Let the sun shine...

For the last couple of days, I have really been impressed with what a pleasant city Beirut is, and how happy I am to live here. The weather is temperate, things are working well, and lots of extra time with family around the holidays. I feel luck to be here and am really enjoying it.

Is that really a good idea?

Now that our Christmas presents have arrived, it has finally occurred to me that we will be adding nearly 1,100 legos to our household inventory....

Time is different in my head

According to my inner dialog, it has only been a day since I last posted. Sadly, that is not the case. I'm presently in the midst of fine-tuning some of my time allocations so I can get more of what I want done. Plus, there were some sick kids this last week that made it necessary to have some recent study on auditory hallucinations in deaf people. It combines so many of my favorite things... Deafness, provocative social study, mental illness and implications for philosophical worldviews. Of course, the deaf people were British, so that is going to throw the data =)

In other news, Arabic has stepped up a notch. I've been able to have private lessons recently. This has enabled me to focus on the written form. I must say, Arabic is really growing on me. I find it has the pleasing lilt of Italian, with the grammatical elegance and complexity of German. Plus, I think the writing looks like Vulcan.

Walls

When we were on our recent trip to Sidon, we stopped by the Sea Castle. Exploring these sorts of things is one of the neatest thing about Lebanon. In one corner, we indulged in a bit of creativity, and used the surrounding materials to reconstruct the walls of Bah Sing Se.