Sometimes people want a day in the life. Those are difficult these days, because I'm still not sure what a normal day looks like. However, I'll try. I wake up sometime in the morning, turn off my A/C unit which costs me a significant though worthy amount of money and check my email, hoping for emails from my friends around the world. Note that the previous sentence was not a shameless plug for more emails from you, but also note that this one is. However, should the power have already gone out before I am out of bed, I skip most of the second sentence from this paragraph. I leave my cool bedroom and enter the sauna that will be my day. Lately I've been fixing oatmeal for breakfast, in an attempt to make healthy choices. I am, after all, close to 30. However, I have to let the oatmeal sit for a while as eating hot oatmeal in a sauna is less than comfortable, which I'm sure you can imagine.
After getting ready, I head out to work, Ipod plugs in my ears, normally listening to an old playlist in need of some tweeking. Lately, I've been picking Andy Gullahorn's "That Guy" quite a bit for the walk to work. The walk is a good 15 minutes and helps me mentally prepare a bit for my day. Once I get to school, I drink about half a liter of water, enter my classroom and prepare to teach some of the most amazing students you'll ever meet. Yes, they often drive me crazy, but at the end of the day, at which we have yet to arrive, I realize that I am the one priveleged to teach them English as a foreign language.
My day is broken up by eating lunch, which locals would call breakfast, because they did not eat oatmeal in the early morning like me. They probably just had tea with a biscuit or two. So, together with friends or alone, I eat something from the outdoor cafeteria, usually a bean, falafel or eggplant sandwhich. Trust me, all of them are really tasty. I often end up in the library at some point in the day. It is one of the places that is not a sauna as even if the elecricity is out as they have a generator, so I am just about guarenteed to have temps at the most around 85. I use that time to grade papers, prepare for classes, listen to sermons on my trusty Ipod (Mark Dever is a fave), or talk to friends. I realize that some of you might find it inappropriate to talk to friends in a library, but I figure that if the university choral group can rehearse in there, then I can whisper with a coworker.
I guess evenings are the most diverse of my days. Once I make it home I might stay in for the evening, during which I will probably do a combination of reading, exercising, surfing the internet or the very criticized-but-lets-face-it-we-all-do-it, TV watching. I like to do that last bit while exercising. The best investment I made here was the purchase of an exercise bike. It has a funny smell, which permiates my room when the door is closed. Still, I love it. If it were cooler I could get on it more these days. I miss the cool days, the days of non triple digit temps.
However, I might go on a visit in the evenings, to a student or friend's home. In these cases, we normally have tea and chat it up about a great deal of topics. Tonight I visited a friend with my roommates and we spent some time trying to convince our friend that our respective states were better than any other state. I find that such a fruitless debate. Everyone knows Texas is bigger and better. I suppose I can handle inferiority complexes for the sake of my beloved roommates (see earlier blog post).
And now, I am on the internet, a bit late, realizing that the wisest decision for me is to go to sleep. The internet has truly changed overseas life for ex-pats. It's good, but it's also not good. Minutes turn to hours lost keeping up with life back home. And, I don't mean keeping up with people back home, but rather those things from back home that we simply like. I'm also a big fan of Wikipedia, which my roommates often use as teasing fodder--never like something more than Michael Scott. But, I love to learn and don't have a lot of books, so Wikipedia works great for me. All around, I'm so thankful for the internet, but know that it is also a source of distraction for me at times.
And, that's a regular weekday for me, weekdays being Sunday through Thursday of course. Maybe someday I'll talk about Fridays and Saturdays.
Much Love
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