This week has been...

- getting stopped (twice!) by the armed guard (by armed I mean AK 47 armed and by guard I mean young man in street clothes, which sometimes means a purple sequined shirt, or something else equally in line with men’s fashion here) because he thought I was a local and therefore needed to show my student ID (foreigners don’t need to show anything)

- not getting lost, neither on the way there or the way back, for the first time, going to my tutor’s house Wednesday

- a new yoga class—same place, new teacher (this time an Indian woman), new price (about $12 per class) and a lot more people. So much for my $5 private lessons…although the legitimacy level of the class certainly corresponds with the price

- and my walks to yoga, now in the evenings, past the overflowing gardens of every apartment block, branches of blossoming trees reaching into the sidewalk, whose scents gladly overpower the diesel fumes from the busy road on which I walk. Women walking stop and sniff their neighbor’s bushes, break off a twig to bring home or give to a friend, old women puttering around their rose gardens, endlessly washing and cleaning and trimming. It is spring! and the weather is in the seventies and eighties every day and forties and fifties in the evening

- spring also means spring cleaning; every house with their winter rugs out to dry, then rolled up and stored away til next year

- it also means buying boxes and boxes and kilos and kilos of fool (beans), which is now in its agricultural prime, to cook and freeze for the year, and kilos and kilos and kilos of bazila (peas), for the same reason, and hours and hours and hours of shelling them (my host mother had been doing it all day Tuesday, then at night they invited our Finnish neighbors over for knafe dessert and everyone helped out, then they left and the shelling continued til 1 am)

- walking back from yoga to night games in the soccer stadium across the street from my house: taxis pulled over on the side of the road, their drivers clinging to the fences trying to get a glimpse of the game, two men watching from a broken bed frame abandoned on the side of the road, huddled under a blanket, and the stadium lights glaring directly into my bedroom

- a midterm this past Sunday, which means the class is now more than half-over

- reading Syrian authors in our new unit on short stories and poetry

- and a holiday on Wednesday for the Shohodah (martyrs executed in Beirut and Damascus in 1916 by Ottomans); celebrated by my family with everyone off from work and school and a lunch in the garden of grilled kibbe patties and tabbouleh.

- Also, it’s May! How and When did that happen? Six more weeks…