One year down...

Last night we celebrated our first anniversary! A whole year has passed since our beautiful Cairo wedding; since we danced under the stars, right along the Nile River, and almost set fire to the hotel when the wind sent our flying lanterns in every which way. Surrounded by our family and friends, we danced to and celebrated every unique detail of that wedding, all of which, we custom picked. It was such a beautiful day, just bittersweet that I was missing family and friends from home.

Since then, everything has happened to us. So many changes, so many life events, so many ups, so many downs. 'They' say that the first year of marriage is the hardest, and with everything that we've withstood, the fact that we survived is a testament to marriage and our relationship to each other. Marriage is really hard, but so is life. 

The first anniversary gift is traditionally paper, so we started the day by going through our wedding photos and selecting the ones we would gift ourselves and print. All our picture frames are finally filled with beautiful pictures of us on our wedding day, on safari, and from our past. Then we gifted each other with books. Bib gifted me a cookbook that I fell in love with, but only ever mentioned it to him once. Now that we live in NYC, I've been on a quest to learn the authentic Middle Eastern recipes we enjoyed while living in Egypt. Olives, Lemon & Zaatar is a book filled with beautiful recipes and stunning photographs, I've been obsessed with it since I first read it. His plan is to have us visit the chef/writer's restaurant and have the book signed.

We topped it all off with a wonderful, romantic, candlelit dinner and listened to a mix of jazz and Fayrouz.

Traditionally, you're supposed to eat the top layer of your wedding cake on your first anniversary, but since we had to eat it early and leave it behind in Egypt, I tried to recreate a version of the cake we ate on our katib kitab (legal marriage) day, with the colors from the wedding.  Admittedly, my color and decoration skills reflected nothing close to what I was trying to achieve, but the cake was delicious!

I realize that it has been nearly half a year since this blog was updated, and since so much has happened in between, I will be catching you up and filling you in!