ahhh!! the sweet smell of home

one of my fondest memories is of our annual family vacations from when we were younger. our travel always started with our baba reciting surat rehman and mama joining in to read aloud the parts she knew by heart. but we havent had a family vac for the past few years so nothing was gonna stop us from going to barian this weekened. not the fact that i burnt my throat drinking acetone( my bad), or that a lizard attacked td , or that two hours before we went i fell down and bruised my leg and arm. so off we went picking our cousins on the way. ok i get car sick when we reach the mountains so my chachoo gave me a gravinate and luckily i survived the trip. reached the beautiful nathia gali where we were staying in a house . the house was in sarhad and ten steps away punjab started :) it is wierd how we draw imaginery lines to seperate ourselves. so at night we decided to go to murree. murree used to be a beautiful hilly area once but is now so full of people that its hard to breath. but we were on a mission we had to get icecream and helium balloons to do the chipmunk voice. ok so we hijabi sisters hate to go in crowded areas and in murree you have to be extra careful as there is a sea full of stupid men who would push, shove or pinch you if they get the chance. so what to do. problem solved we five girls stood in a group while our dads and moms surrounded us, like a chain. now even then one part was open which i had to guard as i was the eldest girl in the group. so like this we started walking towards our goal. ok seriously i was scared to be guarding one side so i thought why should i stand at the side, the girls were old enough to deal with anyone who pinched them. so i rushed forward grabbed my dads arm and held on to dear life as we quickly grabbed the icecream the balloons and ran home. so we went home, talked about scary things in the dark screamed a lot and then went to sleep. the next morning was a beautiful day, clouds everywhere and the beautiful green mountains full of trees and daisies. daisies are my favourite flowers not that i aint fond of roses :) but there is nothing like daisies. they are so beautiful that you can keep looking at them and not get tired. so round and round we went the mountains and then stopped the car as we were told that we can only reach the water falls on foot. while we were climbing up the mountain we met a boy who was singing songs to earn money. he tagged along us and kept singing songs so that we would give him money. so my mom told him that he would only get money if he recited a surat from the quran. he recited surat naas quickly and grabbed his money and ran away to catch other people. after 30 minutes we realized that we had been fooled by the car park guy as he only wanted to charge us for the parking and we would grow old by the time we reached the falls on foot. the funny thing was none of the local people would give directions for the falls as they said that if you want to know where it is you need to hire us as guides. but we being the dheet (stubborn) people we are we found it after dozens of wrong turns on a mountain road so thin (i cant find the exact word)that one wrong turn and youd be off the cliff. finally finding the falls we climbed up (luckily no one else had found the falls so we had it all to ourself) the water was freezing and we had competitions where everyone dipped their feet in the water and the first one to take them out lost. there is not much in nathia gali but the nmature so as we seldom get time to appreciate nature this was our time to relax and observe. then we again had icecream and later had a bbq and played cards in which cheating was the main aim. the high light was when the khans would come to the house with loads of clothes and we would bargain while our dads would make fun of us bargaining. then it was time to come home as we had only two days for fun. ok this time i forgot to take the gravinate and well 5 bags of vomit later when we reached the plain area i was so exhausted that i thought id faint so i told my mom that the only thing that could revive me was icecream, so two icecreams and a box of pringles later i was well enough to bug everyone in the car. so now finally home i am glad that dad and mom took two days off of work. there is nothing like family being together and having fun.

• p.s . i totally forgot about the bandars(monkeys) we saw on the way, there is a whole street full of them, big ones small ones ugly ones cute ones. they run around on the road and if you are eating corn beware you might just be bandarnapped