Spoofy Randomness

Location: Kafr Abdo

  • Disco

    Disco

    I mentioned in a previous commentary about the water heater. Working on grading and I am IN THE ZONE, when all of a sudden loud banging and popping comes from my bathroom.  I go in, and the entire top of the water heater pops off and boiling hot water starts gushing out.  Of course, the shutoff is BEHIND the boiling water.  Finally get everything shut off and call Ahmed from the school (he handles all the apartment stuff).  However, it took a week (and poor Ahmed calling daily) to get a new water heater–the school wound up buying one and then took the cost out of the rent–which meant that I had a week of cold showers.  UGH.

    Souq is definitely an oddity.  It has a lot, but a lot of it is novelty versions of essential things.  My first experience was when I couldn’t find, of all things, a drain plug for my sink.  I found one…with a little hand coming out of the drain.  Hey, it works.  And now I have a shower head with alternating LED lights.

    Apparently now it’s tradition for expat teachers to draw themselves naked for the first time in their comic? Two counts as tradition, right?

    And yay, Meagan’s back in the comic! She should show up more.  We have been able to use Google Hangouts almost every week, which has been nice, and of course we talk fairly non-stop (when we’re both awake at the same time) on WhatsApp.  Yay technology!

  • Mysteeerious…!

    Mysteeerious…!

    It’s kind of Halloween-themed this week!

    Shout out to Bamboo! The sweetest little Indonesian lady runs it, and they have the best spring rolls ANYWHERE. And yes, they have a little Christmas tree up. I don’t know why. Coincidentally, two more months until Christmas. Didn’t plan it that way, but cool.

    Cameos of Joe, who has helped me figure out a lot of tricks to living here, and my boab Saheed (a boab is like a doorman, but also looks after the building, runs errands, etc).

    I don’t know if not meeting your landlord/lady is normally a thing; I’ve only rented one apartment before, and the school handles most of this one, so…  I just find it a little odd.  I’m sure she is a wonderful lady and not planning on taking over Kafr Abdo…I think…

    Everyone seems to keep their shutters closed on their windows.  I mean, yeah, it blocks sunlight to reduce AC usage during the hot months, and I close mine when I’m gone and at night because I’m on the ground floor (while I’m in a good part of town, I still don’t want to invite thieves), but I love daylight and this just blows my mind.

    The water heater thing may come up in a later comic, so I’ll hold off on that story for now.  If you’re following my Twitter feed, you’ve seen a bit of it. It is now day five since I’ve had a hot shower. @#$%&. Here’s hoping there’s not a similar post next week.

    Edit: fixed speech bubble in panel 1

  • Home Sweet Home

    Home Sweet Home

    Apologies to whomever from the school who picked me up at the airport; I have no idea who you were.  I was kinda out of it.  But yeah, this was my reaction to my apartment.  It was a bit of an overexaggeration, but I was expecting a quite small one-bedroom apartment and this place is not much smaller than the first floor of my old house, and it’s the smallest apartment in the building. So yeah, bigger than I expected. Fancy entrances are also a thing here. I think that’s pretty awesome. It shows that the owners have pride in the building and whatnot.

    Sherif makes his first appearance! I won’t say too much more about him because I know he’s going to show up later, but he gets awesome points for showing me around the next day even when I was still coming off of the panic episode and was not feeling well at all.

    And yeah, no box springs, so when I first sat on the bed there was an audible THUD. I did wind up sleeping on the couch the first few nights, but that was more because there was air flow in the living room than the bed itself. Once I bought a fan, I can sleep surprisingly well on that bed despite its solidness.

    I meant to invert Panel 2; for some reason when I was drawing it I was convinced I had the side of the car and road correct. NOPE. And then I forgot to invert it. Although to be fair, the van driving on the wrong side of the road isn’t too unrealistic… The black and yellow car is a taxi; they are VERY noticeable!