Egyptian grandmas are truly something else, whether it’s their delicious food, spoiling antics, or the un-refuted love they have for their grandkids.
Despite this, we cannot avoid the age gap and their relentless stubbornness to do things the old way. Forget about trying to have a conversation about it; it’s their way or the highway. So, let’s meet a character who epitomized the spirit of the Egyptian grandma, Mimi Gamal, in Kamel El Addad:
Evil Eye Annihilator
We all know the evil eye; when someone looks at you in a bad way (with the evil eye) or with jealousy, and bam, something bad happens to you. Of course, that just won’t do so in the past; the older generation had their special ways to counteract it.
Mimi Gamal really got into it in this season of Kamal El Adad. First, she walked around Sharif’s room with bukhoor (incense) before his football match to evade the evil eye. Not only that, but she also got a doll-shaped piece of paper and poked at it while reading out the names of the people she wanted to protect Sharif from when it came to the evil eye.
It’s a whole thing, guys, and to the untrained eye, we kid you not, it looks like voodoo or witchcraft.
Crop Top Is A Faux Pas
The clash of generations comes in so many ways, and today, it even boils down to what you wear when you go out. With the boom of crop tops, shorts, and skirts, clothes are sort of disappearing and shrinking.
When Jessica Hosam El Din is about to go out in a crop top, Mimi Gamal goes into attack mode. She looks the girl up and down and gives her a long lecture on how no girl should go out half naked because, to Mimi Gamal and all Egyptian grandmas, that’s what it looks like.
A Dose of Coffee Cup Reading
Who doesn’t love taking a peek into the future? Well, in Arab culture, we have a very interesting way of doing so. After you drink up a warm cup of Turkish coffee, you flip it and wait to see your fate. Specific ladies in Arab society have a knack for reading the shapes and symbols left behind by the coffee granules.
Mimi Gamal is all about this tradition, so she takes her daughter-in-law, Layla (Dina El Sherbiny), and Layla’s best friend, Inji (Gihan El Shamashergy), to this weird and shady location to meet with a coffee reader. From three men in Inji’s future to Layla supposedly getting divorced, the women definitely got their dose of readings on that day.
Boyfriend Who?
We can’t cover all these topics without hitting the goldmine itself, boyfriends. Let’s just say boyfriends don’t exist in the Egyptian grandma dictionary. There are fiancé’s and husbands, but boyfriends are a big no.
Cue Youssef Gabriel’s character, the love interest of Farida (Lina Sophia), who comes over to the house to meet her dad just to get to know him.
That’s where Mimi Gamal comes in, the moment she meets Youssef, she oversells Farida as a wife, saying she can cook molokhia and what not. But to her surprise, Youssef is just Farida’s boyfriend, a major shock to the traditional grandma.
Taking a peek into Egyptian grandmothers through Mimi Gamal is a hilarious way of uncovering the hilarious tidbits of their personalities.