Would You Believe....?

1. I wear long-johns underneath my trousers every day, and I sleep in a thermal shirt and fleece! According to the internet, it's 59F today, but marble floors and high ceilings make for chilly rooms in the winter. Today I'm turning on the heater!

2. We made it on BBC World News yesterday by name for our high winds. Here, wind = sand! As I walked outside I found sand in my mouth and eyes. My first floor neighbor has small dunes coming in under her door. I don't think it's even sand storm season yet. Oh boy!

3. Yesterday was sandy winds, and today is rain! Quite a downpour that makes me feel like I'm back in the UK, rather than my new desert home. But I'm soaking it all in - trying to enjoy it while it's here, because it's going to get really hot and dry soon. For now, I'm wishing I had Wellington boots to navigate the puddles forming along the dirt roads in my neighborhood.

4. I'm actually getting used to being at school at 7:20am. Waking up is getting easier, and I absolutely love watching the sun rise over my town from my third floor classroom. While I would prefer to wake up to sunshine, I would certainly feel the loss of this morning ritual.

5. After attempting a variety of classroom management methods, I found a winner when I reduced a student to tears last week - I told him to take his chair out to the hall! The hall is a lonely corridor, and he begged for mercy for a full two minutes. Now the class is shaping up, and the little girls still fight to hold my hands when we walk to class.

6. My thirteen year old student said, "Miss, you're a funny girl" after I skipped around the classroom to illustrate the meaning of that verb.

7. There is a leak in my gas bottle that fuels my kitchen stove. I have to keep the window open to air out the room, and play the helpless woman to get maintenance to help me get it fixed.

8. After a week, I still have an ugly bruise from my blood test. They want to make sure I don't have HIV or TB (with an x-ray) before they grant my residency visa. Hopefully I'll come up clear! They did decide I don't have leprosy, whew.

9. I bought ten hot whole meal buns at the bakery…for less than 50 cents.

10. I can find locally made mild cheddar, feta, mozzarella and ricotta; yogurt; and buttermilk; but fresh milk can be hard to track down. For now I'm using boxed milk, German-style.

11. I heard Dr. Phil's voice resounding from the back room of my street's corner shop! Yes, I can also watch Oprah, Jamie Oliver, Good Morning America and Scrubs - if I want to. But my favorite so far is Camel Racing footage! All of these races are (by far) outnumbered by the music-video channels coming in from all over the Middle East, especially Egypt.

12. I'm enjoying my weekend, which ends tomorrow. Yep, I work Sunday through Thursday, with Friday as the religious day. It's so hard to change my mental map of the week; Monday blues now set in a whole day early; and TGIT doesn't have quite the same ring as TGIF.

13. One of the problems of not reading Arabic is that I can't read many food labels! So, I'm dusting off my nose and testing my olfactory knowledge as I sniff bags of spices and try to determine which is cinnamon and which is nutmeg; which is tumeric and which is curry powder. I thought black pepper was relatively straight forward, but it is tasting exceptionally hot, so I may have gotten that one wrong!

14. There are rules against public signs being in English. Even at the airport the English translations have been covered up. So it's back to my ABC's - in Arabic this time so I can figure out where I'm going.

15. After tonight I now know why everyone has candles around their homes. It's because there are somewhat frequent power outages. They're relatively short, but still, it's hard to peel a baked eggplant when they happen…which is what I was doing when the lights went out today.

16. You can fill up your gas tank for less than it costs to buy a 10 roll pack of toilet paper. Yes, you can fill up for less than 7 dinars, and the big pack of toilet paper can cost about 8-9 dinars. It's a bank breaker here, since it's largely a luxury of the Anglo-Saxon expats.

Thanks for joining in my journey of new experiences. Glad there weren't any embarrassing ones to report - but I'm sure those will come in time, too!