Home for one (!) month

We are finished with Saudi Arabia. منتهى (We think this is Arabic for "finished". They say that a lot.)


One of Alonda's students is a member of the Saudi royal family and gave her a nice plaque to commemorate graduating from high school. He gave a different plaque to each of his teachers.

We were the co-advisors to the Class of 2008. Their slogan was "Super 8" and they used the Supereman type logo. We liked the Superman logo on this Leipzig lion. Not everyone you meet on the street takes really good pictures!


We had a nice stopover in Germany for a couple of days before flying home to Bremerton. We visited the teachers we worked with for years as part of the German-American Partnership Program (GAPP). One is going to Geneva to teach German and the other just had a baby. The third teacher is now the German advisor for Western Canada and the Pacific Northwest.

We are home for a month (cell phone 206-369-9258) and then are flying out to Karachi. We start school in Pakistan the first week of August. This also means that school ends in May.

Summer coming!

We are leaving Saudi Arabia for home and will be going to Karachi, Pakistan in July. Enjoy the summer!

Jim won the "People's Choice" award for one of his pictures at the Historical Society. The picture is the one of the young girl dressed up at the museum. Scroll down to see it!

We will be putting up pictures of the summer and Karachi as soon as we get to it.

Refrigerated rooms in Abha?

A friend of ours, Judith LaRue, wrote us about the rooms sticking out on the side of the stone museum in Abha. Here is what she said about them:

Possibility #2 (and I think the most likely explanation): Many large, multi-story stone houses in Yemen had a "refrigeration room." This stuck out of a corner, usually very high up on the building (5th or 6th story or higher). It usually had a small window on each side. Ceramic jars of water were kept there for cooling. Cheese could also be kept cool there, and some fruits and vegetables could be kept longer, especially during the hottest months of the year. I actually went "inside" (well, it's really tiny and low, so you could say I sat on the edge of the door frame) a "refrigerator" on the 7th floor of a city house in mid-July in Yemen, and it was impressively chilly! I drank a glass of cool water from one of the ceramic jugs (and the communal drinking cup...). Many ancient, hot-climate cultures used thick ceramic vessels and shaded areas with good ventilation to create coolness. Alonda, you probably understand the "science" of this, but I'm pretty sure it's kinda' like the human body's sweating. Anyway, I don't know much about the climate of Abha, but consider the refrigerator idea...

Thanks, Judith!