Egyptian Scribbles: A guide to Sheesha… the ubiquitous Egyptian water pipe…

Wednesday 17 October 2007

A guide to Sheesha… the ubiquitous Egyptian water pipe…

A guide to Sheesha… the ubiquitous Egyptian water pipe…
1) Ensure that the mouthpiece is not encrusted with too much nasty crap. Those with particularly weak constitutions can request a plastic cap to cover the mouth bit (but that means you’re a total wimp… )
2) Breathe in deeply so that the water bubbles into a fury
3) Try not to choke (particularly if, like me, you don’t generally smoke) as you allow the caustic apple/ watermelon / lemon flavoured smoke to attack your throat and lungs
4) Blow out and gasp for oxygen
5) Repeat a few times
6) Finally get extremely dizzy and put your head against any available pillar/ chair/ friend
7) Don’t think too much about cancer – living in Cairo is in any case equivalent to smoking 30 cigarettes a day…. So what does an extra carcogenic kick matter?

2 comments:

HoSSaM said...: Nice way of showing the way to enjoy SheSha; 17 October 2007 at 13:45
Ahmed Al-Sabbagh said...: hehehe

i like shisha

can you visit my blog to see me and my german friend
"how can we buy shisha"

nice to see your blog; 21 October 2007 at 14:51

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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."