Rain, Reminiscing, and Raging Good Times

Today I worked on my TOP SECRET Afghanistan education project under the working title Come Unity. I think it's going to be pretty fantastic. The bad part is I had to go out in the crazy rain we're having today. I actually heard grown adults screaming as they rounded corners into the wind. My umbrella, who I've had since London, was mangled beyond repair. So I was walking around, umbrella half-collapsed, soaked to the waist with my sneakers practically falling off from how heavy the rain had made them. And to top it off, when I got back to I-House the elevators, which had broken due to a power outage, were still not fixed. So weighing double my usual weight and soaked, I walked up 5 flights of stairs. FEH.

Let it be known that I am way over my head in work and slowly drowning amidst my papers. That said, I have had a little fun...

Remember back in February when I went to the horrifying "dinner" with Michael and friends? It took place at a Ghana restaurant and my food was more alive than not. If not, here's what I had posted then (but with pictures!):
I was excited to join Michael and Anmol for dinner with a larger group of friends including Paul, visiting German Jan, and about 5 others. Michael chose the place, a little African restaurant (and by restaurant I mean the kind of place where there are 3 regulars who look as though they live there) promising the flavors of Ghana. It was... interesting. I ordered a peanut chicken soup and what I got was an archaeological dig in a peanut bog for skeletal remains of ancient chicken. It was successful, I found the spine! After spending time with Clucker (pictured above, my new skeletal friend, Anmol and Michael got their vegetarian dishes of Red Red (pictured right, and it actually looks red!) which was actually blue paste with oil (oh so tricky). We only ate the fried plantains that came as a side.

So it was with great trepidation and a bit of skepticism that I took Michael's proposal to go out for ethnic food. This time he suggested Turkish, and that seemed a far safer gamble than Ghanaian. So off we went with Anmol, Leann, Marion and Suzana in tow. We ended up at Turkuaz, a lovely little restaurant at Broadway and 100th. With Middle Eastern restaurants there is a tendency towards cheesiness, but this was quite nice. There were the obligatory lanterns, but I thought they were cute, and the over all tent feel was really the hook that got us there. The food was excellent; big puffy pita bread with oil, and we got cheese cigars and grape leaves for appetizers. Michael and I shared a ginormous mixed grill plate that was incredibly good and over-filling.

We had a nice walk back to I-House where we were supposed to all hang out but half the group disappeared so Leann, Michael and I sat around the main lounge making new friends with the German chocolates he brought. Youssef, a new guy from Tunisia who speaks some Hebrew since he studies ancient papyrus, joined us and we followed the pretty girls who were all dressed up to the ball going on upstairs. I ended up with Leann, Jose, and Joel and drank way more than I should have. But, lesson learned, and back to the papers...