Brown water

Have caught a dreadful cold somehow, and have had a temperature on and off and am feeling under the weather. The plumber, as mentioned before, made a mess and left gunk on the bathroom floor and loads of water, which I am putting off cleaning up by writing a blog entry. To cap it all off, I was doing wudu (ablution) in the other bathroom and had just rinsed out my mouth when I noticed that the water was brown. Not just slightly tinged brown, but real mud brown. I was horrified as you might imagine but couldn't do much other than wait for the water to run clear (which it did eventually) as the other bathroom was wet and I had to do wudu. The water had tasted ok, but I don't even want to think about why it was brown. In the end I had to buy an icecream to try to blunt the memory of the trauma I had suffered.

It looks like we won't have heating until Tuesday at least - both of the shops that the Bawwab went to were closed. Some people came to look at our air conditioning system and played around with the remote control; after declaring that the heating wasn't working, they left us to it, but not without demanding 10LE baksheesh for their 'services' rendered! Our bawwab then proceeded to have a loud argument with them over why we should pay them, and eventually, defeated, asked us for 5 Lira. They found this an insult and refused to take it, which was fine by us.

There was an iftar at Diwan today (the Arabic school I'm studying at) which was nice. There are a lot more families than I had expected, and it seems that coming to a foreign country with a young children isn't as mad an idea as I had thought. Imam Suhaib Webb gave a good motivating reminder about how we should avoid wasting time as we're here to study, and can socialise, go online (!) and watch tv as much as we like back in our home countries rather than wasting the opportunity we have now.

I'd better go and mop that floor.