Day 2

Time: 12:08am (technically day 3)

I woke up this morning at dawn to the sound of a really loud bird. And it wasnt a rooster as you might think at first. No, the neighbors actually have a more expensive natural alarm clock.

That's right. A peacock. Talk about annoying. This is what woke me up, and then the other neighbor's rooster decided to join in the screaming, and I was stuck away listening to two birds arguing over which one had the louder scream for about 3 hours. Oh, and they also had an Albino rabbit... this little 8 year old came out and picked it up by the ears out of the box to show us. Anyway, today was pretty uneventful. I spent most of the day at church, and then came to campus to sign up. The drive was just as awful as usual. Here's a video so you guys kind of know what I'm talking about.

Here are a few views from the drive:

Anyway, on campus I noticed a lot of cats. And anytime there's a lot of cats, the laws of the universe state that there must be a crazy cat lady to take care of them. and indeed there was.

she even knew all 30-some cats by name.

I then got to my dorm. Which wasnt even really a dorm. I guess I should have known better than to expect soemthing similar to the U.S., but I figured Lebanese AMERICAN University would be pretty close. I was wrong. My "dorm" is not on campus, but a 10 minute walk somewhere into the middle of the city. The doors are made out of solid metal and bullet proof. Again, hot water is a maybe. Electricity seems good so far, but the "highspeed" internet we were promised isn't currently working, and I doubt it will be even highspeed. By the looks of things around here, "highspeed" probably means a faster dial-up. The students here are really cool though. There are about 150 of us, mostly from the U.S. and Europe. I've met like 4 people from texas already and we all hung out tonight. I have no food or toilet paper or anything in my "dorm" so I'll probably go out tomorrow to buy stuff. However, Ive been warned that the locals take advantage of Americans and raise the prices for us, so we'll see how this turns out. I'll have to bring a cousin with me I guess. Classes start at 8:30 tomorrow morning though, so I'm off to bed. Hopefully I can sleep through all the honking cars below. Right now one car is honking a tune for some reason, and a bunch of other cars are imitating it. It's actually REALLY annoying considering it's almost 1:00am.

Views from my "dorm":