Who Doesn't Love Spring Break?!?!

Well- today is the first day of spring and how appropriate that it is also the first day of my spring break. Am I getting too old to be as excited, or even more so, than my kids about this?

Because it is spring break I have a lot of free time to relax and catch up on my hands. There fore I have decided to write about a few more funny stories that have happened over the past few weeks :-)

About a week or two ago there were several of us that needed to have an official photo taken. So, I went with 2 other girls to the "Kodak" store. We walk in and go to the front desk- apparently this place takes photos and prints them out like a normal place you take film to. They took us back to the sitting room where we would have our pictures taken and left us there. I was so excited when I found a full length mirror- these are rare and extremely hard to come by here, in fact a lot of my friends don't even own mirrors. We began to look around the room and the props were hilarious. The guy finally comes back into the room with a digital camera and I was forced to be first. He took my picture and then the other girls had their's taken. While I was waiting for them I look over in the corner to see one of those Sony home printing stations. It was all I could do not to bust out laughing. After having our pictures taken the guy left us again. We waited...and waited...finally he comes back in saying he needs to know what size pictures we want (not in English of course so a lot of gesturing was involved). They escorted us over to the the room with the the computers and developers/printers. Since they are on the metric system here it took quite some time to figure out the size that we actually wanted (somewhere around the equivalent of a 3 X 5). Then- and this is the funny part- we look over and there is the guy at the computer with our pictures pulled up in photoshop. He took each one and airbrushed us, straightened our teeth, fixed our eyebrows, etc. He did it all!!! And, thinking he'd be funny, he starts making my friends picture all distorted looking. I couldn't take it any longer, I was laughing so hard I was crying! Once the pictures were fixed they were printed- though the men were shocked that we only wanted one each. While they were printing we went to wait in the lobby area. A few minutes later the photos were done and one of the guys is showing me that he had taken a picture of me with his cell phone- saying, not in English, good, right, right? A little creepy so I just walked away. Just another interesting experience here :-)

There is this one student at the school who has a developmental disorder. He is a teenager with the mind of a 5 year old. He can be very sweet sometimes and other times, well...act like a 5 year old :-) I've had a lot of funny times with him. He's a pretty big boy and one day I walked outside for dimissal with some of my children and he was "hiding" behind a shutter with his sunglasses on and finger over his mouth (ya know the quiet sign). So, some kids and I played along. It was hilarious and cute all at the same time- he was so excited to jump out and show us where he had been "hiding". He also likes to copy me. I am usually outside to cover recess and lunches for a couple of classes and he is out there for part of the time. On the days he's talking to me, he'll come stand by me and mimick my actions, laughing the whole time. Yesterday he was doing this but he was also very excited about a birthday party they were having in the class he spends some time in. He was jumping up and down so much that his pants kept falling down! He kept asking me to help him, which for his real age and the culture here is very inappropriate, so I had to get his aid to help him. He keeps me laughing though!

I was in the kindergarten class this past week helping out. I commented on one of the little girls hair (it had been braided) and one of the white kids looks in awe at it and says, "Yeah, I don't know how her mom does it!" It was so cute and funny because he was being completely serious.

That's all for now- off to enjoy my nice, relaxing spring break ;-)

A Different Kind of Pomp and Circumstance

Last night I attended my first university graduation here. It was definitely unlike anything I have ever been to or seen in my life- but fun.

Everything here takes time. One of my roomies is house and truck sitting for some friends that are out of the country right now. So, we took the truck to meet our friend. Then we went to the university and meet up with some more people, who might I add were really excited to meet 2 white girls, haha. We drank some REALLY strong, black, sugary coffee and then had to rush out of there to meet some more of our friend's friends. These friends were at a photo studio having their grad pics taken. We get there and these girls are decked out- I mean bangin'! Me and my roomie felt so out of place because we didn't realize that this was such a dressy event. We ended up in the pictures anyways, though we had just met the girls that were graduating.

Once the pictures were done we all loaded in the truck and drove back to the university. There we sat around in a room for a while, met tons more of our friend's friends (turns out she is very popular and knows just about everyone). They were all very sweet. It was almost time for the ceremony so we all gather our things and go out to the truck to move it not very far at all, I think our friend really likes that we have a car, at least for the time being :-) The graduates are all line up about 4 or 5 across and then in long lines (about 70 of them) complete with a band- drums, trumpets, etc. They had like a mini-parade type thing all over the small campus and then were going to get into all of the cars waiting for them to convoy over the the hall for the other ceremony and party.

While we were waiting a bunch of men crowded around our truck and started talking to our friend. Turns out they wanted the camera men to ride in the back of our truck to film the convoy and for us to be the lead car behind the cop on the motorcycle. My roomie and I could not stop laughing- and of course we jumped at the opportunity. The only problem was, we happened to be the very last car in the long line. The guys got us settled up at the front behind the cop and ready to go. Once the cop had jimmy-rigged his siren so it would actually work we started off- the horn was honking and all the women in the back seat, my roomie, and I started of the "eeeww-eeee, eeeewww-eeee" I can't remember the real name of this but at any celebration, especially weddings, the women do this sound at a VERY high pitch- very fun actually. Of course our friends were laughing at the 2 white girls trying to do it. We continued on with this and leading the convoy for about 15-20 minutes when we finally arrived at our destination where we were treated like VIPs- I think because of our truck, which is not really ours.

We get to the door and they wave us through without having tickets, like the VIPs they thought we were. Then take us all the way up to the front to the head table- you know, the nice one that actually has a table cloth, nice covered and comfy chairs. My roomie and I looked and felt very out of place but our friend told us to just sit there. Once seated she told us that they thought we were doctors, probably due to the fact that we had the nice truck and we were the only 2 white foreigners there, haha! As we sat they kept bringing out all kinds of sodas and bottled water.

Then the ceremony began. The graduates came in and sat up stairs surrounding the hall and looking down on us. Each graduate came down the aisle with their family and friends to a song of their own choosing (mostly Arabic songs but there was one Celine Dion song- they adore her here). The cameras are on them the entire time which is spotlighted on the tv screens up front. Once they reach the front they leave their family, or at least they are supposed to, and go up to the stage to shake hands and get their certificate. Imagine this process about 70 times, for at least 3 and a half hours, plus the music and annoucer all in Arabic and louder than loud. That was the ceremony.

We left right at the end of the ceremony because it was a school night and we had to get up early to teach. Our friends were disappointed because there was to be a party at that same hall afterwards and they wanted us to stay. I would have but there was no way we could. All morning I was fighting sleep and the ringing in my ears finally went away around lunch time. In all it was an excellent adventure though :-)

Time is Slipping Away- Slip, Slip, Slippin' Away

Time is going by so quickly it seems- I go to talk about something saying it was last week and one of my friends tells me it was more like 3 weeks ago. I think it is true that time seems to speed up as you get older. I looked at the calendar and there are only 9 weeks until I come home for the summer. I was shocked! I remember when I first got here and thought it would feel like forever. Although I love it here and love all my friends here I am looking forward to seeing my family and friends at home. I get more and more excited as I plan out my itinerary for the summer- although it's starting to look more and more busy.

We had a meeting on the river the other night. It was nice- especially seeing the sunset.

Looking forward to seeing a friend this week and going to her graduation from university (or maybe her friend's...working on those communication skills). That friend let us borrow a dvd player because ours is broken (due to dust, haha- go figure). But the problem with the borrowed player is that it won't play any of our dvds (probably because of the region thing). It's the thought that counts :-)

The kids at school crack me up! There is this one 4 year old that I always play with before school. Sometimes he looks at me and says- your eyes is blue. So I say your eyes are brown- to which he responds, no black and we get into the brown, black, brown, etc until we get tired of it. Then we chase each other :-) So cute! Another time, the assistant in the 4 year olds room was out for the day (I help out in there some). So one of the kids told their teacher, oh, I know, I know- just get Miss Suzi! I thought it was adorable because he thought he had the answer to solve everything.

They recently had basketball tryouts for both the boys team and girls at school. The kids were super excited.

That's about all the updates I have for now :-) Have a great week everyone!