After narrowly escaping from the "Palace Sayun Hotel", we arrived in the capitol of the Hadrawmat province, al-Mukallah. The only thing Eric and I had ever heard about Mukallah was that it smelled horrible because its main exports are fish, and refrigeration is not very popular in Yemen. We stopped there just so that we could have a break between Sayun and Bir Ali, so we weren't hoping for much besides a clean hotel room. That was probably our first mistake. Holding on to any expectations about the future is a pretty fruitless endeavour in Yemen, which is why you hear [View Full Entry]

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Back by popular demand and an end to laziness, here is my first blog post of the new year. So so much has happened to me in the last 42 days (that's what my blog counter tells me anyway). I'm going to try and back track a bit. So, after I last posted we had a long long break from school and I decided to travel to East Yemen with some friends. The trip was absolutely amazing because I got to see the other side of Yemen. The Hadromat area has had a distinct culture and history that goes back more [View Full Entry]

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Ugh, words are hard [View Full Entry]

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Al-Hamduallah. See you later fat boy: once I switch to a class devoid of retards and you move out, I won't have to see you every fucking day. If I'm willing to invest some effort I might never have to see you again! You can be right about everything all the time, and I can have conversations instead of continuous debates with people. The only thing that makes me sad is that I won't be able to see you do so poorly on the simplest of tests; but the recompense will be so much better. [View Full Entry]

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The trilateral root system and the ten verb patterns in Arabic are the coolest thing ever. It's like the language was explicitly designed to have defineate and consistent patterns for creating meaning. If you figure out the root of a word there's a simple system for transforming the root into any part of speech, and you can create a very particular meaning with only one word, whereas in English it would take several or even a whole sentence. Learning the patterns was so cool, because then you can start to form relationships between word you already know: figuring out why the [View Full Entry]

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The political situation in Yemen has been heating up over the past few weeks. There were sit ins and demonstrations in Aden recently, because the citizens claim that South Yemen is being ignored by Sana'a and the North. Public school teachers in Sana'a have also been demonstrating because they say their are massive discrepancies in pay rate between teachers who do the same job, and because they haven't received bonuses that were promised to them last year. Parliament is about 2 minutes away from my school, so we can year the marches when they happen. I got to see one last [View Full Entry]

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Bombing of US Navy vessels, kidnappings of foreign tourists, tribal warfare including car bombings. This genre of headline had a lot of people asking, "why the hell are you going to Yemen?" I initially put these enquiries down to western ignorance to the everyday reality of this corner of the world. When residents of other Arab nations we have visited asked the same question, I'll have to confess some lingering doubts concerning the wisdom of visiting this country. "So answer the question Yeatesy, why did you go to Yemen?" Glad you asked but I'm not quite sure. Maybe I should simply [View Full Entry]

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The two most pressing issues in my life right now: What's my direction in life? Man friend? [View Full Entry]

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There's an old joke among those who study Arabic as a second language. "Every word in Arabic means what it refers to, its opposite, and camel." I didn't think it was that funny until tonight, when I found out that at least the first part is true -- it remains to be seen about the camel part. I'm worried about how quickly time is passing: I'll have been in Yemen 2 months by the end of the week, and ... I feel like I should know more, or have some kind of plan for after Yemen. I "decided" to wait another [View Full Entry]

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Today, Yemenis celebrate the departure of the British from Aden in 1962 with qat chewing, chatting, wiling away the afternoon, and other activities that go on every other day of the year. This independence day (one of three) is mostly for South Yemen, so there isn't anything particularily festive going on in the North today. I went to a Turkish bath for the first time yesterday. It looked kind of like Jabba's palace from The Return of the Jedi, and wasn't as sexy as I was hoping it would be. This particular one was about 3 flights of stairs under the [View Full Entry]

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