Thursday, September 08, 2005 Internet has been behaving somewhat better lately in Azove. It's still somewhat difficult to get everything done that I want to... but Portable Thunderbird continues to rock my socks off. It makes life a LOT easier. The only thing that could be better is if my laptop would work. Thanks to Shane who caled Apple for me it seems that Apple's "world-wide" support doesn't cover, you know, the WORLD. They'll ship a box to a US address, where I can then magically teleport my computer to that location and then, well... the details weren't very clear after that.

Things are going here in Azove. It's scary to think that stage is really almost over. Our final language test is one week from tomorrow. That should be probably more frightening than it is, but I feel fairly confident that I'll pass. We've been speaking only French amongst ourselves... which is actually really fun. It's like a bizzare club. Especially when you interject American culture. Ly called me a "lucky duck" which we decided translated as "mallard du bonne chance". We subsequently decided that the French should rhyme as well, so it became "mallard-ance du bonne chance". Trust me, it's funnier here when you haven't had contact with any other Americans for 2 months.

Speaking of two months, today is our 2 month anniversary of being in country. Scary!

Today I got my birthday card from my Mommy, and a package of candy (and drink mix) from my aunt. Thank you both! The M&Ms were exactly what the doctor ordered. Additionally someone got Oreos today. Oh man, I don't think I've ever enjoyed a cookie so much!

Ah, one other notable item is that Benin's numbers are changing. We're going to an 8 digit system, so after Sept. 17th you'll need to add a 97 to the front of my number. This means you'll now dial 011-229-97-60-27-11.

Last night was Theresa's birthday, which was awesome. The theme was "breakfast for dinner", so we had pancakes, french-toast, grits, coffee (a la Beninoise) and eggs. Since Garret's mom reads this blog I'll go ahead and mention that your son is awesome at making pancake batter, and an excellent pancake side chef as well.

Tomorrow ICT is going to Cotonou, which will be my first time back since we got here. It should be interesting to see how my perceptions of the city change after getting a little bit more used to how things are here.

Please forgive the relative crappiness of posts lately... when I have a computer I can access for free in a couple of weeks things will improve! Promise!