photos...or not

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.

little bit freaky christmas

we found this guy hanging out in the Old City.

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.