Of curry puffs and holidays

Rain clouds in the morning

The weather has been like this all week ... dreadfully humid and cool in the mornings but very hot in the afternoons. It's so cool in the mornings, dark rain clouds pass over us for at least over an hour and the ground is always wet with dew. I guess it reflects what's happening in Europe right now ... the heatwave and rainstorm.

The earthquake in Indonesia this morning came as no surprise as the wave of earthquakes have been rocking our planet the past weeks. And the fire storm in California is unprecedented. Seen individually they seem to be tragic events ... but seen together they seem to point to systematic chain reaction.

Curry puffs for breakfast

Politically things are less tense today. Police presence has gone back to normal and life is back to its routine. There are still random stop-and-search by police on arab youths but it's less vigorous than before. There's no spread-eagle against the wall with stripping and body search. The police just ask for IDs to be checked. I guess the relaxed atmosphere is partly due to the police choice to keep the mosque open to everyone. Previous years when police restricted entry to the mosque to only men over 50 yrs resulted in more tensions and violence. Now with free entry, there are no muslim grievances so things are a lot calmer.

Sr. Susanna

This morning I woke up at 3am to warm up some frozen food from Singapore for my breakfast. It's one of my summer must-do list ... eat home food. I had some buns and curry puffs at 5am ... which was very nice with a hot cup of coffee. The sun had just risen and the full moon is still on the west so the sky is a strange orange colour. Breakfast alone that time makes summer vacation feel special .... especially since I've not had a vacation for over a decade. I just needed to break from the routine. Do something different, eat something different ... to create a holiday feel. Poor me. From over 40 guys in the house, we're now down to 4.

Later in the morning I had the armenian Mass when I thanked Sr. Susanna for her service. She's a korean sent here to help for the past 3 weeks. I managed to teach her to sing solo for several hymns in the armenian Mass.

Umm Jack our assistant cook (also known as Nadia) was all made up today when she came to work. Yesterday her youngest son Johnny was engaged to be married. There was a party in Beit Sahour (Shepherds Field) in Palestine which I found strange since the couple both come from the Bethpage on the Mt. of Olives. Eventually I found out it was because events cost a lot less in Palestine than in Israel ... almost one third the price. Apparently all arabs hold their parties in Palestine because of the price.