Nouran Hamam There is a very specific flavor to girlhood in the Middle East, and it belongs entirely to the months of July and August. It is a nostalgic, sun-drenched fever dream made of sticky fingers, makarona w panné packed in Tupperware, loud chalet hallways, and the distinct smell of sea salt mixed with sunscreen. To grow up here is to understand that summer isn’t just a calendar season. It is a collective, chaotic core memory that stays with you forever, defined by a beautiful lack of privacy, a complete aesthetic crisis, and an abundance of love.
While the summer always included those classic road trips to Sinai, the crystal waters of Sharm El Sheikh, and family resorts along the Red Sea, the true spirit of the season was anchored in the raw, unfiltered routine of the coastal beach house.
The Bottomless Fruit Plates and Sunscreen Wars
Every Middle Eastern grandmother possesses a magical, boundary-defying superpower that involves a bottomless plate of sliced fruit. You would be sitting on a plastic beach chair draped in a damp towel, and a massive platter of chilled watermelon, grapes, and peaches would appear. You would eat until you were entirely full, look down, and somehow, the plate was still completely packed. It was a refreshing, endless loop of love that never finished.
But before you could even reach that fruit, you had to survive the gatekeeper of the morning ritual, which was Grandpa.
The sunscreen application was a mandatory, non-negotiable family law. It usually involved Grandpa yelling at you down the hallway because you were always running the second he tried to put it on. He would aggressively slather a layer of thick, white cream onto your face until you looked like a ghost, mixed with that whipped, watery part of the sunscreen from the tear dripping over your face because you literally couldn’t just wait 30 seconds to go to the beach.
The beach itself was a whole other fashion statement. When I was five, I had a severe gluten allergy that gave me a massive bloated belly, but because I absolutely loved pastries back then, I refused to let it ruin my aesthetic. I would confidently rock my two-piece bikini, with the top and bottom perfectly framing my prominent little gluten bump right in the middle. That unfiltered confidence was the raw essence of the massive family trip. It was the kind of vacation where you went with your cousins and ended up going with five fingers and coming back with four, and that madness was exactly how you knew it was fun.
The Unofficial Chalet Aesthetic Starter Pack
If you look back at the visual diary of those summers, every single rental chalet or family beach house shared the exact same interior design DNA. It was essentially the final dumping ground for city clutter. Families would collect every single outdated, broken, or unloved item they stopped using from their actual home in the city and ship it down to the coast. The result was a space of pure visual chaos, less like a holiday home and more like a crowded warehouse full of weird, unusable stuff. It was a distracting patchwork of mismatched couches and chipped tables that felt way too frantic to logically call a place, yet somehow it defined the entire vibe.
And right in the middle of it all, the beds were always topped with that iconic blue and white heavy woven blanket. You know the one – it features a completely bizarre, geometric, pseudo-pharaonic pattern whose origin remains entirely unknown to science, yet it exists in every single coastal closet in Egypt.
The beach days were spent trying to execute the ultimate girlhood beauty hacks we swore by. Instead of just swimming, we were fully committed to the legendary Birell malt trend. We spent the entire trip pouring cans of warm, sticky malt soda over our heads under the baking sun, convinced it was going to give us the ultimate summer hair brightening and effortless blonde highlights. It did absolutely nothing, of course. It just left us on a continuous loop of sticky, dry, straw-like hair texture until we finally headed back to Cairo at the end of the trip with a head of completely fried, damaged hair.
Then came the late-afternoon transition to the rental beach buggies just outside the compound gates. The mandatory uniform to protect yourself from the flying sand was a Bedouin Palestinian keffiyeh wrapped tightly around your face. This always led to that deeply awkward, intimate silence where the local guy renting out the buggies would stand right in front of you to tie the scarf over your head. He’d be pulling the fabric tight, staring right into your eyes from two inches away, and the silence would stretch out so long that you’d genuinely start questioning your entire relationship status with him afterwards because of his little look. You’d ride off into the dunes with oversized sunglasses, feeling like an absolute warrior princess, completely ignoring the fact that your shins were covered in a permanent layer of yellow coastal dust.
The Costume Party Incident and the Clown Phobia
Every beach resort or compound had its annual summer costume party, which was essentially the social event of the season for the kids. Naturally, the standard code for the girls was a sea of glittering Indian outfits, Cute Barbies, and white angels.
Then, there was me.
I don’t know what possessed my childhood soul, but I flatly refused the princess aesthetic. Instead, I fiercely insisted on wearing a deeply disturbing, scary clown costume. And once it was on? Kill me, but I was never taking it off. I fully committed to the character and started running after my cousin all over the resort. To give you an idea of how intense that chase was, it has been seventeen years since that night, and we are still actively working on the severe clown phobia I gave him.
The commitment was so real that it even rolled into my summer fling back then. Pretty sure I met him on the very last day of vacation while I was still wearing my scary clown costume. That is exactly where my nonchalant personality started to develop, because I wasn’t taking that costume off until I secured the “Best Costume of the Resort” award. Honestly, whenever I go to an interview now and they ask me about a time I showed true commitment, I should probably just tell them about the summer of 2009.
Bringing Back the Chaos
Looking back, those summers were entirely unfiltered and wonderfully unhinged. We didn’t need a perfectly curated, luxury experience because the absolute madness of the family trip was the entire point. As the new summer season rolls in, I find myself wanting to bring that exact energy back—the zero-cares confidence, the endless plates of fruit, the total lack of personal space, and the sheer joy of living in the moment. I’m packing my bags, embracing the chaos, and honestly? I’m even tempted to bring back the scary clown costume. My cousin is finally making real progress in therapy, and it feels like the perfect time for a relapse.
