Egypt

After graduating from college, I decided to go on a long vacation. My vacation was originally planned to be two months. However, due to circumstances I had to cut it short and ended up spending three weeks with my than time boyfriend visiting him in his home country, Egypt. And then another week in Munich visiting my aunt after 10 years and seeing meeting my uncle for the first time. Since she had married three years earlier. Egypt left an impressing feeling in me. I had an amazing good time and I saw so many things. I was on my first vacation since I had started college on top of that I was visiting my boyfriend. I had always lived at home and did not know fully, freedom. And it was freedom, complete freedom that I got on that trip. We did everything and anything that we wanted to do at any time of the day at night. It was a vacation in which we had breakfast at 2 pm and went to bed at 7 am, when others say good morning to each other we said good night. In those rare occasions when we did go to bed early, at maybe 12 am, we could hear kids outside screaming, running and playing. As I lay next to Alaa and listened to those kids playing I felt so completely at peace and I felt a great happiness. Maybe because those noises outside from the kids reminded me in a way of my childhood in my own country, when us kids in the whole neighborhood would come together and play late at night, the game hide and seek, but we didn't play it inside, instead the neighborhood kids played hide and seek and there were no boundaries, you could hide three or four blocks away. Even to this day in my country kids play outside always, even late at night and they have a childish innocence and freedom that kids in America don't have. So maybe that is why I felt so at peace and I slept so good those nights. Now when I wake up in the middle of the night and can't fall back asleep because it's as if someone woke me up to ask me about my life, my goals and accomplishments, during such nights when I try to force myself to go to sleep and try to block negative thoughts, I close my eyes and deeply try to imagine those nights (try to relive those nights in my imagination) when I laid next to Alaa in our apartment at the outskirts of Cairo, listening to those kids playing outside. And sometimes

that does work and I fall back to sleep.