Sept 12

Sept 12 I had my first day of classes today (Tuesday). I got up bright and early at around 7am, which is really really early for me. It is really cool because my room faces east so I got to see the sun rise over the large mountain to the east. And my room has the famous stained glass windows at the top which project all sorts of colors onto the walls of my room when the sun shines through them. I still don't really know where to go to eat breakfast or what to eat, and yesterday I just went straight to my first class at 8am. My first class is 2 hours long with a guy named Faris. He is a good teacher from what I can tell so far. He speaks almost entirely in Arabic, he went to Al-Azhar university in Egypt, which is one of the best universities in the Arab world. He is originally from Ta'izz, a small city south of Sana'a, so he speaks a different dialect than that of Sana'a, but he speaks in Standard Arabic basically all the time. It looks like we will divide the two hours between my book from the University of Washington "Al-Kitaab fii Taallum al-Arabiya" for the first hour, and then reading from daily news articles and media. He focused on journalism and media at Al-Azhar, so it is right up his alley. I get out at 10am, and have a three and a half hour break between classes, so I went an internet cafe and was able to call my Mom with Skype, although it was 12:30am in Bremerton... Whoops. But it worked okay for Skype-to-Skype. I returned to the school and chatted with Marcus and my other teacher Isma'il and found out where I could get I haircut... So I headed out for the main square Tahrir and found a barber shop. With my basic vocabulary and hand gestures I was able to tell him what I wanted. He was a funny guy, he was singing the whole time, and many people seem to just hang out at the barber shop and they were talking to me, asking where I'm from, how much a haircut is in the US, do I like Yemen, etc, etc. The haircut turned out pretty good, especially given the language barrier, and it only cost $1.50! So cheap. So I returned to the school for my next class, but I made the teacher Isma'il take me to a restaurant so I could get some food. I still feel ackward going to a restaurant alone. He took me to a small place near Bab Al-Sabah (Gate of the Morning?) and I ate something like the famous Salta dish, except with meat added. It was pretty good, you dip chunks of bread into the stew like concoction. Then we returned to the school to have the second hour of class, which was basically a introduction of what my expectation are, what his methods are, etc. Then I basically wandered around on my own, to a tea shop, to the new part of the city. Tried to call my with skype-to-phone but it didn't work very well... It kept cutting out and breaking up. Well, I tried to find another way to call, using a normal telephone, but I guess it is about $1 per minute to call the US. Very expensive. And then the power cut out for the first time for me. I guess this is a somewhat normal occurance. So I decided to go to sleep early.