some catchin' up

SO. time to catch up a bit on my bloggin for all y'all big FANS out there. there are two things i previously promised to post about, if you recall, namely, my apartment and jared and my trip during the eid (too many commas? perhaps). you can see a bunch of pictures of my apartment on facebook, so you know already that it is BIG and beautiful and has a western toilet :) it is i suppose kind of lonely sometimes living alone, but i think that i prefer it after some experiences sharing kitchens/bathrooms before. i reaaaally don't like sharing kitchens and bathrooms other than in my own home (where to be honest mom does most [read: all] of the cleaning, but i think the dishwasher helps and the fact that nobody in my family is disastrously messy). i have visited a few houses where a bunch of ajaanibs (foreigners) live together, and while i very much like many of these ajaanibs, i can't see myself living in such a house. some factors that compound the loneliness/occasional freak-outs are that i am in fact the only one living in my entire building and that there are power outages every night around 11 pm or so...so that's a bit scary. there are 4 floors in my building, each of which is an individual apartment unit, but the other ones are all empty right now (i think a tunisian is renting one of them, but apparently he is never in the country). hence, i try to be in bed watching a movie with my computer fully charged and all four doors (gate, building, apartment, and bedroom) locked around this time haha. i've been meaning to buy some battery lights/lamps for...a while now, but obviously i never remember. i'm hoping that at some point in the near future my landlord will get on trying to find some other renters for the building, but i think the family is quite rich/unconcerned (they own a hospital) and many of them are often traveling. if i mention this to the one brother who has been taking care of getting me settled in, however, i wouldn't be surprised if he took the task to heart...he has been extremely nice and concerned about every little thing and always in-and-out of the place. he let me move in about 5 days before the beginning of the month with no extra fees (i was quite eager to get out of the hotel), has been paying all of the bills through september without any concern as to water/electricity i may have used, got me a discount on my modem/router, picked up said modem/router in addition to beginning my internet service himself (all i had to do was sit at home and pay him when he came), replaced every light in the house when some of them weren't working...etc etc. very kind guy, and i think EXTREMELY, almost unbelievably efficient by yemeni standards. so that's my basic housing situation, and i am quite happy and will be completely content once i get the place organized and start having people over, inshallah :)

aaand the trip! you can also check out the trip on facebook, i posted pictures from every leg of the journey, but i'll just tell you a bit about it as well. during the eid (holiday) that muslims celebrate after ramadan, jared and i took a 3-day trip to the west coast of yemen/the red sea and through a beautiful and quaint town in the haraz mountain on our way back. we started off on a 4 am bus to the port city of hodeidah southwest of sanaa, which took about 7 hours if i remember correctly. the bus was perfectly fine/pleasant, but i can tell you that speeding up and down winding mountain roads in a rather large bus (and when you look out the window seeing nothing but an immediate drop) is quite scary and a bit sickening. we (or at least i, as jared managed to pass out for much of the trip) comforted ourselves with the fact that the bus driver had probably driven this route hundreds of times, and we would most likely arrive in one piece...which of course we did. any mild unpleasantness i had experienced on the bus was immediately multiplied billionfold upon our arrival in hodeidah, where unfortunately this time of year it averages about 3000 degrees with about 40 billion percent humidity...and there are very few taxis to be found. needless to say, we did not explore much and spent basically our entire night (except for a brief dinner) in our air conditioned hotel room trying to decide whether the tv or the fan deserved the one power outlet shared by the two...i think we ultimately decided on the fan, and watched a bunch of episodes of prison break on my computer. i won't dwell on it much, but i will mention (for those of you who have not experienced it firsthand, and to jared's credit) that hot/humid weather turns me in a raving b**** and a red-faced sweaty psycho, and thus from the moment we stepped off the bus until the point when our taxi reached higher altitudes/cooler temperatures on our drive back through the mountains 2 days later, jared was forced to deal with quite a few irrational outbursts and generally unpleasant behavior...sorry boo!!!!

you might be asking why we even came to hodeidah if we were just going to sit in our hotel room and do nothing but watch episodes/whine and moan...and the answer is of course the island of kamaran!! a bit north of hodeidah just off the coast of a town called salif lies kamaran, a somewhat beautiful, somewhat desert-like and deserted island that is home to a few yemenis, many motorcycle taxis, scattered withering plant life, one hotel, and a beautiful multitude of surrounding underwater life. after wasting much of the morning sleeping in our hotel room in hodeidah, we finally wrestled up the nerve to venture outside and find a ride to salif. after waiting entirely too long in the ridiculous heat for the driver to fill up his vehicle, we departed in a "dabbab (mini-bus) with 16 year old driver, smelly man and bicycle, and niqabi in the back" (these are jared's words...for some reason, most likely the fact that i was born without the gift of memory, i don't really remember this ride). we arrived in salif a few hours later and had to wait for another at the shurta (police) stand near the dock for the 90 pound police officer to get permission to let us leave for kamaran (even though we already had permits from the tourism police in sanaa...go figure. i haven't been mentioning it, but all throughout the trip we had been stopping at various check-points to present our travel permits). when we were finally told that we could go, the only boat that seemed to be available was an empty boat willing to take us for the sensible price of 3000 riyals...about $15, and probably more than anything should cost in all of yemen. after a short period of time, another boat started inexplicably/silently filling up with goods and people, and after a bit we came to our senses and started asking why we couldn't go on that boat. nobody really gave us much of an answer, so we just hopped on the boat and ended up paying 250 riyals/person...quite a discount.

upon our arrival on the island, we had to AGAIN pay a visit to our friendly island police to register yet again, before hopping on a few motorcycle taxis to the island hotel. it would be absolutely haram (forbidden, most often used in an islamic context) for a woman to ride a motorcycle taxi in sanaa and probably in most of yemen, so i felt quite daring and adventurous on my very first such ride, and took a short video that i will hopefully remember to post. we relaxed at the hotel for a bit before making our way to a nearby cove beach recommended by the hotel owner. fortunately for me there was nobody else there, as i had forgotten my burkini and was stuck with only the real thing. we swam in the beautiful, warm and clear water and took some gorgeous pictures of the beach, sunset, and underwater life. i also collected a few decorations (some shells and a crab claw) which are now adorning my lovely apartment, along with an egyptian trinket from a very sweet student at AMIDEAST who traveled to cairo during the eid.

as it turns out, this post is getting to be quite a bit longer than i expected, and if i want to continue my narrative in such an engrossing and humorous fashion, i think that i must now retire and leave the rest to another day (inshallah tomorrow). my brain is feeling a bit fried from the combination of my non-stop 7+ hour work day (supposed to be 6), some intense g-chatting, and of course narrating with such cleverity...yep, cleverity.