Sylvia's Journal

I dreamed about Hammourabi, not the Mesopotamian King, but his name which, in my dream, I translated dutifully from Persian into English as Blue Fish, from the words ‘hammour’ and ‘abi.’ Hammour is a fish and ‘abi’ means blue in Farsi. How’s that for continuous and unconscious language acquisition?

After a dream like this I marvel at the random firing of my neurons. Just to be on the safe side, in case this was a message from yonder, I googled hammour and hammourabi and learned that a hammour is a grouper, a member of the Sea Bass family. I ate hammour a few times during our stay in Dubai.

As for Hammourabi, he’s the one who authored an enlightened legal code (‘Code d’Hammourabi,’ one of the oldest legal texts known to us (1750 BC), carved on a basalt stelae). From Wikipedia I learned that he believed the builder of a house that collapsed on its resident should be put to death; and if the son of the resident was killed the builder’s son should be killed. But if a slave was killed a new slave should simply be provided.

In the end, not being able to find any significant message in my Hammourabi research, I decided it was just my brain getting back into gear for Dari class, later today.

In my Dari class I finally finished the Chinese fairy tale I started reading before our Dubai trip. The good thing about fairy tales is that there is a lot of repetition and so the reading and understanding speeds up as the story unfolds.

The language center is located in a modest building, sparsely lit by single fluorescent light bulbs and barely heated by tiny traditional diesel and wood stoves. This makes reading and focusing increasingly difficult when daylights starts to fade and, with it, the temperature drops. We will have to bring woolen socks and layers of extra clothing now that winter has arrived.

Also at the language center I discovered today that squat toilets are too much of a challenge for my recovering knee. I sometimes wonder how old people and not so old people with bad knees manage these basic routines (even if there was no arthroscopic intervention) in this part of the world. It is probably a lifetime of squatting that makes it possible for them to eat, sleep and do their business at any age without the agony that we joint-challenged westerners have.