So I'll be heading down to Austin, starting at an ungodly hour tomorrow morning. I'm not totally sure what the plan is once I get there, but I'll do my best to contact people once I have an idea of what's going on.

Look forward to seeing y'all!

Well, I have arrived safely, slept a bit, eaten my mommy's pancakes, and I'm about to step into the wood fired hot tub (why wood fired when we live in the middle of the city? I know not). It's nice to be home, I can say that. It's all rainy and springlike - I missed the smell of rain in Minnesota, and the immense greenery of everything. I look ( Read more... )

I've arrived safely in Amman, had some popeye's chicken(weird fucking restaurant selection here, I'll tell you that much), and now am enjoying the actually functional free wireless internet. Nothing seems to indicate any major delays in my flight(knock on wood), so if I can get through customs in a reasonable span of time, I should make it to ( Read more... )

Well, I'm all packed, though as I expected I've had to throw out a ton of clothes (well, I donated them to a church, but some of them I rather liked) and I'm still probably a bit over the limit (according to my friend's bathroom scale which I borrowed). I've stuffed my carry-ons to the gills with books (my laptop bag is now about 10% laptop, 90% ( Read more... )

Well, looks like I'll be heading home tomorrow. I still need to arrange a taxi, but since I'm leaving at a reasonable hour (like 8:30 AM), it shouldn't be a big problem. I still have yet to figure out how to cram as much stuff into my various bags as possible while staying under weight, then see everyone I can, then bring left over clothes to ( Read more... )

Yay, I finished the final revisions to my final paper for CASA! This means I'm done, unless my teacher finds anything else that needs revision (and in that case, it'll be something like 5 minutes of fixes)

I'm super excited to be coming home! Yay!

I went to a crazy play the other day - a reimagining of Shakespeare's Richard III into kind of modernish day Saudi Arabia. It helpfully had English supertitles(sort of) but it was a linguistic tangle of impossibility- they switched between Saudi and Standard Arabic, with random sections in English and French as well, plus trying to read the ( Read more... )

We (CASA students, teachers, and co) just went on an awesome trip this weekend. Though it did suck getting up at 5:00 to get to the meeting point at 6:00 (our teacher claimed she'd be really strict and leave even if people hadn't arrived yet...then was like 30 minutes late herself), it was a great trip. It was however, rainy - it hasn't rained here ( Read more... )

Well, I'm definitely in that weird place you get to before you go. I'm super excited to go home, of course, but I know the reverse culture shock is going to be crazy. I was seriously shocked to see a girl wearing a tanktop with sort of a racer back, ie, showing LOTS of shoulder. And not a foreign - a real Syrian. It was scandalous. Also, it's so ( Read more... )

I know this probably doesn't mean much to most people, but apparently Sammy Hajj, the Aljazeera camera man who was taken to Guantanamo, has finally been released.Poor guy - 6 years in Guantanamo without charges, even though he was just a journalist stuck in the war zone. It's totally political - the US has been really crazy towards Aljazeera, even ( Read more... )