The rough life.

I finally got to experience a really big holiday here in T-town. I passed the end of Ramadan here, called Eid al-Fatir. Finally, on August 30th, everybody got to eat during the day! Hamdullilah! Interestingly enough, my good friend Rachel wanted to visit me for a while and came two days before Eid. Unfortunately for poor Rachel, due to the holiday, transportation shut down and she couldn't get out of town. However, she did get to Eid with me and made the holiday extra special.

During a big holiday like Eid, it's important to go out in the morning and visit all your family and friends and eat tea and cookies at everybody's house. Rachel and I ate at so many peoples' houses that we had to come back to my house and nap through the major sugar crash we had earned through our cookies. 

Here's a picture of Rachel enjoying the company of my baby host sister. 

During the Eid, Rachel and I got snagged into eating couscous at a friend's house. 

I am trying to intimate by my face how ridiculously huge this plate of couscous is. 

What a glorious day it has been! I've been gradually recuperating from traveling and being gone from T-town for two months and I'm really starting to feel myself again.  

Today began productive. I washed my clothes in the bathtub, dumped about 5 buckets of water down my three flights of stairs to clean them, and then squeegeed after. But then, I took a turn and watched about 2 hours of tv. Hah, summer and free time makes me lazy. I'm sort of just kicking around until work starts back up! Lo and behold, I think a little bit of work came my way this next week with people realizing I'm back in town and I'd love to teach English. 

However, I can only do so much alone and so I eventually came out of my house to go visit some friends. When I knocked at her door, my friend wasn't there but I did see that her neighbor's door was open. I walked over to their house and knocked on their door to find out if they knew if my friend was home. They said that they didn't know but then they invited me to come inside, which eventually turned into, "Come see the fields!" How could I not love seeing the fields in the late summer afternoon? Everything smelled rich and earthy and the fields were green. My hosts were kind enough to gather up figs, grapes, and mint to give to me. You should smell the mint! It smells like sweet candy you could just eat then and there. 

We came back to the house after we had wandered around the fields for a while. There my new friends made me mint tea and cookies. After a bit, the girl I had been looking for came into the house  and found me happily nestled in pillows, drinking tea. So everybody chattered for a while until my friend took me to her house for more tea and cookies. 

It's a rough life.