When I was 10 years old, my family and I went to Pakistan so I could attend my uncle's wedding. This trip would be the first time I've been back there since I was five. I was really looking forward to this trip, but my mother did her best to get me excited by telling me stories from her childhood in Pakistan. Hearing these stories made me happy and I became less and less reluctant to go. To say that Pakistan was a culture shock for me would be an understatement. I started noticing the drastic differences immediately upon stepping off the plane. Even though it was mid-November, it was still stiflingly hot outside. There were people screaming, cars honking and trash everywhere. The money exchange man tried to scam us by lying about the exchange rate and the taxi driver dropped us off three blocks from our intended destination. For me, this trip was nothing like my mother said it would be. One day, we were getting ready to take a train to Islamabad, which would take six hours. We stopped at a bookstore to look around before our train left. It was there that I saw a battered copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I never liked any of the Harry Potter films and my teachers discouraged me from reading them. However, it was the only book in the store in English, so I picked it up and reluctantly began reading it. Little did I know that this book would soon change my life. Before this assignment, I probably would have said that Harry Potter didn't change my life. I already loved reading when I found Harry Potter in fifth grade. I had loving parents and friends, so there wasn't really a hole for JK Rowling's words to fill and fill. However, after finishing the entire series, I realized that I had... half the paper... ... earnings at the end of the day” (Lanich). Works Cited Alton, Anne Hiebert. “Generic Fusion and the Harry Potter Mosaic,” in Harry Potter's World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives. Ed. Elizabeth E. Heilman. New York: Routledge, 2003, 141-162. Elliott, Jane. “Trampling on the Harry Potter buzz.” Bitch Magazine: Feminist Perspectives on Pop Culture (2001) http://www.bitchmagazine.com.Lanich, Michael. “Harry Potter's Legacy: Tracing His Global Rise and What It Means.” The Spotlight review. The Spotlight Review, July 4, 2011. Web. January 20, 2014Schoefer, Christine. “Harry Potter's Women's Problems.” January 13, 2000, http://www.salon.com.Zipes, Jack. "The Harry Potter phenomenon, or why all the talk?" in Sticks and Stones: The Problematic Success of Children's Literature from Peter Slovenly to Harry Potter. New York: Routledge, 2002.