Not much to post…

I’ve really settled into a routine here. I may be going to see more of the country next week. Luca’s sister is visiting and he’s looking into a weekend (wed-thur-fri) expedition to see some more of the country. I won’t be going to far, but it’ll be good to get out of the city for a while. The countryside looks fantastic, at least it did from the air. On the other hand, this means I’ll come into contact with abject, desperate poverty as opposed to the run of the mill third world city atmosphere. The 5 of us should have some fun, and it’ll break up the study, eat, sleep grind.

Christoph took me to a Palastinian resturant yesterday. We had chicken, rice, bread, and Mashaaka. Mashaaka is a vegtable mix in sauce. I don’t know if I was just craving veggies, but it tasted really good. The tricky thing is eating it. With no utensils, it was a bit of a challange. I had to pinch it with pieces of bread. Christoph pointed out that he had been eating like an Arab and now he looked like one since he got a decent amount of mashaaka on his shirt and pants… I’m going to go back today and attempt to order some fasaa, that lamb concoction that was so god at the other place. If they don’t have it, I’ll go with the chicken…

Finally registered with the embassy. SOme kind soul recommended that I register online, turns out that that is the easiest way to do it. I screwed up the description of my physical address though. Going by what I wrote, I live in the middle of the wadi… So I have to log back in today and correct that and give them my phone number…

The rest of today will be spent studying and washing my clothes. There are some cleaners around, but the guys report random variations in the quality of the results. Much shorter pants have been a common problem, they must wash in really hot water and then blast them dry… I’ll stick to the manual method for a little while.

Randy has suggested posting some audio files. Not sure where I’d post those. I have thought about doing some video and posting it to youtube, but the internet connections here have all but ruled that out. Maybe if I send a dvd to one of you with better bandwidth we can work something out….

Isaac