Yousef Acar, Elias Bakkoush, Muttasim Billah.

Plot : 

- In which Mikael freaked out and lashed at Even for kissing him, because he was secretly in a relationship with Adam Malik.

- Mikael Overlie Boukhal and Adam Malik are together romantically, but Adam, unlike his lover, isn’t fully coming to terms with doing what he thinks his religion views to be a sin. 

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Chapter One : Mates From Among Eachother

The minutes passed slowly, as if holding between their seconds grande ages that time couldn’t sweep forwards in a blink of an eye. Mikael felt the vast moments absorbed by every second, forbidding the world from moving forwards. For it was his own tale stuck between the seconds and minutes of the clock. It was immensly heavy, he almost felt time push his shoulders, crying for him to lighten his heart and let the world go on freely by its laws. 

It wasn’t possible for Mikael though. He couldn’t let his past crumble behind and be swept by time forwards. He couldn’t do but hold still, chained by the memories. His consciousness of time was almost non-existent, and that of the world poured from between his fingers, as his eyes stared into nowhere. He could swear his eyes watched inside his mind. He could swear the world fell off its grounds and emmerged only him. Either the world sucked him in, or he sucked the world into him, for he could only think and feel himself; that mess of a mind. 

It wasn’t a pretty sight. Thoughts flying around and questions colliding. Nothing sitting still, nothing making sense. Not that he couldn’t make sense of it all, not that he couldn’t rid himself off this misery, but he wasn’t free to act. He was emprisoned by morals that, somehow, being a human had obliged him to adopt. The unwritten rule of hiding the mess of loved ones under the rubble and protecting them from what could come of harm from them or from others. He couldn’t know how but he found himself following the rule and, thus, losing his well-being in the process. 

A dear friend of his, one named Even, had done- one among many- an act of oddness. In fact, it was nothing to be frowned up. A mere kiss on the lips, a usual emboddiement of attraction and translation of love. It wasn’t odd from Even’s side, it was odd from Mikael’s side. He couldn’t handle the heavy messages sent through the kiss, beyond the attraction. 

He saw his friend drawing new patterns he had never swam in between. It was as if each human lives inside a framing; one we paint through living but it’s firmly stable to keep us in order, and suddenly the framing breaks, then nothing makes sense. Our eyes can’t read the new visions, our minds can’t comprehend the new uncoded language spoken. Even broke his framing, he was skating out, away. And Mikael couldn’t understand the hazardness, everything was read off as odd. 

And so, he couldn’t figure out why Even kissed him. But he wasn’t sliding back to his past to confront him, nor was he marching forwards to tell the ones who deserved to know. He just rolled at a halt now, stuck in time. He couldn’t push himself forwards and tell the man with whom he shared his heart that another had kissed him. Not just any other, it was Even Bech Næsheim; their bestfriend from little age. 

He knew Adam Malik too well to vomit out the confusion to him. Adam, although a friend of Even himself, wouldn’t be as confused to know of the incident. Indeed, confusion wouldn’t be what will fill his mind upon hearing Even kissed his boyfriend, it would be anger and furiosity. 

Mikael’s body was as glued to the wall as Iblis is to sin. He had been sitting there for three hours. His limbs refusing to budge, his eyelids refusing to move and even his tears refusing to fall. His chest was barely moving up and down in sync with his breathing. Barely. For the heaviness of the secrets sitting on his chest almost put his heart to a deafening silence. It is a human’s most destructive weapon; a secret. That and hatred. Mikael’s heart fortunately was as white as milk, not a drop of hatred towards no one. However, secret upon a secret, the rocks fell into the bowl and the milk poured out, falling here and there, escaping his heart as if Iblis had been chanting evil words to him continuously the night before. 

“Why am I even hiding...” , the words left his mouth like saliva from someone’s lips on a fasting Ramadan day, “...love ?”, he could swear he heard SYML’s The War playing in his head. Appearing out of the crazy chaos in his head to portray his emotions, much to his ignorance, and somehow managing to decipher his puzzle of a question. They say the mind works in boxes, that, from time to time, a box steals in a wordly item from our surroundings to stick into it moments from our lives, as we live. Sometimes, it’s smells, and other times, it’s songs. Like SYML’s The War. That song had its box in Mikael’s mind, and had its memories stuck to it that would rise to surface when Mikael hears the song, or the other way around. 

So his question about why he was hiding his relationship with Adam and why they decided to keep their love a secret, was the suitable thought to provoke the box to open up and let out that song. For, now, his mind jumped back to a memory, one that gives him the answer. 

                                                    *       *       *

“And among His signs is this, that He created for you mates from among yourselves that you may dwell in tranquility with, and He has put love and mercy between your hearts...” , Mikael read off the Qu’ran in Arabic to Adam, not finishing off the twenty-one verse of Surah Al-Rum, only absorbing from it which he wanted his lover to hear. A big smile appeared on his lips as he let the word “hearts” trail in the air, as if he just discovered the preciousness of the world in the words he had just read, to an Adam who seemed a little less happy about the seemingly big revelation that fell upon Mikael from the clouds.  

“Allah has made me of you, and you of me !” , he ecxlaimed, closing off the Qu’ran on his lap and moving closer in bed to the blue-to-green eyes man. Adam wasn’t receptive to the excitement that ran through Mikael though. In fact, his eyes roamed, searching in the eyes of the smiling boy for a hint of anything that would tell him Mikael wasn’t serious. But he was. 

“Ah. If I were a girl, yeah.” , Adam let out a sigh despite of himself, as he watched Mikael’s eyes and lips drop, a cloud of darkness fell over his head.It wasn’t the first time Mika had Adam refuse his thoughts, he thought his boyfriend to be deep into the negative reading of Islam, it would take more than one time of introducing the words of Allah to him under a sweet light, it would take continuous collisions of their relationship with religion. He knew he had to move loads of rocks down the river but he refused to see him drenched by guilt and even dislike towards his own being, thinking he wasn’t accepted by his own creator. 

Here stands a man at the bottom of a hole he’s made, Still sweating from the rush, His body tense, his hands, they shake,

It was then, on the sole radio sitting on the salon’s table next to Adam’s room, SYML’s The War started playing. Barely heard, but with the silence swimming between them and the little words jumping from one to another, the song was a clear tune playing in their heads at that moment. 

Adam took a hold of the Qu’ran and shoved it inside the drawer. “Stop trying to merge between Islam and...”, he sounded more hurt than upset, almost sweating of shame, as if he was caught naked, “...us.”, he felt nude. Under the eyes of Allah. Not that He wasn’t always watching, but the thought was always at the back of his head, burried, but with Mikael reading the Qu’ran, it couldn’t be escaped. He couldn’t help but feel sin crawling into him as if worms were eating his skin. 

Don’t you ever leave me alone, Be my shelter from the storm, My war is over, I am a sad boy,

As the song came to an end, the last words ringing in their heads, it was almost a promise to keep both lives seperate, to Allah was the five prayers and to Mikael was what fell between them. And it was also abvious that what Adam wasn’t comfortable in with his own self, he wasn’t comfortable in with his friends, so it needn’t words from any of them to know that what pulled them together was a secret to be burried. 

                                                  *      *      * 

Mikael thought if their love was flying around them, revealed for everyone that even the trees and flowers of Oslo knew of an Adam and a Mikael in love, then maybe Even wouldn’t have kissed him. And maybe then, he wouldn’t have reacted in the certain manner he did towards Even. 

The phone buzzed in his pocket, not for the first time but it was only now that he made sense of it, his grasp of life around him finally breaking into his soul. It was a call from Akhoy, which was what Mikael had Adam registred under as his contact. Akhoy is Egyptian Arabic for Brother, in a Sa’idi dialect for a humorous touch, Mikael thought it to be witty. It was the equivalent of Khoya in Moroccan Darija, the word that Adam used to call Mika more than his own name. Apparently, in Morocco, it was a thing to refer to eachother as Khoya for men and Khti for women as a direct tradition falling from the precious words of Allah : “Humanity is but a big brotherhood, so make peace with your brethren.”. Not that it wasn’t common in Egypt either, but Adam didn’t seem to know any conversational tricks but to call every soul Khoya.

He picked up, but he didn’t utter a word, his fragility working its way to the surface. “Where are you, man? Been calling and sending messages, why you not answering ?”, Adam’s worry was apparent, bursting from his voice into Mikael’s heart, warming him at the realization that Adam was there. At least he had him to worry about him, to hear from him. But it also worried him himself, that the man he loved was rendered into a ball of worry after his disappearance for only a few hours, and that the only man he confined in wasn’t to be his cushion of comfort from the guilt of what he perceived to be a horrible deed he had done upon a friend. 

“At your place. By the door.” , because Mikael couldn’t let his bruised self fall into the arms of his lover, he thought he’d let the shadows of his being embrace his pain instead, so he headed to Adam’s home and just sat by the door, leaning on the wall, crunched down onto the floor, his clothes almost swallowing him away from life. 

“What?”, his question reeked off confusion and a little bit of dread even, but it wasn’t met with an answer, “Alright, coming!” , his words trailed, Mikael hummed a “Hmm” in response, hanging up, and just drowned even more into his own clothes. 

It wasn’t a grave sin that nastily dragged Mikael into this cave of suffocating gloominess, it was the obligation, sitting on his throat like a sharp knife, to keep his insides inside only. If there was anything that blew Mikael off his feet, then it was filling himself up to no end. He couldn’t, to save his life, keep a word sewed to his tongue. If only he could tell Adam, and if only Adam could understand that Even was in disorder. 

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[theconcept-blog]

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[dememarquette]

GSI AU

[Prelude] - Part One - Part Two

IN THE JANKY HALLS OF THE GSI OFFICES…

No sun, no air, hardly the sound of another human being unless you count the incessant scrabbling of pen against paper (though it sounds much more like a convict taking a spoon to the concrete wall), the tepid wasteland of GSI offices lay nestled beneath the extravagant offices of tenured professors. You know you’ve made it when you have a window in your office. For now, the majority of us sit ass to elbows and wait for a student to pass by so we can, at last, feel useful.

The next time you think the life of a graduate student is glamorous, think again. I’m here to tell you that we hate ourselves just as much as you hate us for calling you out on your shitty paper.

Yes, in the dark underbelly of each building hides a squadron of graduate students furiously pedaling away to keep the electricity going. Don’t forget it, and make sure you clear out by 6 pm because that’s when we all emerge to return home, bringing doom and gloom up to the surface alongside us.

I glance at the clock. 5:59 pm. Time to go. Everything is packed into a folder, a binder, a pencil case with a compartment for each pen and pencil, and then I’m good to go, hitting the light switch on my way out to startle the remainder of the graduate team. They blink at me owlishly atop piles of empty coffee cups like dragons hoarding gold.

That, at least, gets me ten feet out the door before I have to backpedal. When you’re on the way home, it takes the supernatural to hold you back. That or the foul stench of defamation.

Amongst the chaos of the bulletin board, the brightly-colored posters and the stray cry for help (DISSERTATION EDITOR NEEDED IMMEDIATELY!! And IS MONOGAMY A LIE??), all that’s left of my flyer is a corner. In its place stands a Spotify promotion disguised as an educational flyer, in turn disguising Gwen Stefani as music. It reads:

LINGUSTICS. THIS SH!T IS BANANAS. B-A-N-A-N-A-S.

I glare at it for a minute before tearing it down and putting my flyer back up.

The next day, Gwen Stefani glares right back at me.

***

“Alright, so remember we have a quiz on Thursday, and that English uses Greek as an embellishment, but in Greek those words are simple as hell and make you sound like an idiot. Martyr. Witness. Phobia.” I shrug. “Fear.”

I shove my folder into my bag and zip it shut, nearly getting my finger caught in the zipper. Fuck. Play it off. “Okay, now get out of here and take Greek 1.”

The students miserably shuffle out the door. The girl in the back was pounding two thermoses of something all throughout lecture, either coffee or liquor—maybe both. I don’t blame her. It’s about that time where the line in my office goes right out the door and to the bathroom around the corner. Please, the desperate college student begs, I will literally die if I don’t get a B in this class.

Well, fuck. Just die then because it isn’t going to happen.

I lean against the podium and watch the back row clear out. I’m not in a particularly forgiving mood this semester. Too many apathetic faces staring at me, but at least I’ve come to a tacit agreement with my students. We’re all here against our will. They’re here because, as first-year undergrads, they have shit registration times and got stuck with a 7 am Greek Religion class, and I’m here because I tragically split hot coffee on my advising professor’s pantsuit. Twice.

When the last person leaves the classroom, I immediately deflate onto the table and groan. It’s an impressive groan that lasts for at least a minute, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

“Wow. What an impressive groan.”

I don’t have enough self-respect to lift up my head. “Yup,” I say. “I’ve been practicing.”

“It’s paying off. Hey, do you mind moving a bit to your left? I gotta plug my laptop in.”

I move the chair to the left. The dude has adventurous taste in footwear. When’s the last time I saw a pair of monk straps? The answer is there was never a time. I have never seen a pair of monk straps in person, other than on myself. So you got me, dude. I’m down on my self-respect but I would never turn down a chance to look at the owner of a magnificent pair of shoes.

I look up. As expected, his shoes are the best part of him.

“Okay,” I say, abruptly standing up. “Farewell.”

“See you.”

Why, Erebus? You could have stayed, the two of you could have talked shop! You never find another GSI wearing anything outside the category of high school boy footwear. Yeah, I could’ve killed myself too, doesn’t mean I’m going to do it. I laid there for five minutes, and now my workload has interested by a corresponding five minutes. Ugh.

I step out of the classroom and maneuver around the crowd of students lining up to enter the room, forcing me to go a different route. I trot down the hall—with dignity, might I add, which is a lot harder than it sounds. Trotting is generally undignified, but I am all dignity.

That is, until I come across an entire wall of Gwen Stefani posters pinned all over the Center of Religious Studies corkboard. The paper taped on top of the board reads: DO NOT POST WITHOUT PERMISSION. I’m pretty fucking sure Spotify didn’t get permission from the department.

I have a fuckton of work sitting on my desk and last month’s test scores are backlogged in the system, but I also have a stapler in my bag and a whole stack of event flyers hot off the press. Why the hell not?

It takes me fifteen minutes to rip down the entire wall of Gwen and replace the posters with my own. I leave one defiled Spotify poster, just as you leave one man alive in an army you slaughter. You know. As a warning.

***

“610, Muhammed receives a message from the angel Gabriel. He is told the Arabs must follow the Abrahamic God, and that he is the chosen prophet, Jesus Christ’s legitimate successor. The Eastern Christian Church already split from the Greek Orthodox Church at this point in time—why? The Romans were—man, the Romans were off their game. Christianity no longer emphasized discipline and moral fiber, but Muslims did. That’s why the Romans were so offended by Islam. Because it was, essentially, a purer form of Christianity.”

There’s a lecture this Friday on the beginning of Islam and its relation to Greek Orthodox Christianity. If you’re interested, look at the poster board outside the classroom.”

Apparently, I spoke too soon. When I went into the classroom, my flyer was up. When I went out, it was replaced by Gwen Stefani. Fuck.

“I hate you,” I say to Gwen, pressing my nose right up into the flyer.

Someone clears their throat behind me. “You a big fan of Gwen Stefani?”

“You wouldn’t ask a Jew if they were into Hitler. Why would you ask an East Asian if they’re into Gwen Stefani?”

“Woah.”

“Yup. Totally wish I could take that back. But hey I haven’t made eye contact with you yet so this conversation never happened. Goodbye.” I scuttle away, keeping my eyes on the floor. Oh. It’s monk strap guy. Good to see you again.

Back in my office, there’s a post-it note on my desk summoning me to the department head’s office that afternoon. I’ve done a lot of questionable things that would warrant a summoning—I’m going to need more fingers to count the possible things this meeting could be about. Uhm. As a historian of Islamic history, I’ve been reported as a ISIS-sympathizer. One time a white supremacist reported me for being racist, which was fun.

I wait on the bench outside her office, flanked by Gwen Stefani posters. I drop my head in my hands and groan.

“Oh hey, Hitler dude. What’s up?” Someone sits down beside me when the entire bench is available.

“Gwen Stefani.”

“What?”

“No, seriously. Look up.”

Monk strap guy looks up and squints at the poster before snorting. “Shit. Okay, that one was definitely not me.”

“Wait—what?” No. Don’t do this to me. Don’t let my only acquaintance who has ascended far above Adidas and Nikes be—be a Gwen Stefani sympathizer. “Are you the one posting all these fucking Gwen Stefanis everywhere?”

“Are you the one replacing my posters with, what was it, Religious Studies?”

“Replacing—I’m not the one replacing them. You replaced mine first, and it’s Center! CENTER for Religious Studies, and I’m restoring the poster boards to their original glory, their—their academic glory! There is no academic glory or integrity in Gwen Stefani.”

“Oh. I thought we had a friendly rivalry going on.”

“We aren’t friends,” I hiss. “We are enemies.”

“That’s cool too.” He extends his hand and I stare at it suspiciously. “I’m Demetri.”

“I’m Erebus, and I don��t shake hands. Germs.” Right as I do jazz-hands, the department head’s office door opens and I get up to go. I turn back, narrowing my eyes at Demetri. “This is a ceasefire. Stay off my turf and we’re all good.”

Demetri shrugs. “Sure.”

***

The following day, David Bowie’s face on my office door squints back at me.

[sellalametta]

Letter : Dear Bride a.k.a. My Best Friend, ...

Dear Bride a.k.a. My Best Friend,

Yesterday was a big day, for you (of course), for your family (for sure), and for me (yes, it really was).

I am proud of you taking this huge step. It seems easy and difficult at the same time. It seems like a piece of cake for you because I know you as a person, you have that knowledge and supportive environment and family I must say. However, it was like a Pandora’s box because it always is, as you are not making a promise to your husband or his family alone, nor this country by signing that book. More than that, you make a holy promise to Him, Allah SWT. But hey, I have a hundred percent of trust that it is not going to bite off more than you can chew with this marriage.

I was touched because Allah got me the chance to visit you three days before the D-day (If I counted it right). Been a while without seeing your family too, like 8 years? It was also my first time meeting your baby daughter who is no longer baby though. I wish I had more time before, but as you know, having my study and work in the different island has turned all friends circle into long-distance-friendship, including ours.

Long story short, 

we concluded two years stories into some hours in your new design bedroom for newly-bride and groom. I was honored to have seen it earlier than your hubby LOL. We also checked the guest book that just done and sent, also you handed me your wedding invitation. To tell you another truth that your wedding invitation card was the best I have ever received, same went to my family too. Yes, a compliment for that! Again, little prouder to have seen it earlier than other guests. And once more, I was so much appreciative for receiving this condition of free-at-home and so I could make it to your marriage and wedding. Still, I was feeling like working against the clock.

I would jump to the D-day which to me, everyone can see eye to eye for such an inspirational wedding that catch our eyes now, after a short paragraph about how we two met first, we'll. Let's do it yo!

It was on August 2 of 2007, eleven years ago, in a classroom signed as 7.1, we gathered as the new classmates. I forgot the 'exact how' we ended up as chair mate. Yet I remember, it was the first of September, together with Ria and Anda, we grouped ourselves as a gang.

Next, I will stop throwing back a story. In your D-day, Anda and Ria could not make it as they were not around the city and left me alone as the official representative. I got sometimes in that morning to prepare our gang’s gift for you and sadly made me late. LOL.

Well, there was nothing I could do to blame it, I, myself was just late. I planned to come as early as possible because I did not want to call myself a guest, I preferred to be noticed as a part of the family who came as early as your relatives. LOL again.

Nevertheless, here, I did not count how many times I have mentioned, but I was again saved by Allah because the penghulu (Islamic wedding oath conductor) came a little bit late and thus spared more time for a late person like me. Just for your information, my ten minutes-late was honestly contributed by a driver that brought me there as he missed the direction, yet least I was not barking up the wrong three, Alhamdulillah.

The time I arrived at the venue, I speed my steps up to see you in the corner with other besties and family while waiting for the Ijab Kabul to begin. I was speechless as you might notice. I was trying to talk so randomly because, yeah I just did. After having some sentences with a nervous bride-to-be, all besties decided to get to the upper level that assigned for female guests.

Did you know what I truly wanted to do for real on that very moment? Well, I wanted to stay, sit next to you and witness all by my eyes. However, would not be fair for other girls, right? Besides, I believe the room might be full of your close family – who has an absolute higher priority to belong there, I would not make it more crowded though. Accordingly, I reach the second level and wait while biting my tongue.

Tell you the truth, again, it was more packed than expected which made the less clear sound thru speaker at that level. I decided to have my chair next to the speaker and assure myself to be able paying full attention to all event downstairs via that only speaker.

As I told you by chat yesterday, I got my eyes watery and my heart beat little faster. I have faith in if there was a person looked at me at that moment, she would barely see all the random expression I made. I was beyond happy in the heat of the moment.

Short after that, you beautifully came to the female area with your two official moms. At the drop of a hat, we all wowed at you. I did not bring my glasses and so I moved a little bit forward and forgot that merit speaker to check you out. And then some, I remember I came to Mrs. You for three times after ijab kabul . I too shook your mom in law’s hands as much as three-time excitedly –which frankly worried me a little bit if I drove her up the wall knowing her elegant brand-new daughter in law best-friending a much-enthusiastic girl like me. Then, can I have a penny of your thoughts on this later?

I could agree if we did not have to photograph everything to remember it, so I respect the rules KKK. But knowing that we still got a chance to have a picture with you, I was over again over the moon. I will treasure it without any doubt!

Another perk of your day was me able to meet your other good friends (whom somehow, I think would be mine too if I decided to go to your senior high school). And thus, thank you for the new friends and mini-reunion with my other best friend (also yours) there.

I just realized that I have made a long enough paragraph for my blog standard about this. Because of that, I was thinking to give it a full stop soon.

To cut the chase, I would like to tell you that I am grateful for knowing you for these eleven years, have met your family, your other best friends, and your husband’s family. I am thankful for ever being to your table, house, wedding, and life. I am shameful for not being such a good one for you and hopeful to be better. I am hoping that this ship is powerful enough to fill our life on the earth and useful for our future days in the akhirah.

Uhibbuki fillah!

Your Best Friend,

Blog Owner

Alright, peeps, I will call it a day! Thank you for reading the longest writing here, much love!

Thank you!

Sella Lametta ♡

[newstfionline]

Young Nigerians choose to fight Boko Haram with books

By Ryan Lenora Brown, CS Monitor, June 19, 2018

MAIDUGURI, NIGERIA--In Gwoza, the gunmen arrived just after 10 a.m., skidding to a halt outside the school on motorcycles and surrounding the Nigerian students who huddled in small groups around the courtyard, frittering away the short break between their classes.

In Damasak, they came as a teacher was placing an exam paper facedown on the table in front of one of her students. This time, everyone in the classroom heard an explosion first, cracking over their heads like a clap of thunder. First one, then another, and another again.

In Bama, it was still too early for school when Boko Haram appeared. It happened before dawn, as the morning call to prayer was just beginning to blast out from mosque speakers around the city. The shooting woke up the rest of the town like a staccato alarm clock.

In the school courtyard in Gwoza, Lydia began to run, tripping over the bodies of her classmates as she fled. In the classroom in Damasak, Aisha ran, too. And in Bama, Fatima’s mother dragged her out of bed and whispered urgently, go. Don’t take anything. Just go.

Today, northeastern Nigeria is a place of suddenly interrupted lives. Since the Islamist movement Boko Haram began its violent insurgency here a decade ago, nearly 3 million people have been uprooted from their homes and scattered across Nigeria and its neighbors. Among them have been about a million children like Lydia, Aisha, and Fatima, for whom the sudden displacement has often meant an equally abrupt end to their education.

For Boko Haram--whose name is often translated as “Western education is forbidden”--that fact is no accident. Their campaign for a fundamentalist Islamic state in northeastern Nigeria has deliberately and brutally taken aim at the region’s schools. Since 2009, the group has murdered some 2,300 teachers and destroyed more than 1,400 schools, according to figures from UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s agency. Kidnapping children from schools, meanwhile, has become one of the central ways the group has earned its international notoriety.

But as Boko Haram’s war against education here grinds into its 10th year, a quiet counterinsurgency is also building strength. It’s a fight with unlikely front lines--like the battered open-air classrooms inside camps for displaced people across this region, where teachers lead geography lessons in open defiance of the group’s flat earth ideology. Or in the dormitories of girls’ boarding schools, jammed with chattering teenagers in pink hijabs, reading romance novels and braiding each other’s hair as though they have never heard of girls kidnapped in Chibok or Dapchi.

And leading this particular fight are young Nigerians like Lydia, Aisha, and Fatima, who have seen Boko Haram’s terror firsthand, and who, when it comes to their education, have chosen to fight back.

“Going to school is our way of battling against Boko Haram,” says Aisha, tucking a stray strand of hair into her bright pink hijab. After being out of school for three years while in a refugee camp in Niger, the 19-year-old, whose last name has been withheld for her safety, is now less than a year away from graduating from a boarding school in the city of Maiduguri.

“They don’t like education; they don’t want it,” she says. “So just by doing this, we are all fighting them.”

The tenacity of that fight among northern Nigerians has startled many experts. For decades, after all, northern Nigeria has sat stubbornly at the bottom of nearly every national ranking of educational achievement. Fewer than half of young adult women here know how to read, and only 46 percent of children are enrolled in school at all, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics.

“This is one of the most disadvantaged places in the country when it comes to education,” says Babagana Goni Ali, secretary of the Education in Emergencies Working Group at the Borno State Universal Basic Education Board. Historically, he says, many parents here haven’t seen the point of sending their kids to school. Life, after all, often seemed to be on a single track. You grew up. You got married. You started farming. There weren’t really other choices, and certainly none that required you to be able to read a novel in English.

And Boko Haram soon gave many families another excuse. In a YouTube video released in July 2013, the group’s commander, Abubakar Shekau, said, “We are going to burn down the schools if they are not Islamic religious schools for Allah.”

Over the next few years, the group torched schools across the region. The militants often specifically targeted teachers of subjects such as science and geography, which flouted the group’s fundamentalist Quranic interpretation of the world. Sometimes these raids doubled as forced recruitment drives, with the group snatching up young boys to become soldiers and young girls to become “wives” to their commanders.

At first, it seemed to be working. In 2016, the Nigerian government announced that the number of children who weren’t going to school had shot up 50 percent since the start of the crisis. Teachers stayed home, too, fearing targeted attacks.

But as the group retreated from many of the major urban areas in Borno in recent years, Mr. Ali began to notice something. It seemed Boko Haram’s tactics were beginning to backfire.

“There’s suddenly a huge issue of congestion in our schools that wasn’t there before,” he says. “It’s the blessing behind this tragedy. You find suddenly so many more people are interested in getting an education.”

Indeed, although there aren’t yet statistics to show how much the situation has changed, many here say Boko Haram’s insurgency has done something that decades of low educational achievement failed to do. It has lit a fire under people.

“Lack of education is the disease that caused [Boko Haram] in the first place,” says Fanne Abdullahi, a mother of five who lives in a wind-swept camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Maiduguri. She never had the money to attend school herself as a child, she says, and anyway, her parents didn’t approve of a girl learning how to read. So when she grew up and had children of her own, sending them to school wasn’t much of a priority either.

But after Boko Haram attacked her village, killed her husband, and sent the family fleeing in 2015, she began to rethink that. When her family moved into the Bakassi camp in Maiduguri, someone told her that UNICEF was running free schools there, and she decided to sign up her three school-age children.

“Instead of them getting brainwashed by Boko Haram,” she says of her reasoning, “it’s better for them to get educated.”

Now, they join about 3,000 other kids each morning in a huddled collection of open-air learning spaces that serve as one of the camp’s two schools. Their “classrooms” are little more than a concrete platform with a grass roof sagging over them. Most once had walls as well, but nearly as soon as they are put up, school officials say, they’re stolen for firewood.

On a recent morning, as Mastapha Kaltumi taught math to a group of about 50 fidgety third-graders, wind whistled through his classroom, flapping hijabs and fluttering notebooks. Nearby, just beyond the school’s flimsy chain-link fence, children screamed and giggled as they chased each other in a game of tag. A little boy in a raggedy T-shirt walked by flying a kite he’d made out of a plastic bag.

It wasn’t perfect, Mr. Kaltumi thought. There were still too many kids in his class, and too many kids outside not getting to class at all. But it was something. It was a start.

“Many students here are coming to school for the first time in their lives,” he says. And he knew that for many of them--like himself--focusing on addition and long division was a way to get out of their own heads: to forget, briefly, the things they had seen.

From the government’s perspective, it also doesn’t hurt that northern Nigeria’s current crisis has brought a wave of international money and expertise into its schools.

“The government has always had an interest in educating kids here, of course, but the international assistance makes a big difference in what we’re able to do,” says Ali of the Borno State Universal Basic Education Board.

Last year, humanitarian organizations in the region received about $12 million for educational projects in the region. But at Yerwa, Fatima doesn’t know about any of that. She’s got her eye on one thing: finishing high school next year. After that, if she can somehow manage to scrape together the money, she hopes to go to college and train as a doctor. When she lived in a displaced persons camp, she saw firsthand what happens when there isn’t a good medical system.

“I saw people dying in hospitals and just being left there to die because they couldn’t pay,” she says. “When I’m a doctor I won’t do that. I will save your life, and then later, if it’s possible, you can help me.”

[muscledemandsrespect]

SEA TO SEA IN ISRAEL!

When first I visited Israel – a decidedly middle eastern country – I didn’t expect to find myself strolling amidst a Gay Pride parade with over 100,000 people revelling on the beaches of Tel Aviv. On my recent and second visit to Israel, I had the great honour of being invited by The Ministry of Tourism, who ushered me and two journalists on an equally unexpected – and remarkably broad – historical and cultural tour of this breath-taking country, called ‘Sea to Sea’. Israel is a delicious melting pot of religion, culture, people and food; where Mediterranean meets Middle-Eastern, and where modern meets traditional. On this expedition, I discovered some truly ancient sites, voyaged through one of the oldest cities on the planet, enjoyed exquisite Israeli restaurants, feasted my way through vegetable/fruit and fish souks, and languished in the intimate boutique hospitality of this country. The list of highlights is impractically long so I’ve listed my absolute key takeaways if you’re thinking of a trip – and at the bottom of the post, other things to do whilst you’re there, should you have time. This is an active trip to remember!

So, faced with the massive suite of possible highlights, my absolute favourite spots from the trip were Jerusalem, in particular, the Old City – as well as Masada and The Dead Sea. Tel Aviv is always something special to behold too! Here’s the list with some visuals to bolster the imagination…

Jerusalem

Visiting Jerusalem enabled me to tick off a major box from my ‘life bucket list’. It’s the capital city of Israel, one of the oldest municipalities in the world, as well as the Holy City for the three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The narrow limestone walkways paved by Olive trees have been walked by some of the most significant religious leaders to have written history, and are the reasons as to why the world looks the way it does today. Jerusalem is a historian’s dream location, steeped with significance that you can almost taste in the air. The places to visit include;

1. Christian Quarter with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre This is Christianity’s most important church, located in the centre of the Christian quarter. It is the site where Jesus was crucified by Roman soldiers.

2. Rebuilt Jewish Quarter and Cardo The ruins of the main street from Roman times.

3. Western Wall (Kotel) This is Judaism’s most sacred site. It’s a limestone wall built by King Herod in 20 BCE. For hundreds of years, people have prayed at the wall.

4. Best view of the Old City? Mount of Scopus (In Hebrew it means “lookout”) offers the best panoramic view of the city.

5. Mahane Yehuda market (Shuk) We visited the market during the day, and indeed a memorable imprint it left – tasting and eating your way through fruit, vegetable & fish stands. However, it was only when we chose to return one evening to experience the nightlife that this became an absolute highlight of the trip!

I’ve never experienced anything quite like it and was totally blown away. The atmosphere was electric. To wander through the market at night is to observe the very essence of a melting pot for people of all religions and ages. There where Orthodox men out on ‘date night’ with their wives, orthodox Muslims, bakers shouting selling their goods, whilst girls and boys were dancing on tables in the immediate vicinity to the tunes of live DJ’s. So many walks of life intersected here that it verged on the surreal and wandering through the streets with a drink in my hand, I couldn’t help but smile; it was exhilarating. I wished I’d partied there as a teen and not in some dark club sitting at a table.

6. Dinner? We enjoyed a delicious meal at Satya Restaurant in Jerusalem. The menu offers a real mix of foods which are perfect for sharing. I could happily just eat all the starters in Israel including herring with sour cream and cucumber salad, sashimi or sea fish tartar and plenty of vegan options like vegetables with shitake mushroom sauce and white rice. All super fresh and benefitting the wonderful climate.

7. Accommodation Situated in the heart of Jerusalem, The David Citadel combines a sense of heritage and modernity, fusing old and new with consummate style and understated elegance. I awoke rested in a spacious calming modern environment, and upon stepping out onto my balcony I could enjoy views of the Old Limestone Wall alight in the morning sun. I loved the garden terrace, full of birdsong, cocooned within the hotel walls whilst overlooking the pool and the Old wall – this was a favourite as was the exquisitely appointed spa, an oasis of calm in an otherwise bustling metropolis

What to do in Tel Aviv…

1. Stand-up paddle boarding This was such good fun, but I would observe, is materially harder than it looks; great for balance and core strength. The view of Tel Aviv from the ocean is totally worth it and the activity delivers a great, all-round workout too.

2. Stroll along the beaches The sweeping beaches flanking Israel dominate their 200km of Mediterranean coastline from Rosh ha-Nikra to Ashkelon on the Central and South Coast. It’s quite breathtaking to behold, and Tel Aviv offers as dramatic an oceanscape as I’ve seen with its skyscraper coastline peering out over Jaffa… There’s also the machine-gun-like barrage of ‘Matkot’ – a beachside racket game where two or more players just try to keep a squash ball alive with a wooden bat. It’s a bit of a national sport, and a stroll along any Tel Aviv beach will show just how popular it is!

3. Where to eat? Mantaray was exceptional with views overlooking the golden beaches. The Israeli cuisine is so light and healthy – fresh sun-drenched veggies, fruit courses, fish is preferred over the meat, & goats milk as standard. It has a relaxed aspect which is just perfect to take in the vibrant orange sunsets. As you walk around the city, you can see some stunning Bauhaus architecture brought by the European migrants around the time of the war.

4. Explore Old Jaffa Here you’ll find craft shops, art galleries, and stalls selling antiques and jewellery at the lively Jaffa Flea Market. Landmarks include the Clock Tower and St. Peter’s Church, while the Ilana Goor Museum shows Israeli and international art.

Check out Caesarea…

It was so interesting to see some Roman architecture in this part of the world, and learning about the history of that ancient civilisation, as well as how it influenced Israel; most unexpected! An ancient port built by King Herod, which at the time was one of the largest & most important cities in the Roman world. It acted as the capital of Judea during the time of Jesus, as well as a crusader fortress along the road from Acre to Jerusalem. This used to be a large entertainment venue with 10,000 seats, called a hippodrome, where horse races were conducted. There’s a beautiful amphitheatre and make sure to check out the remainder of Kind Herod’s bathhouse too.

The Dead Sea

We visited the iconic lake and one of the most amazing wonders of the natural world, the Dead Sea; yet another big fat tick on the bucket list. For thousands of years, the Dead Sea has attracted visitors who come to enjoy its health-promoting properties. The mineral-rich mud contains the likes of sulphur, magnesium, calcium, chloride, sodium, bromide and potassium, creating a natural body & face “mask”. The mud stimulates blood circulation & is thought to help skin diseases (Inc. psoriasis, arthritis & dermatitis). The mineral composition of the body of water itself, including the 30% salt content, makes you exceptionally buoyant so that you simply float on the surface! The Dead Sea is the lowest point on earth, set at 430 meters below sea level, landlocked by the Jordanian desert mountains. It is an otherworldly place to visit, and quite incredible.

Hike Masada

If you can, and people generally recommend that you do, hike up Masada mountain at sunrise. We arrived at noon, and amidst the relentless 40-degree heat, opted for the cable car to save a punishing and futile ascent by foot.

Once you arrive at the crest, the views are spectacular – looking down onto The Dead Sea, the desert and the Judean mountains. It is a panorama which is forever sered into my mind!

Other places to visit include…

Discover what life is like on a Kibbutz – I spent some time on Ma’agan Michael, which was founded in 1949 and is a collective community, traditionally based on agriculture.

See Akko (Acre) – a beautiful ancient Phoenician & Crusader seaport and a U.N.E.S.C.O. World Heritage Site. Check out the Old City, Hammam, Crusaders Knight Halls & the Green Mosque!

Grottos – Cable-carring to the sea-carved grottos…

Haifa – Israel’s third-largest city and second-largest port, on the slopes of Mt. Carmel…

Abu Ghosh, a town outside Jerusalem, an Arab-Israeli village.

The Sea of Galilee (a.k.a. Lake Tiberias) – is a mega 230 sq. km & is cocooned by the hills of the Galilee and the Golan Heights super magical to behold

Tiberias – the capital of the Lower Galilee.

Decks Restaurant Tiberias – Such a beautiful view overlooking the Sea of Galilee, and a great atmosphere with music & dancing.

Hope you enjoy planning your trip

Faya x

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[trunewsofficial]

Countdown Clock is Ticking: How Close are We to World War III?

The U.S. is now just a matter of days or hours away from war with Iran—and the countdown clock is ticking. Last night, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal both reported that President Trump had given the order to conduct military strikes on the Islamic Republic—and warplanes were already airborne—but he changed his mind at the last moment before the attacks began claiming the response would be disproportionate to the downing of an unmanned drone. Instead, the president has sent a message to Iran via Oman: come to the negotiating table to end this or the U.S. will strike. The message reportedly said the president didn’t want war with the Islamic Republic, and he would prefer to talk about a handful of issues, but the downing Thursday of an American drone in international airspace was a bridge too far. Iranian officials say they are powerless to decide the issue, which has been conveyed to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Just last week, he publicly told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe there would never be talks with the U.S. as long as President Trump was in the White House. Meanwhile, Israel is still pushing for a harsh military response with government security officials openly complaining in their country’s media that the lack of a “decisive U.S. response” will only embolden the Islamic Republic. A number of mainstream media outlets have also picked up on that message, from FOX News to MSNBC. “FOX and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade belittled the president’s decision not to strike Iran, saying: "I think by not doing something he is doing something. There are consequences for non-action and there's consequences for action. In the Middle East a non-action is looked at in many cases as weakness. And the one quote that just sticks out with me, and it still holds up today, Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, he said, 'If you don’t punish the first insult, more are sure to follow.' What we have seen is we didn’t punish the first insult and more are to follow." NBC News and New York Times political analyst Bret Stephens said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program: "You’re right the President likes to project unpredictability. He thinks that is his signature card. But whether it is tariffs or these called off strikes on Iran, it is predictable. He hesitates and he withdraws at the last minute. There is fear in him. And the Iranians are expert calculators when it comes to figuring out the fear in their enemies. I think they’ve got this guy’s number." But the president defended himself on Twitter this morning, writing: “President Obama made a desperate and terrible deal with Iran - Gave them 150 Billion Dollars plus I.8 Billion Dollars in CASH! Iran was in big trouble and he bailed them out. Gave them a free path to Nuclear Weapons, and SOON. Instead of saying thank you, Iran yelled Death to America. I terminated deal, which was not even ratified by Congress, and imposed strong sanctions. They are a much weakened nation today than at the beginning of my Presidency, when they were causing major problems throughout the Middle East. Now they are Bust! “On Monday they shot down an unmanned drone flying in International Waters. We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone. I am in no hurry, our Military is rebuilt, new, and ready to go, by far the best in the world. Sanctions are biting & more added last night. Iran can NEVER have Nuclear Weapons, not against the USA, and not against the WORLD!” In an interview later today with NBC News’ Chuck Todd, the president said he never fully authorized military strikes on Iran and refuted the reports that American warplanes were already airborne and had to be recalled. He said: “We had something ready to go, subject to my approval. And they came in and they came in about a half hour before. They said, ‘Sir, we’re about ready to go.’ I said I want a better definition.” The president said that while aircraft were not yet airborne, they would have been “pretty soon,” had he greenlighted the mission. Meanwhile, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Air Force claims they showed restraint, too. Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh says there was a P-8A Poseidon surveillance aircraft very near the drone when it was downed. He says the plane had nearly three dozen Americans aboard—but his forces “refrained” from shooting it down because they were only interested in sending a warning to what he called, “the American terrorist forces.” As TruNews reported in Thursday’s God-cast, Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down a U.S. Navy MQ-4C Triton reconnaissance drone in what the U.S. later declared an “unprovoked attack.” Iran, however, claims the drone had violated its airspace and the downing was justified. Meanwhile, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed to have struck a Saudi desalination plant in the city of al-Shuqaiq, which is located in the Jizan province that borders Yemen along the Red Sea. Saudi Arabia responded with ramped up airstrikes on Houthi positions in Yemen. The “war hawks” in Washington were quick to jump on the escalating situation. Senator Lindsey Graham told reporters: “They’re trying to bring Trump back to the negotiating table through intimidation. They’re trying to divide us and the Europeans. They’re trying to drive up the price of oil because they need money. So getting out of the nuclear deal was a good decision because it was a bad deal. To get Trump back to the negotiating table they are trying to use hostile acts as the means to do that. If they are successful, that becomes the template for other outlaw regimes and terrorist organizations.” Graham went on to say that if the U.S. were to relent with Iran, North Korea would soon follow suit, believing that’s the way to bring Washington to the negotiating table with better terms. He also noted the U.S. was now “one step closer” to war with the Islamic Republic. In the midst of all this, India has dispatched its own task force of warships to the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. The flotilla’s mission will be to provide security for Indian-flagged tankers and cargo ships transiting the global hotspot following multiple attacks on commercial vessels. (Photo Credit: Erik Hildebrandt/U.S. Navy) source https://trunews.com/stream/countdown-clock-is-ticking-how-close-are-we-to-world-war-iii

[diariesofahajji]

The 6 days of Hajj

Day 1 - Yaumul Tarwiyah

Most of us set off from Aziziyah to Mina on foot. Genius over here decided to stop to tie her shoe laces with her heavy backpack on. When I stood up a very audible and tangible snap was felt in my ankle. I bit my lip to hide the tears and soldiered on chanting that God was sufficient for me, and the best disposer of my affairs, and furiously begging “save this ankle” the entire time, because the ankle is a particularly important part of the body required for pilgrimage. By the time I got to my tent and checked it to assess the damage, the ankle was completely healed, which astonished me because I know how much pain I was in not much earlier. It was like I was the opposite of Achilles, because every other part of my body, besides my ankle, was in intense pain. Worth noting that maybe very specific supplications aren't always the best idea.

On the first day of Hajj there are no prescribed forms of ibaadah, so the day is spent in contemplation of the days to come (Yaumul Arafat and eid) and also contemplating the requests you have for God and the misdeeds you seek forgiveness for. It was also a day for engaging with your fellow pilgrims and discussing your experiences up to now. I happened to meet some fellow cat lovers, which was great because nothing draws me out of myself more than talking about Pippin. I'm not a mother, and haven't left human babies behind, but i do miss my kitty. He's my friend, who purrs my troubles away. Anyway, in the evening a storm hit Makkah and shook our humble tents in Mina rather violently. As I mentioned before, our Sheikh recited Ar Rahmaan in the middle of the storm and urged us to be more in awe of God's power than afraid. There was no point being afraid, because no matter what we did to hold the tent together, if God wanted to level it with all of us in it, He could've. Was God flexing a proverbial muscle to remind us of His Majesty? Was God sweeping our sins to Arafat a day ahead of us? Maybe the winds simply swept through to purify us for our departure to the holy centre of this planet, where Adam and Eve met after being cast out of Paradise, and where the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ delivered his last sermon, Arafat.

Day 2 - Yaumul Arafat

The typical story: Busses are delayed, poor communication results in people standing in exposed sunlight for extended periods of time. We were mostly dehydrated before we got to Arafat. An old lady saw me crouched on the floor and offered me her toasted almonds and apple juice. Her kindness revived me more than her food. Due to the temperature teetering close to 50 degrees Celsius when wuqoof started, we confined ourselves to the hot and overcrowded tent. It was hard to form a spiritual connection in these conditions. I remember crying back in Joburg when I put together my duaa book. I felt a spiritual connection then. I remember sitting in the Raudah in Madina and feeling the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ gazing at me with love and acknowledgement. I remember looking at the Kaba and feeling that there were no barriers between God and me. However in Arafat, all I could see when I looked up was a dusty tent wall. Reading through my prayer book felt like I was reading a shopping list. So I mustered up as much sincerity as I could and remembered that just physically being in this holy place helped, I remembered that the fact that I was a guest of God personally called to complete my Hajj helped, I remembered that as long as I am here (no matter what state I am in) my prayers will be answered. I've heard that with every tread of the camel that brings you to pilgrimage, a sin is wiped away. I've come from the other end on the world oh Lord, to bear witness to the favours You have bestowed upon me my whole life, and to ask that You continue to provide for me for my remaining days. Please forgive me fatigue. See that I come to you now in humbleness, clinging to my waning attention span, trying to remain awake throughout wuqoof so that i may praise you the best way I know how. Please Allah, even if my humble little duaa book did little justice, please search my heart, Oh All Seeing, All Knowing, The Omnipotent, find my deepest desires and grant those which You believe are best for me.

Once wuqoof ended we began our 14km trek to Muzdalifa to spend the night sleeping on the ground under the stars (which were completely hidden due to light pollution). As we passed Jab Al Rahmah I read the Nabi ﷺ ‘s last sermon out loud for my mother:

O People, lend me an attentive ear, for I know not whether after this year, I shall ever be amongst you again.  Therefore, listen to what I am saying to you very carefully and take these words to those who could not be present here today.

O People, just as you regard this month, this day, this city as Sacred, so regard the life and property of every Muslim as a sacred trust.  Return the goods entrusted to you to their rightful owners. Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you. Remember that you will indeed meet your Lord, and that He will indeed reckon your deeds.  God has forbidden you to take usury (interest), therefore all interest obligation shall henceforth be waived. Your capital, however, is yours to keep. You will neither inflict nor suffer any inequity.

Beware of Satan, for the safety of your religion.  He has lost all hope that he will ever be able to lead you astray in big things, so beware of following him in small things.

O People, it is true that you have certain rights with regard to your women, but they also have rights over you.  Remember that you have taken them as your wives only under a trust from God and with His permission. If they abide by your right then to them belongs the right to be fed and clothed in kindness.  Do treat your women well and be kind to them for they are your partners and committed helpers. And it is your right that they do not make friends with any one of whom you do not approve, as well as never to be unchaste.

O People, listen to me in earnest, worship God, perform your five daily prayers, fast during the month of Ramadan, and offer Zakat.  Perform Hajj if you have the means.

All mankind is from Adam and Eve.  An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor does a non-Arab have any superiority over an Arab; a white has no superiority over a black, nor does a black have any superiority over a white; [none have superiority over another] except by piety and good action.  Learn that every Muslim is a brother to every Muslim and that the Muslims constitute one brotherhood. Nothing shall be legitimate to a Muslim which belongs to a fellow Muslim unless it was given freely and willingly. Do not, therefore, do injustice to yourselves.

Remember, one day you will appear before God and answer for your deeds.  So beware, do not stray from the path of righteousness after I am gone.

O People, no prophet or apostle will come after me, and no new faith will be born.  Reason well, therefore, O people, and understand words which I convey to you. I leave behind me two things, the Quran and my example, the Sunnah, and if you follow these you will never go astray.

All those who listen to me shall pass on my words to others and those to others again; and it may be that the last ones understand my words better than those who listen to me directly.  Be my witness, O God, that I have conveyed your message to your people.”

It was at this point, in Arafat, that the following revelation was sent down to Nabi ﷺ: "…This day have I perfected your religion for you, completed My Grace upon you, and have chosen Islam for you as your religion…" (Quran 5:3)

It looked to me like 70% of all the pilgrims were making this trip on foot. The people on busses on the Bridges above us said we look like flowing water, all walking in the same direction. Almost floating. We took our sweet time, because there was literally nowhere else we had to be in the world. Some chanted Labaik in solemn and uniform minor chords which punctuated their reverence and struggle. As if in marching formation, they proclaimed to God that they were present for service. Others chanted Labaik in perfect harmonies of major chords, and it was as if the sound fluttered around your ears like tiny butterflies. It lifted the spirit and urged me on. I suppose some find Imaan in the solemnity and humility of prayer, and others find Imaan in the colour, music and harmony of this life. It wasn't difficult for me to decide which group I belonged to. We Labaiked our way to our resting place for the night, Muzdalifa. Ahead of us we saw the clock tower, sparkling like the Eiffel Tower, in celebration of Eid. It beckoned to us for Tawaaf e Ziyarah/Ifaadha, but it was just out of reach for the present moment. So we collected some pebbles, took selfies with Palestinians and rested our tired bones for the night.

Day 3 - Eid Ul Adha

At around 10am we walked to the Jamarat Complex to pelt the biggest Jamarah, Aqabah. There are three stone pillars which are pelted 7 times. The biggest of them, Aqabah, commemorates Abraham’s stoning of the devil when he tried to convince Abraham not to sacrifice his son, Ishmael. The second biggest, Wusta, commemorates Hajira’s stoning of the devil when he tried to convince her to stop the sacrificing of her son, Ishmael. The smallest, Oola, commemorates Ishmael’s stoning of the devil when he tried to convince Ishmael to put an end to his own sacrificing. Such was the firmness of their faith. From a less literal perspective, the stoning is symbolic of the pilgrim casting off their lower selves and more baser desires/needs. One also casts off a major sin with each stone throw. We were told that the devil is as close to us all as the blood in our veins. Although the evil forces of this universe were dealt a humiliating blow on Arafat, with the sins of the pilgrims being forgiven, the work of misleading Believers doesn't stop. It was hard to imagine that the devil was absent at “his” own stoning. There was violence in the eyes of people casting stones. One man charged straight through the crowd with a menacing smile on his face, which didn't look normal to me. Thousands have died in the Jamarat Complex because people lose all sense of reserve and decorum. Some primal force takes over their minds. Thereafter we waited for confirmation that our animal sacrifice had been done, cut our hair, and were officially out of the condition of Ihram. After resting for the afternoon we decided to make our way to Masjid al Haram at about 9pm for Tawaaf e Ziyarah which is a compulsory act of Hajj, and the Sa'ee which is waajib (not compulsory, but if excluded without a valid reason requires a sacrifice/charitable offering). Road Travel during the 5 days of Hajj is a nightmare! It seems that only official taxi drivers and SAPTCO busses are allowed anywhere near the Haram, and you often spend an entire week's salary on a one way trip (slight exaggeration). However, we've been told that God in His infinite Bounty and Mercy will return every cent to us which was spent during pilgrimage, so we quietly allowed them to extort us. Being drivers in Johannesburg, my mother and I happily navigated (I mean pushed our way) through the crowded Tawaaf and Sa'ee. By the time we returned to our camp, the Athan for Tahajjud began (3:30am), which meant we were gone for a full 6 hours!! So we soldiered on through our camp’s fajr salaah in congregation. Thereafter our Sheikh, who is a convert, decided to tell us his entire journey to Islam, which although interesting, could've been kept for a more reasonable hour in the day. My mother, sister and I nodded deeply off somewhere in the autobiography around the time he had to be circumcised before he could take his Shahaadah (pledge of Imaan).

Day 4, 5 and 6- 3 Days of Yaumul Tashreeq:

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ said concerning the days of Tashreeq: “They are days of eating, drinking and remembering Allah.” Which is basically all that we did. More enlightening discussions were had, and more socialising was done. People shared what little provisions they had left, shared stories, hopes and dreams. I had a fantastic discussion with a fellow Hujaaj after pelting the Jamarat at night on one of the days of Tashreeq. We talked about everything from Oedipus Rex to Catherine de Medici, Machiavelli, to the meaning of dreams and Plato and our recognition of the form of things from our time in the spiritual realms. She comforted me immensely regarding my primitive notions of what a sin is. She told me that unless I had murdered/harmed someone without cause, or stolen the property of another, any other action in itself is not a sinful thing. It is the intention behind it, and the end (which the action is a means to) which causes the rifts between humans and God. It makes sense that God doesn't forbid certain acts and behaviours for what they are. They are forbidden because of what they draw out of us. They are forbidden because we are weak creatures with very little self control and often very little accountability. There are some questionable acts that unravel the very fabric of our societies and beings. Many may claim that they are highly functional (and often highly spiritual) alcohol drinkers, or drug users. However, as our Sheikh told us, we have a very finely tuned sin-detector inside of us, our hearts. Our hearts feel very uneasy when we partake in things that we wouldn't want anyone to know about firstly, and secondly that causel a feeling of unease inside us. Possessing taqwa requires us to ask ourselves the following question before every action, even before every thought: Would Allah be happy with me if I did/thought this?

Would I be happy with me if I did/thought this?

Armed with my new outlook on action vs intention I now have a more healthy outlook on halaal vs haraam. The lady I spoke to also told me that I was immensely fortunate to have made this journey as a 29 year old unmarried and childless woman, because I'm young enough to reinvent myself without major repurcussions and old enough to have the mental capacity to appreciate this journey. I am starting a new book of life from this day onwards, the same as the day that I was born. A second chance at life. Any Believer would tell you that Paradise is the ultimate attainment, and that it is within reach after pilgrimage, but i am excited for this life! I am excited to approach it with fresh eyes. I am excited to partake in all the halaal enjoyment that this world has to offer me, and I am excited to do my bit to leave this world just a little bit better than I found it.

The three days of Tashreeq passed as such, pelting, eating heartburn-inducing curries, sharing advice on how best to survive the toilets of Mina and remembering God. By the morning of the 6th day of Hajj we were happily on our way back to Aziziyah, which had beds and showers that were completely separate from the toilet :)