A Life Far Removed from Durian Trees

A couple of days ago: UK envoy in Yemen escapes 'suicide bomb'

...forgot to add: durian counter reset to zero - had some while I was in Malaysia!!!

I came home yesterday to find that: - there's no H1N1 screening at the Sanaa airport any more, straight to immigration - the rainy season has started, hot mornings (well, relatively) followed by rainy afternoons - rain water leaked into the house in some places, enough to wet the carpets (note to self: roll up carpets the next time we travel) - the boilers hadn't leaked (note to self: was a good idea to turn off the boiler switch before travelling) - my cleaner has been reunited with her passport and is much chipper than before (to make a long story short: her handbag was stolen by a taxi driver. He kept her passport/phones/valuables in his home in Taiz. She made a police report and somehow they caught him. He promised he'd return the passport but never did. Then somehow she found out that he had died in a car accident - at one point the police actually considered that she might have killed him. She went to Taiz with the taxi driver's wife to get her passport back. ...

It's been a long time...Just got back after more than a month away - in the UK, Malaysia and India. I feel relief. That I'm home again instead of living out of a suitcase. That the weather is a perfect combo of cool 18^C breeze and sunny skies. That I can work in my ergonomic, tranquil office. That I can (re)start my diet (yeah right!). BUT, it was a good work/holiday trip. Great seeing the guys in the office again, really enjoyed seeing the family back home, did some travelling in Malaysia and India, and ate lots of good (but unhealthy) food!

Remember when I said I was allergic to something here but couldn't figure out what it was? Turns out it's the bukhoor (Arabian incense). Now I know whenever we burn it in the house (like after cooking curry), I'd get an itchy rash on my forehead/eyelids and puffy eyes. Takes days to recover. Last weekend, someone gave me a couple of jars of bukhoor ; after just one sniff (they smelled good), I started to swell and itch. Even if hubby does the firing up and I stay away from the smoke, it still gets me. The weird thing is, it's a recent thing. At the beginning, I had no problems. So sad. I love bukhoor . http://www.bestincense.info/allergic_reaction_to_incense.html

Our next door neighbour is killing us. After barely hearing anything from them last year, the place seems to have turned into some kind of office. There's been construction work in the last month. Initially it was non-stop but now, it's random. Last night, someone was nailing something at 1 a.m. until we sent the security patrol over. I felt like hosing them down from over the wall. And they've got a new generator that's right by the wall that faces our bedroom; we can hear it from under the bedcovers - even with earplugs. We have a generator too but it's not as noisy and there aren't many houses at our end of the street, so I don't think it bothered people too much. And now, there's a police car parked just outside our front gate. It seems the president's son now goes to the school a few doors away. Not necessarily a good thing.

Postcard From Yemen February 7, 2010 By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Sana, Yemen Yemen’s former prime minister, Abdul Karim al-Iryani, got right to the point when I arrived at his Sana home for dinner: “So, Thomas, did it take Abdulmutallab to finally get you here?” Yes, it is true, I admitted, because that young Nigerian, trained in Yemen by Al Qaeda, tried to blow up a Northwest jetliner on Christmas Day, I decided I had to see Yemen firsthand. I further confessed to Iryani: “I was a bit worried coming here. I half expected to be met at the bottom of the stairs from my Qatar Airways flight by Osama bin Laden himself.” Fortunately, though, I found that Sana is not Kabul, and Yemen is not Afghanistan — not yet. The Walled Old City of Sana, a U.N. World Heritage site with its mud-brick buildings adorned with geometric shapes, was bustling with coffee shops at night and vendors by day. Walking through its streets with a Yemeni friend, we came upon four bearded, elderly Yemeni men — traditional dag...