Manakah and my introduction into the Ethiopian Community in Sana'a

Today I went on a day trip to Manakah, the most beautiful place in Yemen.

Today I awoke early and we were off on the road to Manakah!
It was a long drive through the mountains west of Sana'a, made longer by our hour long stop at a military checkpoint while they made sure the way was clear. When we arrived at Manakah (I may have slept...), we drove through the town located on a ridge between two mountains to a high peak. After hiking up halfway with the goats, we arrived at the house of one of our Yemeni staff. Manakah is the hometown of the owner of the college and most of the staff are related to him in somewhere and are from Manakah as well. The view was amazing with high peaks and deep valleys, and green in a way that Sana'a definately is not.
From the mountain, we bused over to Al-Hajjarah, a village on a mountain peak (literally, 3 out of the 4 sides were cliffs!). Mohammed, a 7 year old, volunteered himself to be my guide of the town. For about 3 seconds I was so surprised with this generosity, until he told me 20 feet into the tour that the last stop would be his family's shop. Oh well. The tour was wonderful, I saw the oldest building in Al-Hajjarah, the Jewsish settlement, and the amazing views. And the inside of Mohammed's shop. The children here were incredibly well-trained. The bus rolls into the village and almost immediately is surrounded by little 'port-a-shops' on card tables. An interesting town, but the kids were a little too eager.
After Al-Hajjarah, the bus took us back into Manakah for lunch at a hotel, complete with traditional music and dancing! The music was great, and the dancing was complete with swirling jambiyyas. A little scary but a lot of fun to watch.
Our last stop in manakah was al-Hoteib, an Ismaili village and pilgrimage site with pilgrims coming from as far as India, America, and Indonesia. By far the nicest and cleanest town in the area (possibly the country - I would debate that), it receives a lot of money from Ismailis abroad and has been able to keep the town looking beautiful and the mosque whiter than the white house.
We climbed to the beak above the town to the 6th century tomb of Ismaili scholar, ready?, Hattem bin Ibrahim al-Hussein al-Hamadi. I considered adding more names to be funny but someone would wikipedia that and catch me in a second. The view from the peak, while hazy beyond a couple miles, was incredible. The entire countryside is terraced to the last meter and thus is green as far as the eye can see.
It reminds me of all the photos in National Geographic of the Chinese countryside. I can't get over how beautiful this place was and have resigned myself to the fact that none of my photos will ever do this region justice.
The ride home from Manakah was just as awesome, as the sun set over the mountains behind us, there was a light sprinkle (gasp! Rain? In Yemen? Nooo), and the descent from the mountains after sunset into Sana'a.
That weekend I had my first taste of Ethiopian culture at the Ethiopian club, a dance club in Sana'a, and was subsequently invited to an Ethiopian wedding! It was a huge dance party! And I know I inherited some serious dance moves from my mother, but I looked like a tree with roots next to these powerdancers. I simultaneously learned some new dance moves and entertained an entire wall of old Ethiopian men and women who were wondering who this white girl was. The food was strange but the music and the dancing kept me there for hours. I'll get a better look at the Ethiopian culture in a week when I head to Addis Ababa for 5 days during break!

Much love,
Katie

Girls Day!

Wednesday was a day of surprises. Instead of going to class for the last two hours in the morning, our teacher took us a couple blocks away to the National Museum. Inside was a very eclectic mixture of random artifacts, an entire room dedicated to the life of the President, pictures from the 1930's taken by some German eccentric, three fake lions from Kenya...you get the idea. Not really Smithsonian standard but what was interesting was seeing if I had the arabic to read the exhibit signs. In a separate building was an audio-visual exhibit on Soqotra, an island off the southern coast of Yemen that has been labeled "the Galapagos of the Middle East". That exhibit was very well done and really made me want to visit Soqotra while I am here. Unfortunately, in the summer it is incredibly windy and stormy, and the only flights to the island are for food and supplies. We also received a pamphlet on "Islam for Infidels" (not the actual title) which lectured us on the things Islam has done for the world. While I agree with some of the facts, there are others that are completely laughable to me. That the veil prevents women from getting raped in the arab world? Personally I think it's because the woman's family will kill you but hey, I am an infidel.

Later that day, 7 of us from the school set off to play soccer with Yemeni women. We went by taxi to the Yemeni International School, which had a field (of gravel) surrounded by high walls. Women here do not take off their niqabs unless no one (with the exception of other women and their husbands) can see them. One Yemeni woman and one woman from India who taught biology in Sana'a came to play with us. Before going to play, the four Danish girls, Wendy, and I all went and bought the Yemeni soccer uniforms (for 5 dollars), so we were ready to play.
After doing some drills made more difficult by the fact that we only had 2 balls, we split into teams and scrimmaged. My team was me and 3 of the Danes, all in matching uniforms, and we rocked that gravel field. The goal of the team is to get Yemeni women in a place they feel comfortable and teach them to play soccer, so next week we're hoping to get more women from Sana'a to come.

After soccer, I got into a taxi with two other girls from the school and went to a women's party that was being hosted by a sister of one of the male teachers. I wasn't sure I wanted to go, but once I got there I didn't want to leave! Since there were no boys allowed, all of the women were dressed in fancy, slightly scandalous dresses and everyone was dancing. There was a ton of food, fruit juices, tea, shisha, and qat. Whenever girls got up to dance, everyone sitting on the couches around the room would clap and sometimes the Yemeni women would do that "ALALALALALALALLALALA" sound with their tongues that you only hear in movies with terrorists. While Hollywood uses that sound for crazed extremists, in Arabic countries it's simply an expression of joy. After a couple hours we finally had to leave, and all the women veiled back up to leave the house, donning the all black that left me unable to discern who was who, even though I had been dancing and talking with them for hours.

I think the most interesting thing I learned today was how women in general live behind the scenes. You see them on the street and they're veiled to the point where you can only see their eyes. They don't work in the stores so you don't interact with them when shopping, women cannot eat in public so you don't see them in the restaurants, when they ride the bus they are normally very quiet. But there is this underground culture of women behind closed doors that is full of laughter and smiles and great dancers and snappy dressers. It's all very unexpected but I am so happy that it's something I can enjoy while I'm here. The women here have such strong bonds of sisterhood with each other, and are amazingly willing to apply the same sense of hospitality and fun to strange westerners. I've started to ramble but the whole day was a peek into the world of women here in an Islamic society.

Much love, and while I do love the female community here, I love shorts and t-shirts more.

Katie

The first weekend

(It's long, I'm sorry, I really am)
As a special Happy Weekend! present, on Thursday morning all the students staying for over one month walked over to the Yemeni Health Laboratories for the HIV test required in order to obtain a residency visa. It was definitely not the hospital of a developed country but the needle was opened in front of me by the female doctor (female for the girls, male for the boys - we were separated by curtains even though all we were exposing was our arm). No bandaids for the boys either - tough love. My 'non reactive' results back today and hooray! I can stay in Yemen.
Also on Thursday was my first trip to the Shumaila Hari - the supermarket. Six of us piled into a dabub and headed to Hadda Street about 15 minutes away. The Shumaila Hari is two stories, but only a quarter of this is actually food. The upstairs has clothes only (although a guy at the gym told me that he bought his shirt, which has an angry gorilla on it and says "Unleash the Beast" - tempting) and half of the downstairs is appliances, etc. Most interesting is the cheese section and fruits and vegetable section, both of which are filled with a variety of foods that I have never seen before. Yemen is also well known for its honey, and there is a section of the food area devoted to the 15 or so different varieties of honey, which you order and they ladle into a glass jar. There are also armed security guards at the door, but a Baskin Robbins stand outside - that balances out right?
Overall, the military presence in Sana'a is very evident. Outside of every Parliament building and Government owned building there are at least two guards. Since there are 3 of these buildings in my neighborhood, the soldiers are hard to miss. Which I don't think I could ever do anyway, due to their incredible uniforms. There's the regular camouflage of course, but then there is also a bright purple camouflage, as well as a bright orange camouflage. The purple isn't bad, but the only place I can see the orange working is at Laser Tag.
13 June (Friday the 13th, actually) was my first excursion out of Sana'a and into the surrounding countryside, and it was amazing. We left at nine in the morning from the Markez and headed off in a bus with 14 students, 8 Yemeni staff from the Markez who spoke enough English to say "Everyone here?", but that was about it, and one absolutely insane driver. I have realized by now how much Yemenis love their car horns, but this man would be completely alone on a country road and honk his horn. Our first stop out of the city was Wadi Dahar, a Yemeni "Scenic Overlook" over a fertile valley that contains the Dar al-Hajjar, the imam's rock palace.
While I did get a picture with a falcon on my shoulder, I didn't realize that, when a man comes and puts a falcon on your shoulder without you asking, you still have to pay. Whoops.
Our next stop was Thula, a city on the UNESCO tentative list for inclusion as a World Heritage site, which it should be, as it was first settled in the 2nd century, and is the best preserved fortified town in Yemen. It is at the top of a hill and surrounded by a thick stone wall about 10 meters high, with four baabs, or gates, that were opened during the day.
The town was full of houses several stories high made of mud bricks and stones, and has several cisterns within the walls. It withstood several invasions by both the Egyptians and the Ottomans. It has become a tourist attraction, which means that there are small children everywhere either trying to sell you things on the spot or drag you to their parents' antiques shop. The view of the surrounding countryside was incredible. Most of the farming here is done with terraces built into the sides of the hills.
We left Thula and headed to Shibam for lunch at a hotel. We ate in a mafraj, which literally means 'room with a view' with couches on the floor and low tables. Everyone had to take their shoes off in the hall way, and the other rooms around ours were segregated into men and women.
I have never seen so much food. Johanne from Germany, Tina from Thailand, and I personally saw that an entire pan of honey cake did not go to waste. After lunch and tea, we rolled ourselves back into the bus and headed 350 meters practically straight up a mountain to the village of Kawkaban. There were several points at which I was convinced the driver was going to lose it and we would start rolling backwards. Kawkaban is a village on top of a mesa-like formation, 350 m almost directly above Shibam, at 2800 m above sea level. In times of war, the villagers of Shibam would flee up vertical (more or less) path up the cliffs to Kawkaban and take refuge within its 20 m high stone walls. There is only one door into Kawkaban, and it is still locked every night. Throughout its history, the town withstood invasions up until the invention of air power in the mid-1960s, when it was holding out against the revolution.
In both Shibam and Kawkaban, the prime attractions were the antique shops. Small children were constantly following us around, either asking for money to buy soccer balls or for pens. The main highlight of Kawkaban was the incredible view.
We also hiked down the cliffs to Shibam, but as amazing as the view was, my attention was primarily focused on the ground so as not to fall.
We finished the hike down the mountain in about an hour and headed back to Sana'a. On the way back (as well as the way out) we encountered several military checkpoints checking all cars on the roads. Nothing like the sobriety checkpoints in the states, these had armed tanks sitting in the crossroads. Overall it was a great trip, I know the pictures don't do any of these places justice, but enjoy them anyway!
Saturday signified the end of the weekend (weird, right?) so we had class all morning. But on the way home from lunch, I was accosted by a bevy of small children who had been playing soccer near the Markez and had let me try for a goal. The oldest, Ahmed, demanded that I come and play soccer with them later that day. I went to the gym first, and on my way home found myself in the most ridiculous dabub in the world, and I wish I had had my camera, because I'm not quite sure I am going to be able to do it justice. First of all, the inside of the dabub was unlike any of the others, which are covered in a cheap vinyl. The inside of this dabub was plush red velour. With Celine Dion on high volume. A giant stuffed heart with flowers around it was dangling by my ear. The normal white light had been removed and red mood lights were in place for the nighttime riders. And last but not least was the sticker on the window that said, in english, with giant red lips - "Kees Me!". The dabub was looking pimped out, until the driver turned around to collect his fare with a cheek that looked like it contained a softball. Incredibly unattractive.
Anyway, I arrived back in my neighborhood, walked through a small door into a courtyard to play soccer. Ahmed, Abu Bakr, Ibrahim, and Zait were waiting for me. Their ages range from about 6 to 9, Ibrahim and Zait are brothers, the courtyard has a mound of wooden chairs in the middle, and they all call me 'cat-ie'. A recipe for a great time. I was playing in my baltu and hijab (HOT AS AN OVAN) which meant that I could hide the ball under my baltu when no one was looking. Since the courtyard was small we played mostly keep away with no teams until Ibrahim kicked the ball through my legs. Then there was a new game - kick the ball through cat-ie's legs. Ahmed's mother came out to meet me, as well as the aunt of Ibrahim and Zait, who speaks about as much english as I speak Arabic. This was my first experience seeing women here without the full Yemeni garb. Because they were in a private home, both women were dressed in tee-shirts and jeans. I left after45 minutes for dinner, completely winded, and having promised several times to come back.
I can't believe how nice the people here are. Between my new friends next door and Mohammed and Ali (who we went and visited again) and my new friends at the gym, everyone is very open and everyone who knows I am here to study Arabic forces me to speak to them in Arabic, although a lot of them like to practice their english on me.
I've already started planning some pretty cool trips with friends here at the Markez, so not only will I hopefully have some good stories but I will have some awesome pictures.

The bus, the gym, and the Russian Club

(The view from my window)


Happy Weekend!!
Well at least it is for me!
The weekend in Yemen is Thursday and Friday, so we are out of class for the weekend. Wednesday after classes let out was also the Welcome BBQ that featured unknown meats, unknown veggies, and an extremely talented fellow student named Anoush who plays the oud. It is the Arabic version of the lute, sounds similar to spanish guitar players, and was accompanied by all the Yemeni staff whenever they knew the words. I learned that the Sana'a city soccer team plays on Fridays against teams from other cities in Yemen and that the stadium is packed, so that's definately going to be on the list for the summer.















(The baltu sleeve)

I bought a baltu - it's the long black dress that the Yemeni women wear, along with their niqabs. I just figured when I walk alone it best to fit in as much as possible. But now that I own one I've been wearing it all the time. As a westerner, I have to wear long pants and a long sleeve shirt that covers my stomach and my chest, and that gets hot very quickly. Under the baltu I can wear shorts and a tee-shirt and am much much much cooler (both in temperature and in style, of course). It's also a lot like wearing a uniform, and twelve years of Catholic school has definately left me very lazy when it comes to my fashion choices. With the baltu, put on whatever you want (with me that probably means it doesn't match at all) and throw the baltu on top and voila! you are good to go. Plus it feels like a really long, really comfortable nightgown. PJs 24/7!

Class is going well. The small size (8 people, which is actually big for the school here) is much better than my 15 person classes at Georgetown. On Wednesday we had to write a one page essay on anything and then read it in class - mine was on the hijab shopping experience with Mohammed and Ali. And then, in grammer, my teacher Sultan gave me thumbs up and told me one of my sentences was both long and beautiful. Wahoooo!

But it's the weekend now! We killed some time before the Welcome Barbaque with a massive Pass the Pigs game (yes..the pigs have made it to a different continent to rave reviews!!).
Yesterday was also my first trip to the gym. I went with Ken, a guy who has been here since October, another boy from DC, and my roommate Katie. Collectively, my roommate and I are known as "the Katies" and separately are known as big Katie and little Katie. I tried to convince everyone that 'I AM A BIG GUUUUYYY' but they didn't go for that and big and little Katie has stuck. Anyway, the gym is across town and so today was the big day that I figured out the bus system here. Dabub, as the buses are called, are not buses so much as mini-minivans. They fit 6 people in the back on two benches facing each other, one in the passengers seat, and a driver who almost always has a tennis ball of qat in his cheek. A 15 minute drive through traffic for 20 YR (about 10 cents) took us past the grand mosque (I'll get a picture next time I go by it, it's huge) which is being built with the President's own money and has architechts and artists from around the world working on it.

The gym itself is a nice western gym, owned and operated by a body-building afficiando named Najeeb who has a picture of himself with Arnold Schwarzenegger at the front desk. There are women's hours, but they are early in the morning when we have class. The gym is westernized enough, though, that as long as the women is a westerner herself and dressed decently it's not a problem at all. There were two other women in the gym besides Katie and myself, but besides that it was all Yemeni men in jeans and tee-shirts working out. For inspiration, a video of the Mr. Universe championship was on all the TV screens. I don't think anything has ever made me want to work out less then severely tanned men in shiny speedos and incredibly well developed muscles right under their arms which I think lizards also have to help them glide through the air. Just a guess...these guys are not flying anywhere. The music was incredible, to be honest. For a moment I thought they had stolen my workout mix and were playing it over the loudspeakers. Then I heard "Apple Bottom Jeans" in Yemen and felt slightly sick. But the most incredible thing about this gym (it's a Weider gym so there is a shrine to Joe Wieder on the wall - I'm not kidding, its a greek temple like structure with his upper body painted on the wall) is the picture of Ahhnold himself on the wall. But not just the picture - it's signed "Keep pumping, Arnold Schwarzenegger". After seeing that I couldn't wait to get back to the weights. It was a little hot in the sweatpants but nothing I can't get used to.

Then, after dinner and some homework, was an adventure to the Russian Club. The Russian Club is a bar/dance club owned by two old Russian men in the Tourist City, a walled part of the city which Yemenis are not allowed in. To be quite honest, between the massive amounts of smokers, Russian music videos and bad 80's music (to be fair, they did play 'I will survive' but I think that might have been the high point), and arrival of Somali women of the night, Katie and I decided by 1230 that we had had enough. I don't think we'll be back, but we did meet a wonderful girl from the gym there who lived in Baghdad teaching English for a 10 months in 2007. Her story of her posing with an AK-47 was both entertaining and also made me happy I was not in Baghdad.

But yes! So in the past couple days I have been wearing a baltu, eating with my hands, and conquering the dabubs and the taxis. Tomorrow a small group of us are heading out of the city to Shebam Kowkaban. "Look out at the ancient palace of Dar al-Hajar, visit the ancient cisterns of Thula, and the breathtaking views of the mountain villages of Kowkaban and Shebam. Enjoy a traditional Yemeni meal in Shebam and then, depending on students, we may either hike up to Kowkaban (strenuous) or hike down from Kowkaban (easy). Those who do not wish to hike may take the bus to the destination point." My pride will not allow me to step one foot in that bus so we will see how the legs feel on Saturday. And now that I have the pictures figured out thanks to a guy on my floor there's no telling what you might see!!
Much love,
Katie

A treasure hunt

As of this morning I hadn't decided if I was going to write something everyday or just when something interesting happened - but after today it looks like something interesting is going to happen everyday!
This morning was the first morning of classes. After the placement test yesterday they put everyone into the appropriate level for today. I either did so well on my test (impossible) or so bad that I didn't even make the list, and so I spent the first 20 minutes being led around from classroom to classroom. I ended up and a perfect level for me, alot farther back than where I had technically ended at Georgetown but all the review is going to help alot.
There are four hours of class each morning, 2 hours with one teacher focusing on vocabulary and speaking and 2 hours with another teacher focused on grammer and reading. I volunteered to have a conversation in the grammer class and proceeded to ask another student, after she told me she didnt have any brothers or sisters, where her siblings when to school. Just trying to learn.
After class and lunch, I began to plan my treasure hunt for the day. An adapter, a headscarf, childrens books, and dinner. But wait...it's to hot, everything is closed - I guess the Spanish really do have it down with their afternoon siesta.
But about the best part of the day. Around 6 pm, 5 of us set off on the streets. We got our pictures taken for our residency visas at a hole in the wall picture shop, and then split up. Katie and Mike headed off to find the ATM at the bank al-Islam and Joanne, Blake, and I headed off to find electric adapters. My personal motto here so far has been 'the more you get lost, the more you see'. I don't think Blake or Joanne agree... Anyway we found what we needed at a roadside secondhand store, and then Joanne led us off to find headscarves.
We arrived in the souq that sold Yemeni textiles and headed into a booth named "Sam City". As we were looking at headscarves, we introduced ourselves to Ali and Mohammed. Or, as they told us so we could remember them better, Mohammed Ali! The Greatest! After looking at materials for a couple minutes, they invited us in, and Mohammed asked, "do you like tea?" Well, yes, the tea here is incredible, and I thought he was asking in an "Ah, so you're in Yemen, how do you like the tea?" So yeah, I do like it. "Ok, I'll go get some." While he was gone, Ali taught Joanne and I how to wrap the material like the hijab that Muslim women wear. In Yemen, however, the hijab is actually much less comman than the full black with the niqab, the veil across the face. Up until very recently, the women here wore very colorful materials - lots of reds and yellows and greens - over the black batu. But the Wahabi influence from Saudi Arabic has resulted in the majority of the women, at least in Sana'a, wearing the totally black robes. It's a shame that the tradition seems to be dying out because the older traditional materials are much more colorful. Anyway, as conservative as the hijab may sound, it's actually much more liberal than the niqab. I didn't think I'd be comfortable wearing anything that covered my head, as it's so hot here already. But the more time I spend on the streets, the more I want to cover myself, and at least attempt to fit in.
Anyway, back to Sam City. Ali wrapped both Joanne and I up, all the while saying, "I guess this is how it's done. This is how it looks like it should be done." Blake, sitting quietly in a corner, finally got pulled in when we convinced him to try on the traditional male headdress, a kofi. On the way over, he had remarked that him wearing a Kofi in Yemen would be like going to Mexico and wearing a huge sombrero - maybe a little disrespectful? But Ali said "la la la" ('no no no') and sat him down and showed us how to wrap to kofi on. Blake looked in the mirror, remarked that, well, it's already on my head, and bought it. And wore it around. For the rest of the night. Then Mohammed came back with the tea and we sat in the booth and drank and talked about soccer and school and being in Yemen. (By the way, all of this visit in in Arabic. The people on the street are incredibly friendly. They know you've come a long way to learn their language and, as Mohammed said, "a student of arabic is a friend of mine." He and Ali invited us back anytime to talk and drink. It's a different experience than in class, because we were talking about things we wanted to know and wanted to try to say, and Mohammed and Ali would explain what we were saying wrong as well as answering our questions.
We finally had to leave to meet up for dinner. We ate at the same place as yesterday, a place in an alley called Aden Port Restaurant. Stopped in a bookstore on the way home for children's books. I got one about a genie, one about a very angry looking cyclops, and a romantic love story (but they might die in the end....the pictures don't look too good.
Anway, overall the treasure hunt was a big success! and my first personal encounter with the locals has left me thoroughly excited for the rest of the summer.
I'm still trying to figure out the pictures...Dad's been sending me how-to-lists so I can make them easier to download.
Maa Salaama

في صنعاء

Ahalan wa sahalan!
I have finally reached Sana'a, the capital of Yemen. I left at 5:30 from Dullas airport after meeting another student in line. Johanna is from the DC area and actually worked at the Tombs before going to the University of Toronto. 8 hours (and 27 Dresses, The Bucket List, Fool's Gold, and Horton Hears a Who) later we arrived in Frankfurt and met several other students before hopping on Yemenia Airlines. A brief layover in Rome (asleep) and off we were over the Mediterranean. It was so incredibly blue, and the clouds were little popcorn clouds so low to the sea that it was almost impossible to tell if we were upside-down or right-side up. As night fell we were flying over the complete blackness of the Arabian Desert, but a fantastic lightning storm to the east lit up the clouds as if there was a strobe light going off within them. We landed in Sana'a (the smoothest landing I have ever felt, ever) and stood in line for visas for 45 minutes. It was here, in the immigration department of the airport, that I had my first culture shock.
There is no toilet paper.
Not only is there no toilet paper, the toilet is a hole in the floor.
I am all for experiencing new cultures - but this one almost broke me.
After collecting our baggage we headed out to experience first hand the chaos that is the Yemeni streets. There are no lines in the roads and therefore, apparently, no rules. Drivers use their horns in a way that would get you arrested for aggressive driving in the US. After stopping by at a streetside food vendor for a sausage-frenchfry-in-pita concoction we finally arrived at the Markez, the main building of the school where the classrooms and my dorm room are. My room is at the top of the building, on the 6th floor. I couldn't figure out why these six flights of stairs were so hard for me. Am I really that out of shape (possible), are my bags that heavy (also possible)? Wait, Sana'a is 7,220 feet above sea level. Yes! An excuse! And an opportunity for some high-altitude training. I have one roommate, a girl named Katie who is a graduate student at Columbia and really cool.
So finally at 0ne am we settled into bed - hot and stuffy because we couldn't figure out how to open the windows...ahhhh sleep at last.
3:50 am. The morning call to prayer.
3:50 am.
Until 4:50 am. I can see 21 minarets from my window, and each one was blasting the morning prayer. After I got over my frustration of only getting 3 hours of sleep in, I layed in bed listening to the voices (from the speaker systems in the minarets) playing over and over again and finally began to realize (though the toilet paper was the first step) what a different world I had stepped into.
The morning of the first day started at 6am, as our room with its huge windows faces east to the sun. Breakfast of beans, bread and honey, and tea. An orientation about the school including an opportunity to get a language buddy with YALI, the premier english school for Yemeni here.
Then testing to see what level you belong in (embarrassingly enough, I had not opened a book since the end of school). Theeeen a tour! The best part of the day, they took small groups of us around the city and into the Old City, which is still partially walled and is full of all kinds of different souqs (markets) of everything! Spices, clothing, dates, art, metalwork, jewelry, jambis - the traditional short curved sword that men wear around shoved into their belts like cowboys used to shove pistols into theirs. And the vendors know you're foreign so from every side you hear "Welcome to Yemen!" "Come here, come here my new friends!" "Hello, Hello" "Welcome" "Look at this" "For your family at home" (the guilt-trip one) "Welcome to Yemen" over and over again. The architecture is all so old and so amazing, I hope you can see it in the picture. We haggled over mangos in the souq before leaving and walking back to the Markez.
Classes start tomorrow and run from 8 am to 12 noon. And that's it for the day. Most of the shops are closed from 12:30 to 4 in the afternoon, which is when everyone sits around and chews Qat - a small leaf that acts as a stimulant drug. It's a huge part of the culture. Over 80% of the men chew qat and they stick it into one cheek like a chipmunk and then hang out or walk around and smile at you with this tennis ball of qat in their cheek.
But I do have some goals for the next couple of days - find a gym (although I could probably just run up and down the stairs a couple times, that finishes me off), buy some headscarves and learn how to wear them, and learn how to sleep through the morning pray Insha'Allah (God-willing).

Missing everyone at home. I'm here, I'm safe and sound, and I'm happy!
Katie

Countdown from One Week

Shots - check. Three. A polio booster, Typhoid, and Hepatitis A. Ouch.
Embassy Registration - check.
Kings Dominion to ride the roller coasters - check.
It's amazing how little I have to pack. I couldn't figure it out, since I usually have multiple full bags when I go to camp. But wait - both my tee-shirt and shorts collection have to stay here, which leaves me with only one bag.
With less than a week remaining (departure time is 5:23 pm on Friday) I'm trying to absorb all the badmitton, tank tops, and ice cream that I can.