Home Sweet Abou Roumaneh!

Hello from Abou Roumaneh in Damascus, an officially swankier part of town!

So, we finally started class, and a grueling week later are slowly recovering. The classes are 5 hours a day, 8:30-2 (with a 30 min snack break), five different subjects every day. These range from Grammar to Dialect, Conversation to Modern and Classical Literature, Social Studies, History, Media... on and on, and all in Arabic. It's reasonably intense.

We're meeting lots of new people, though, and excitingly getting settled in to our very own apartment! Leah and I are in the fourth floor of a building on Khalil al-Karim Street, just two minutes walk from our school. Eric and our new French friend Jeremie live above us on the fifth floor, and have the most incredible view from their huge balcony. They also have a set of stairs to the flat roof, where you can get a 360 degree view of the city. I'm hoping to get a video of it soon.

Our apartment is nice and big. It's long and thin, with a "WC" and kitchen at one end. This is followed by a long hallway. Our two, large bedrooms open off it on the left, and a bathroom (with just shower) on the right. At the end of the hall is the living room and dining room, and the door to our own big balcony. The decor is hilarious, with standouts being the over-the-top, tacky French style of the dining room, and Leah's bedroom, which looks *just* like a Barbie Dreamhouse.

We have also developed a strategy to keep track of the roaches we've seen, and to properly identify the catastrophic effect they've had on our coddled sense of what constitutes a scary bug. We're naming them like hurricanes! Alternating gender, Arabic or Hebrew names. So far we have weathered Hurricane Cockroach:

• Ali
  
• Bint Ali (lit. "daughter of Ali")
  
• Caliph 'Umar (homage to this formidable man )
  
• Daoud
  
• and just last night, caught crossing the living room floor, Elahe (no relation to our lovely friend by the same name, but we were stuck for a name and it made us giggle)
  

And without further ado, some pictures!

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