Sept 24

Sept 24 Sunday The next day I slept in quite long until about noon, and then went off to my class with Faris at 1pm. After that, well there's not a whole lot to do during the daytime now because of Ramadan. Normally at this time I might go to the internet cafe, to get something to eat, or whatever, but it's not really possible now. So I just go back to house to study or watch TV or something during the day time. Hung around until about 6pm, and then me, Matt and Markus went to Al-Naseem restaurant that I had been to before with the Brits, in order to break the fast, it is located about 20 minutes away walking by Bab al-Yemen. The restaurants are always packed now right at 6:15 or so and Al-Naseem was no exception, the (fairly) large restaurant was full so they had set up a tarp on the ground in the street in front of it for more people to sit... Even the tarp was full but some Yemenis noticed and gestured for us to come sit by them. I ordered some of their good fish, as did Matt, but Markus was still boycotting things that come from the sea because of his trip to Socotra where he ate fish and only fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for five days. Then we decided to grab some tea and go sit on top of Bab Al-Yemen, but the top of the gate was closed, apparently due to Ramadan hours, so we sat on near the gate, drank or tea and ate some sweets from a nearby cart. There was a 'majnoon' (crazy) that kept coming up and talking to us, then we saw more, we decided that there must be a majnoon convention in the Old City tonight. There are quite a few crazy people around. They are harmless really. There is one who lives on our street, and he is constantly surrounded by packs of children who are always harassing him, and bothering him. There are always about 5-10 children around him at any given time, I have come to the conclusion that it is because of this that he became crazy... But the children always point him out to me when I walk by and say 'majnoon' and then he yells out "heeelllllooo" to me in English, and says some unintellgible things. We returned back to the house, and I got my stuff ready for class and headed out to Ismail's house. At first when I got there he said we'd watch about 10 minutes of Arabic news... but instead he turned on some English movie on MBC4 and started watching that... Then about 25 minutes later he went to go pray, then dessert was brought out. We finally began the lesson over an hour late. So even though I go to his house for lessons, it is still as though he comes late, because we don't begin until much later. I ended up staying until about midnight that night, and he did have an actual lesson for about 2 and 1/2 to 3 hours. I got back to the house and stayed up pretty late that night doing homework, so it was pretty productive.