Classes commence

My classes started last Monday, which is the 3rd day of the week here. My teacher is nice, he writes really neatly and his English is ok but had I not learnt some Arabic before coming I would have quite a lot more difficulty understanding some concepts and meanings. We're studying from Al-Kitaab Vol 1 and the Linguaphone course - both courses I purchased before coming to Yemen but I have never studied either very much. Linguaphone has everything on tape that is in the book so I don't need the teacher to read all the words of the book but he makes the study interactive by asking me questions about the content and gets me to use the words I've learnt to describe things about myself. And of course he's there to answer my questions and follow whatever tangents I ask him about. My classes are 1 on 1, 2 hours a day, 5 days a week and as long as I keep up with homework I'm expect to make great progress.

Unfortunately I don't have any major Yemeni adventures to talk about for the moment. I went out to dinner with a group of Italians on Wednesday night (which is the first night of the weekend) and they hardly ate a thing so I took it upon myself to gorge. Never guess what happened? A pretty bad case of Yemeni belly. So the next day I couldn't go on a trip to Wadi Hadjr and then the following day (Friday) I slept in until 8am and missed the bus to Manakhr which was wonderful day trip 3 hours away. I'm here for a year though so there'll be other opportunities to go to those places. In a few days the school is organising a 4 day trip to Hadramount so I should be able to go on that trip and take some photos and write about it. I've asked one of the Italian students to give me a wake up call so I don't miss the bus this time.