Surreal Yemen

I just nearly got decapitated by one of the massive “Safety First” signs that was hanging on the wall as it was blown off by the wind. They laminate those posters and then attach wooden poles to both ends to get the thing to lay flat, so I really was in peril. When I went to rehang it I couldn’t find the nail. Either it fell out or it never existed.

And that is just one of the many surreal things that’s going on around here. I am currently trying to teach oil and gas terminology to a group of oil and gas engineers. For you computer people out there, try to imagine teaching computer terminology to a group of students—you have to tell them what a loop is, a statement, etc. Now imagine your mother (who presumably knows about as much about computers as I do the oil and gas industry) teaching the same material and you will see the problem here. A “loop” is suddenly something that is found in a bit of string. For example, one of my students asked me what “spud” meant. I told them that it was a potato. They all looked really confused and I told them to use it in a sentence. The word from their readers refered to people spudding in wells.

Today I asked my students what they had learned in thier other class and was pretty appalled when they all started shouting “F*ck you! F*ck you!” at me. Turns out that they were trying to say “vacuum”. Fortunately we got that one cleared up before I turned in my resignation.

Meanwhile, my class at the main center is going really well where I am continuing to teach regular, basic English. Today on the plate is the grammar of “going to”. I am going to have them practice this one by pretending that they are physic and having them make physic predictions for each student. I am hoping that I will teach full time at the center instead of working at both places as the main center is quite a lot less strange…

It's getting pretty surreal outside Yemen as well. As far as I am concerned the only thing stranger then the JonBenet Ramsey case ten years ago is the fact that it has made front page on all major websites for the past few days, even through there is nothing to report that is more interesting then "John Mark Karr got on the plane..." "John Mark Karr got off the plane..." John Mark Karr reportedly had a drink on the plane..." This breaking news was briefly interrupted by Tiger Woods victory in some golf thing and finishing it up with the news that "Hillary" might run. This wouldn't bother me if it wasn't for the fact that there was a deadly train crash in Egypt, a war (which is admittedly in ceasefire), and Iran was testing bombs and Korea is about to start testing nukes again. Nope, change the channel; let's hear about what John Mark Karr picked out of his nose in LA this morning instead...