Back on track

It has probably been pretty obvious that I was quite disappointed when I wrote the last couple of posts but, that's behind me now. I'm feeling 100% well now, I finally got access to my bank account funds and I found a large supermarket where I bought a few comforts and some familiar things to cook some food with. I haven't been sick for 3 days straight now :)

Unfortunately my teacher has been sick for the past two days and I've missed 3 lessons this week but onto the good things.. I made it to Pizza Hutt last night! And can honestly say it was delicious - better than Pizza Hutt at home. Pizza Hutt and KFC are out on the edge of Sana'a next to a gargantuan mosque getting built by the President on a scale that has to be seen to be believed. It's much larger than the Muhammed Ali Mosque in Cairo. The meal cost us 4800 riyals --> $32 for 2 large pizza, 6 small cans of soft drink and delicious garlic bread with melted cheese ontop. I haven't had tasty cheese since arriving here a month ago. So yes it is very expensive by Yemeni standards but we appreciated every riyal of it.

Work was excellent yesterday, my co-worker Hassan who speaks very little English (which is more than the functional Arabic I speak) bought RAM and we upgraded most of the student computers yesterday. We'll be updating them all in the coming days and reloading the software on them. I'm planning on having them all run Suse Linux 10, possibly Mandrake/Arabeyes ie. Arabic Linux, Windows XP English and Windows XP in Arabic. I'm expecting that these upgrades will really make the computers much more pleasant to use. At present some of the computers run Arabic Windows XP and other English Windows XP and they all have different sets of programs, many have spyware and virii and they run a program called "Deep Freeze" which wipes the hard drives and recopies the working partition on every restart. So this means every improvement or change anyone makes gets wiped although the intention is to wipe any incorrect settings or virii.

I wrote to Adawliah in Saudi Arabia and I'm going to try sending my translator back to them for repair. Hopefully that will save me a lot of money otherwise I will have to buy the BAS-1875 from an internet dealer and get it posted to me.

Now that I've settled in I've decided I should turn this time into more of an Arabic bootcamp to get better results. I've drifted into a pattern of waking up at 11am and starting work and then socialising from 8pm when I finish work until 2am when I get to bed. My plan now is to wake up at 6am, go for a run and other exercises, have the YLC provided breakfast at 7am or if beans everyday get too much, have some cereal. Study in the morning from 8-10, work from 10-12, lunch at 12, my class from 13-15 and then 16-20 work. Even with only working 6 hours a day and have no travel time there isn't all that much time to study if I don't make it. So let's see how well I stick to my plan :)