Tuesday-Sunday, 16-21 September 2008

I've been rather busy lately and haven't had a chance to write much. School has been picking up, and I've been doing a fair amount of work. They assign just enough work here that I feel like I am able (and therefore should) do it all; whereas, at AU the professors assign so much work, no one could feasibly complete it all.

This past weekend was an easy one. I've been resting a lot since I have been sick, but I'm finally getting better! On Friday, Jeremy, Daniel, and I went to the beach. The smog and humidity were so bad that I was able to be on the beach for three hours without sunscreen and not even get a light tan. I hope the weather starts getting nicer. I can take the heat, but the dirty, wet air is a bit too much. After the beach, we went to the mall mainly to pick up some hiking gear and find out about bus schedules to Oman. Starting this Thursday, we have ten days off from school and are planning on spending some of it in Oman.

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to find useful, reliable information on things such as bus schedules online. Most companies over here don't seem to find a benefit in posting pertinent information online. Most website are essentially useless and community forums are unreliable. So we went to a travel office in the Mall of the Emirates which I read online sells bus tickets. As luck would have it, they don't sell bus tickets. But the agent was nice enough to try and find us a phone number for someone who does. The number he eventually gave me is not a phone number, and I have not called it, but it was still nice of him to do.

Right now we're planning on renting a 4x4 and just driving to Oman. Two people in our group have driver's license so hopefully this plan will pan out. Nine people what to come and everyone keeps changing their plans, so this entire trip planning was so far been a disaster.

Anyway, on Saturday night we decided it would be fun if we had our own American iftar to celebrate Ramadan. Everyone cooked something (I made cookies and cake). Some of the other dishes were walnut-stuffed chicken, pomegranate salsa, jambalaya, pasta and tomatoe sauce, pizza, pasta salad, two other types of salad, and Bader brought some traditional food from his family. Of course, we all cooked way too much, so there are plenty of leftovers. We invited pretty much anyone and everyone who passed by to have some food and our number of dinner guests grew quite large.

After dinner, we played an impromtu game of charades which was a lot of fun. We basically just stuck to movie titles and we didn't play on teams, but it was still entertaining.

Tomorrow I have my first Arabic test of the semester, so I need to go study for that.

-Lindsay

Some of Our Iftar: