OK, I think I’ve got the apartment stuff taken care of. I’ve unpacked, thrown out the old junk, and mostly rearranged what need to be. I’m settling in nicely, it’s great to have my own place. When I left the other place, there was a family downstairs, and Karl and an American that Karl and I referred to as “the ghost.” He got that moniker because he made himself scarce all the time. He wasn’t interested in being social with anyone, and went out of his way to avoid us. The only way we knew he was there was by his incessant swearing in the kitchen. He really made a ruckus in the mornings. As far as I could tell, it was always about something silly, like dropping something. He really swore up a blue streak though. I asked Karl about him and Karl said that he had had enough, he moved out. He said the last straw was when he heard the ghost swearing one morning and he worked the phrase, “They’ll kill us all…” into it. When Karl asked him if everything was alright, the ghost responded that he didn’t want to talk about it and then slammed the door to his room. Why are all the weird ones American?
For some reason, the jet lag really hit me hard this time. It took several days before I didn’t feel totally out of it and/or want to go to sleep at 5pm. I’m also really feeling all of the laying around I did back home. I walked to the store and back and I literally was having trouble standing up, my knees were buckling. My legs are getting better, but I’m still not 100%. Well, there’s only one way to fix that problem…
The other business that had to be taken care of was the schedules for class and for work. My teacher is busy until the 30th, so I won’t have any classes until then. I want to stay with Mahmoud because he’s really making me work on my spoken Arabic. I’m forced to come up with some way of expressing myself and that keeps me on my toes. There’s a new manager where I work, so I had to go over all of the stuff that I thought that i had taken care of before I left. The good news is that they are really excited to have me there and are scrambling to get me into some classes. They’re going to form a conversational class for me, and I’ll take over a mid-high level class as well. It looks like things will be pretty much normal come Feb. 1. Whew! It’s been some work, but I’m feeling good about everything now…