Holiday's Over

Tonight's the last night of my two week vacation. I didn't get around to acquiring the services of a prostitute like I had set it out to. That cab driver did call me, and I agreed to meet him two Thursdays ago whilst knowing in the back of my mind that I had every intention of ditching him. I called him the day before Thursday and told him I couldn't make it. Haven't heard from him since.

I'm really not looking forward to going to college tomorrow. I really didn't get much rest during this vacation. I did so many things. The day my exams ended, my dad called and sent me off to the farm the next day for one night to pick up the sums of farm revenues and expenses for the last six months of 2007. After adding them roughly up it came out to a net loss of a few hundred dollars. But I'm not really sure if that means anything. There's more than one way to add up those numbers.

The gaping hole in the back of my car got patched up and looks great. Last week, Nahida's brother was falsely tipped off by someone and was taken by the Iraqi army. He's been keeping in touch and is still in their custody. They admitted that he had been falsely tipped off and that the person that did is going to get into trouble. Nahida's brother is just waiting to get processed out now, which with an incompetent bureaucracy can take a while. In the meantime, the new rear axle I had installed with a one week guarantee started making small noises in the second week.

I went to college a couple of times for the sake of my project. I also went to Suzy's house too because she and another girl make up my project group. Her parents were really nice and old! Her mum was telling us of memories when Iraq was a monarchy. Of how she came along with her brothers from Mosul as a girl to be the one to help them out at home.

I met up with Muni, a classmate of mine, after one of my trips to college. We were supposed to be joined by Zuni, also from college but a different department. We waited and waited for Zuni. Eventually we gave up on him and had lunch at the new Chinese restaurant. And it was a surprising sight, it was so inconspicuous. Tucked into a Karada alley, it was a little shop with a glass wall facing the sidewalk. Inside it had three tables and upon an elevation deeper inside the tiny shop were a grumpy chinese man and a cheerful woman facing other, each one with a frying pan on a stove each. Later on a second Chinese man appeared that seemed to be the manager-like one of three. A simple falafel place looked better than that place.

An Iraqi teenager was there too to help take care of things, he was the one that struggled to speak with the cooks who spook no Arabic and no English either. He showed us what was on offer today. It quickly became apparent that my hopes for some sweet and sour chicken weren't going to realise. The food wasn't great. We started with some pastries stuffed with meat and then a dish of some beef with green peppers and a dish of chicken with potatoes.

Food aside, it was a wonderful experience to see those Chinese folk there getting on with it despite of everything. It was also possible to scrape the sensations that we the diners were in the foreign place in between the cheers of a bunch of Iraqis in a shop on the other side of the road watching China and Iraq playing a game of football.

I had Muni and Zuni come over and sleep at my place during the holiday. Nahida liked them a lot She's been constantly disapproving of my other friends of late, and so that was a nice change. They were really curious to see how it is I live. They were supposed to help me shop for clothes as to change my shabby image.

Zeina still records my conversation and partakes in phone sex in the afternoons and asks me to transfer a dollar of credit to her phone everyday. I see that as a pretty good deal for live phone sex. I recorded one of our conversations too, and realized that it was no fun listening to one's own conversations. It's actually quite boring. Got to erase it before I go to college tomorrow.

One of the two helped me purchase a new telly today, a 32" LCD Samsung (LA32R7) for $725 with a one day guarantee. Nahida's other brother and nephew came over and installed up on the wall for me. And it's pretty nice. I no longer have to strain my eyes to read the names of the songs on VH1 and I can play those Wii games that had really tiny text.

I thought two weeks of holiday was going to be enough, but it wasn't.