Ah, the sweet, fond memories of the olden days. We had fun doing some ridiculously pointless things using stationary, we pulled pranks on everyone including our teachers, and we had a special relationship with food. We won’t lie and tell you we were innocent during our schooldays; we’ve made our fair share of trouble. Here are 13 signs you grew up in an Egyptian school (and probably why you turned out the way you are)
Colored Pen? Use ALL the Colors
Ever bought one of those pens that included red, black, green and blue ink? If so, you’ve probably tried to pull them all down at the same time to see how your handwriting will look with it. You’ve also probably broken it that way.
Useless Stationary and Accessories
Slap on bracelets, troll pens, scented erasers, push pencils – which were rendered pointless the moment you lost one of the plastic pieces – and above all floppy disks the capacity of which was 1.44MB… let that sink in for a moment.
So. Many. Obsessions
There was the girl obsessed with Spice Girls, the girl everyone called a tomboy because she was obsessed with Power Rangers, and then there were the rest of the girls who were obsessed with either Backstreet Boys or Titanic. Of course this meant their school supplies were covered with their favorite characters’ pictures. We all knew posters of Nick Carter and Leo DiCaprio covered the walls of their rooms at home.
Second-Skin Glue
Your Arts and Crafts teacher would always request that we buy glue – among the many other stationary we never used – for their class. What we ended up doing with the UHU glue isn’t very crafty; we would slather it on our hands and wait for it to dry. Only to peel it off once it does.
Stamp Fever
Those colorful stamps of random shapes and characters never made much sense, but we all loved them. We would stamp every visible spot of our skin from our hands to our face with them. Why didn’t anyone tell us we looked like idiots?
Uniform Pajamas and/or Modified Uniforms
Getting up early for school was the worst part of our academic life. That’s why the few extra minute of shuteye were very, very precious to us. So precious, in fact, that we would sometimes sleep in our uniform so we can wake up as late as possible. We also put our little touch on our uniforms. Long skirts aren’t what most teenage girls want to wear, but a trick that’s been employed by girls since the 60s would always save the day. We walked in wearing a below-the-knee skirt. Then, we would fold the skirt at the waistband a few times and voila! We had ourselves a nice mini skirt. This worked perfectly if we ditched school, which we sometimes did.
Lines! Lines, everywhere!
Any Egyptian student knows for a fact that lining their notebook meant better grades. Teachers love to see neat, pretty notebooks, don’t they? This doesn’t explain why we would stack lines at the end of each composition, though.
Pranks All ‘Round
From shaking a can of soda before someone opens it, to putting pins on your teacher’s seat, to going as far as putting a whoopee cushion on random seats. Or maybe making a paper “tail” and sticking it to your friend’s pants, or scaring them half to death with a bag balloon, which you would pop right next to them. And you are not Egyptian if you haven’t gotten a bunch of tissues soaking wet and thrown it to the ceiling. Another rite of passage is to prank your friends, and punish your enemies, by spitting chewed up tissues from a straw. We’ve done it all. And detention was totally worth it. The worst of all was “Bodret El 3afreet” there’s nothing magical about it. Maybe hazardous, and definitely disgusting. We would sharpen a pencil until we have a huge pile of shredded wood and pencil lead. We would also use an eraser on a paper to get an equally huge pile of rubber. We would then combine both piles to make an abomination that we called bodret el 3afreet. It was rumored to make your worst enemy itchy!
Unnecessary Pets
With unbelievably short lifespan. Whether it be tiny, colored chicks – which we were sad to know used to have unfortunate fates – to caterpillars that turned into butterflies within days (those, actually, looked pretty cool).
Food, Food, and did we mention Food?
We loved food so much that we may or may not have taken money from younger students, we ate in class behind a book, and we immediately became best friends with the kid who had Nutella or chicken pane sandwiches.
Idols
Every child worth their stationary knew that this was the coolest show on Egyptian TV (at least at the time). Boys wanted her; girls wanted to be her, Xena was the epitome of the 90s and we were fortunate to see her every day on “Elqanah Eltania” and gossip about it the next day at school (even though it was highly censored anyway).
