A deaf bat is a dead bat.
I had forgotten what it feels like to wear real, toe-hiding shoes until yesterday. Because of the heat of the summer, I’ve been relinquished to wear sandals while trodding through the melt asphalt and torrid dirt streets of Guelmim. Yesterday, however, was a beautiful, cool, 35C (95F) day, so I decided to lace up the real shoes. The only thing I learned from the whole awakening was that traction really lets you go faster!
In other news, I have a new email address. I’ve had my Y! account for quite a while now, and, being an early adopter and having friends like NCL, I must switch to Gmail. The new address is:
joshuahaynes @ gmail . com (without spaces, of course).
August is the month of vacation here in Morocco and now it’s gone, hamdulillah. The expats all gaggled back to their birthing nests much like the European fusha-crested pigeon. The evening strolls were no longer gentle, flowing people-watching parades, but rather harsh, packed people-gawking episodes. By about the second week, I had become increasingly frustrated with the non-natives ooogling me with some sort of unfounded curiosity as to why this Frenchman was in Guelmim (I’m still not French, by the way). I started politely saying “thank you for visiting our city. Guelmim loves tourist!” The looks on their faces were priceless.
So with August being national vacation month here, that meant that both my counterpart and my delegate were nowhere to be found. This made it really hard to get anything done and when I went to try to work on September 1st, I found out that they are not expected to be back before October. Oh, I bet you can imagine how that just added to my frustration. But hey, that’s the way.
Any other news? After two months of constantly pestering my landlord, I finally have a lease and can finally renew my residency card and can not have to go to jail because I didn’t renew my residency card in the three months since I’ve been here. Okay, jail was never a concern, but residency cards are serious business folks; I just hope to have my new one before I return to the States in December. 2005.