Sylvia's Journal

Slowly we are picking up our routines again: Dari classes on Monday, exercising our lungs, already affected by the dust and going to bed at a reasonable hour. Vacation is over, not just for us but for everyone.

It was more of a work day than I had anticipated. I received a call from my boss to help out on the presentation a week from now by the Acting Minister at the Millenium Development Goals Summit that will take place in New York. The still in draft form powerpoint was large, as they are when people put full size pictures in them, and so it took a couple of hours before I had downloaded the enormous file.

My work was interrupted by Dari class. Axel cancelled his class because his back was hurting; we think it might have been the gin and vodka bottles that we crammed into already too heavy hand luggage. We got away with it then but apparently payback time waited until later.

I had brought my Dari teacher an English-Dari/Dari-English dictionary in the hope that she would be able to find the real English meaning of Dari words, rather than have me guess from her description of the word in Dari. I had guessed wrong many times in the past.

As I was working my way through Pinocchio in Dari there were many occasions to use the dictionary but I learned quickly that she’s not very good at using a dictionary. For me, using the dictionary to find the English meaning of a Dari word is difficult as I don’t know the ‘alfabah’ by heart yet and the sequencing of words is thus rather difficult. So I continue the guesswork.

Reading Pinocchio in Dari, even though I know the story, is difficult because of the many idiomatic constructions that don’t lend themselves to word by word translations. Still, after reading moral stories and fairytales for months now I am ready for something more adult. I gave my teacher an ‘Intermediate Dari’ book I had ordered from Amazon and brought back from the US. It has more adult content, phrases like, ‘he burned his books before he committed suicide.’ I asked her to review the first few chapters to see whether this can be my new text book.

We picked tomatoes and basil from our garden and Axel made the kind of tomato salad that we used to eat all through the summer in Manchester. I made a Lebanese zaatar bread roll to accompany our meal and we opened our last bottle of wine, a Ksara Rose that was left over from our previous Dubai visit. Because of the full hand luggage we were not able to add another bottle. So from now on we are relying on visitors.