News Entertainment

What a long weekend. I only have classes four days a week: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. On Wednesday we've only got one class at half past eight in the morning. Last Wednesday I didn't go and I don't think anybody else. But unless I've got some advantage in that class, I'm going to have make it a habit of attending that very badly timed class. Tomorrow's Sunday and it'll be the start of the second week of college.

It's been a very long and boring weekend. Forced to be at home before six in the evening and Friday's curfew doesn't help either. And despite being house bound most of the time, I've only managed to read 5 or so pages from one of my textbooks. I'll have to pick up the pace there. I'm going to have plenty of these long and boring weekends before the year is through.

So how am I keeping myself busy? I've finally sorted out all the mp3 files that I downloaded while I was in the UK. And my iPod is now good to go. I've been playing Metroid and Metroid Hunters on my Nintendo DS. And I've been trying to learn how to play a barre chord on my guitar. I've got to start taking guitar lessons, but I'm waiting one of my classmates to come back from Syria. Maybe I should just go ahead, he might never show up.

I wonder how many mugs of coffee and tea I go through a day. Whenever my mug's empty I call on Nahida to get me another. I'm not a caffeine fiend, I'm just thirsty. On the other hand, I'm back to smoking a lot. While I was in the UK, I had managed to cut down on my smoking, but I'm back to chain smoking now.

A few days ago Nahida got the downstairs satellite receiver fixed. I'm discovering that I can understand Arabic television a lot more than I had imagined. But I've still got problems understanding the news in particular. I'm always getting my digest of the news through Google news or the BBC and I'm curious to see what the Iraqi networks are saying, so I've added all the Iraqi networks to my favourites list. One of my friends jokes about how the scrolling news bar at the bottom of the screen doesn't ever repeat itself, but I can't tell because it moves too fast for me.

My biggest trouble with reading college material is my weak vocabulary. So when I read five pages or so this weekend. I must've dug out over 30 words out of the dictionary and write them down in an indexed hard covered notebook. One of the words that I jotted learnt was the word for 'loan'. So I really glad to understand one sound bite during a televised conference that mentioned that Iraq was getting a 3.5 million dollar loan from Japan to build a port.

There was some fuss about corruption in the government. Some guy was quoting a report on corruption in the government and then the committee that made the report seemed to be taking a defensive stance. There was also some guy who was saying that the government has all the information on the five thousand people that make up the 'death squads' but that the government is undecided on how to implement a plan to deal with them.

And I get the new Al-Jazeera in English. I wonder if my parents in the UK get it with their Sky subscriptions. It's fairly entertaining, I'm waiting to see them criticize some Arab leaders, that would be nice. I saw the Blair interview, he didn't say that Iraq was a disaster. Frost was asking a question and threw in the word 'disaster' at the very end just as Blair began to answer.

I'm watching the news right now. It's really good. I'm glad to see the subjects are out there and being spoken about. I just wish I could understand it all a little better. I got the dictionary next to me now, picking out the words that keep getting repeated. Well the electricity just cut off. I guess they can't have the people watching too much news, otherwise they'd find out what's going on.

Nahida is telling me that her sister said that the bank near her home got robbed by cops during the night and that all was reported on the news was that a bank got robbed with no further details.