cafe politics

one of our favorite places to eat here is sale sucre, a french-style cafe/bakery. in addition to offering outstanding food and good service, sale sucre engages in crepe diplomacy. on three occasions, we've been served crepes that had messages written in nutella on them. we have some pictures on ethan's cell phone, but we've discovered that we have no way to upload them to our laptop, so instead we're using these embarassing substitutes to share with you sale sucre's cross-cultural communication efforts (trust us, the real thing definitely looks better; please use your imagination).

(this served to us on Day 3 of our time in Syria - early September)

(and these two served in early November)

november 5!

we woke up before 6:00 this morning so that we could be watching when the polls closed on the west coast. virtually every tv channel had live election coverage, so we probably spent as much time looking at Grant Park and the Mall/White House as you did. the only thing we lacked was a rally of our own to attend; we substituted pancakes and coffee at home.

caveat pt. 2

this semi-accessibility means that we often can't read your blog either.

caveat

blogspot is only semi-accessible here. for example, i can sometimes publish a post without being able to view the actual blog, as happened when i completed the post below. so i can't always vouch for the finished product.

branching out

i have developed at least two new habits in the last month. neither of these habits is due to anything unique about Syria; they just weren't things I had ever gotten around to in the States.

1. going to the gym. there's a really good health club about a 10 minute walk from our apartment, which we just joined. this is nice, particularly as the showers there have some of the best water pressure around.

2. using fabric softener. i may be way out of the ordinary for not having done this before, but it's true: i don't recall ever having purchased fabric softener before. all of our laundry is hung out to dry here, and i believed that air-dried laundry was always crispy. Ethan, who is semi-fanatical about softener, has convinced me otherwise. with a large-enough dose, even air-dried laundry can stay soft.

would you put your child on this?

traveling in style

over Eid Al-Fitr, we went to visit friends in Aleppo.


there's a new "City Train" that offers first-class tickets at 240 lira - about $5 - for the 4.5 hour trip. it's really a pretty nice train, but what was most amazing was that in a single first-class car, seating only about 50 people, there could be such a high proportion of children, all of whom seemed to be (noisily) awake for the entire trip.


one of these children spent much of his time checking out/touching the back of Ethan's head.

democratic participation

we voted this week.

absentee ballots would be nearly impossible since we don't have a residential address here, but we can send emergency write-in ballots from the embassy. these ballots are a masterpiece of design that leave all personal information, including social security number and passport number, on the outside of the envelope containing the ballot, which will then be sent to the District of Columbia through the US postal system. we considered adding our credit card numbers for good measure.

here we are...

we've arrived in Damascus!

we've resisted blogging for quite a while, but this seems likely to be the most effective way for us to keep in touch, so here it is, with no promises of consistent posting or even interesting content.