Eid Mubarak! Either Wednesday or Thursday will mark the end of Ramadan. Since we don't know exactly what day it will be, we have the next three days off. We are looking forward to eating out during the day, drivers being more patient and seeing what "normal" life looks like. We'll miss the F'tour meals. Once the sun goes down, everyone breaks their fast by eating a meal of sweet dates, soup, hard boiled eggs and bread. There have been a lot of interesting foods for sale specifically for Ramadan.
It has been raining a lot lately, which we thought it wasn't supposed to start raining until November - but it hasn't started raining this early in about 5 years. We've been driving to work when it rains and it is raining about 4-6 hours at a time (about three times a week). The temperature is getting cooler so no one is swimming at the beach. We're traveling to Fes tomorrow - our first time on a train in Morocco, to start our 5 day weekend.
I'm [Marc] starting to get ahead of the learning curve with school. Still lots of meetings and October looks like it will be extremely busy with trips to Ifrane with the nine graders, planning a trip to Germany (maybe), parent conferences and getting grades out.
We now have our Commissary cards (we can go to the grocery store run by the US embassy) so that we can buy silly things like microwave popcorn, Tostitos chips and salsa. We didn't see much that we couldn't buy at our local store. The winter holiday shipment of frozen turkeys came in last week. Only two per customer... first come first serve. We decided against a turkey since it would take up our entire freezer... and we can buy turkey at the local grocery store.
I (Stephanie) have had three flats in the last three days on my bike. I've gotten really fast at changing a tire now! My first flat came after a friend of ours was telling us about his two flat tires... and I stupidly thought to myself "lucky me... I haven't had any flats yet!" The flat tire happened the next day on the way to school! Patty and I were about 1/4 of a mile behind Marc and Paul. We had no way of letting Marc and Paul know that I had a flat... we just had to wait for the guys to turn around. Everyone that passed us was super friendly... asking if we were OK. Eventually a woman passing us in a car caught up to Marc and Paul and told them (in french) that their friends behind them needed help. What a nice woman! We didn't ask her to find Marc and Paul... she just assumed we were together and wanted to help out. In the process of changing the tire and waiting for Marc and Paul, two of our co-workers passed by in their cars. I decided it would be easier to fix the flat latter (especially since I didn't know how to get the new tire on the wheel)... so I rode to school with a friend. Marc, Paul and Patty rode the rest of they way in to school. Marc helped me fix the tire at school... which the new tire ended up deflating as I was pumping it up before our ride home... yes, two flats in one day! Marc knows his flat is coming soon!
We bought a truck load of firewood for the winter. We didn't realize that a cubic meter of wood would fill up a whole truck. So, any winter visitors will be nice an toasty in our apartment.
We've almost gotten all the paper work done for our car. The car has been running well and we've finally gotten the insurance figured out. We also paid a little extra so we can drive in Europe this summer and be insured.
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