have been trying for the last several weeks to post photos here, but apparently the ongoing clash between blogger and local server will not allow this, at least for the time being.
so, what you would have seen...
1. the baron hotel in aleppo. there are a few on flickr, but we have more - especially good ones of the bar, which is stocked with bunches of vintage-y bar paraphernalia.
2. strawberries! it's strawberry season here, and we've been eating a lot of them. unfortunately, the coming of the strawberries apparently signals the end of avocado season. we had been having guacamole just about every day, but when we tried to restock on avocados last week, the price had doubled.
3. our apartment. when we moved in (some five months ago now), we got a few questions from friends and family about where we were living. don't think we ever really answered those questions. we're on the first floor of our building; we have two salons/receptions, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen with balcony (covered, fortunately, as the clothesline is out there, and it's been raining a lot recently). high ceilings, tile floors. we're about a two minute walk from a huge market area where we get most of our produce. it's pretty common anywhere in the city for the electricity to go out from time to time, but they've recently instituted rolling blackouts, so our power is out every day from noon to 2 pm. it's really not that big a deal most of the time; fully-charged laptop battery lasts almost two hours, gas stove still works, and there's plenty of water for two hours (all water in the apartment runs from a tank above the kitchen, which is filled from a tank on the roof of the building, so we can go for a while without a pump running). it can get a little miserable on really cold/dark days when we can't use our space heaters and we're likely to keep the window shades closed to keep the cold out. but otherwise, the only thing we really have to plan around the outage is laundry. a full wash cycle takes a little over three hours, so unless we're organized enough to start a load by about 8:30 am (which, frankly, has been almost never here), we either don't start a load until after 2 pm, or we forget, start a load, and it stops in the middle for two hours.
