Aaron and Anne-Sophie

Classes finished up for us on the 26th, and we won’t resume classes until maybe the 14th of November because after Ramadan is a week long holiday called Eid. During this holiday people return to their villages and close up shop, so Sanaa will be rather dead around that time. We hope to take a trip to Aden during Eid. We also thought the 26th meant the end of Ramadan, however it’s not. Whenever we ask people about it, they don’t answer yes or no, they say “en shallah.” Apparently there’s some confusion, because people will say the 26th and they actually mean the 26th day of Ramadan and not October. (more…)

First of all, we forgot to mention that our water is working. They finally fixed it properly the day after we wrote our last blog about it. We even have a washing machine that is so light that it jumps up and down during the spin cycle. (more…)

We’ve been making tireless efforts to make our site more user-friendly and interactive. You might have noticed that there is a search function for the photos, so we’ve been adding keywords to allow people to look at pictures by theme. Here is the list of the keywords:
- names of people (Aaron, Anne-Sophie, and maybe even yourself if you’ve been lucky enough to cross our path this year!)
- themes: water, animals, view, bridge, park, mountains, beach, church, mosque, night, signs, food, party, ancient, old, kids, sunrise, sunset, paintings, friends, family

You can search them, combine them, and even find new ones, it’s so much fun!!! Something to do if you’re stuck in front of a computer at work…

Unfortunately we can’t escape the water problems at our apartment. Although we continue to get promises from the building owner that it’s fixed, our neighbor and us still get little or no water. We are trying to be patient. Likewise we’ve tried to avoid writing about another subject, but the matter has become too irritating to not share about it. (more…)

We hope to be starting Arabic classes after Ramadan. So far our Arabic has been enough to get around and order food in restaurants (except on one occasion when we actually had to leave because they didn’t seem to have any of the dishes we knew how to order, and we didn’t understand one word of what the waiter was saying…). (more…)

Our new apartment is on Algeria St., a bitter reminder for French of the country they colonised and lost to in a bloody war for Indpendence from 1954-1962. Some have compared it to the situation in Palestine. Everyday we go to work on Baghdad St., a reminder of the decades of violence and injustice that the US was largely a part of in Iraq. Iraq ironically became the theme of the weekend. (more…)

We got to move into our appartment 2 days ago. It is nice to finally have a home, albeit an imperfect one, as there is very little furniture so far. (more…)

We finished our first class today, and most of the students fortunately will be passing the class despite it being rushed to finish because of Ramadan. Tomorrow finally we will move into our new apartment en shallah. Expect some pictures of it and our class photos soon. (more…)

Ramadan started last week, on Tuesday, according to the moon observed the night before. Our schedules have expectedly been changed to match the daylong fasting the majority of the population follows. (more…)

Yesterday there apparently was an eclipse of the sun, but nobody seemed to know about it until the prayer leaders started reading scripture from the Qoran concerning eclipses . . . (more…)