an entry somewhere else

I’ve taught all my classes for the week and am sitting on a square meter of vinyl flooring set on some ceramic tile in a small cube typing this up. Only a few of the cubes at the internet shop have chairs. I didn’t get lucky today.

Ramadan has started here and I have noticed a quietness from the first week I was here. I consider this to be a good thing. The only challenge I’m starting to have is sleeping. The occasional call to prayer isn’t all that problematic; it’s when the muezzin or cleric uses the loud speaker for several hours of quoting the holy book, in Arabic. Now, I do enjoy listening to Arabic being sung/chanted, but only if it’s clear. The loudspeaker near me makes it impossible for anyone to understand what is being said because of the distortion. My perceived melody of the chanting is thus nixed. Hmmm. No one ever said it would be easy to sleep during Ramadan.

Teaching is going fine. The Ramadan schedule has shortened my classes from 1.5 hours to 1 hour per meeting. There’s not a whole lot I can get done in one hour either. I bank on having my speaking classes meet twice a week. I have no idea what is going to happen to the Literature classes. We’ll stay on poetry for about four weeks, then to short stories, and maybe to a novel. It might be a long slog.

I’ve borrowed my counterparts bicycle but the tire is flat. I’m walking again, toting papaya from the fruit market to my house is no fun except when I get to chow down. I found something called jali-jali yesterday at the market. After some research, it appears to be a relative to corn and referred to as Job’s tears. I didn’t buy it because it was expensive and I didn’t know what it was. Has anyone out there tried it before?

This weekend will be another one without a thing to do. I do plan to head out to Pulau Weh next weekend and arrange an introductory dive to see if I’ll take the PADI course in the future. The countdown to Bali is on…