Saturday, September 4

We finally made it to a Hash with Tom and Betsy. Every Friday the British Club organizes a run/walk way out in the desert. Afterwards, they have drinks together. It's really all quite silly. They have all these rules and rituals. If it's your first Hash, for example, you have to go in the center of the circle and chug a beer while they sing a song. Last night, the theme was "Rehydration," so they had set up eight stops in the desert. A different country hosted each stop with a drink from their country, so there were gin gimlets at the English stop, whiskey sours at the Scottish stop, screwdrivers at the Norwegian stop, and Long Island iced teas at the U.S. stop. These were just a few. They also had snacks representative of their country. The U.S. had Doritos! To say the least, it was a crazy night. Mixing all that alcohol proved very disastrous for me. Joe, on the other hand, stood up to the challenge.

The location of the Hash was a wadi. I'm not quite sure what that means exactly. We were way out in the desert and there were many buttes, I guess I would say. We climbed up and down a few of them. The view from the top was amazing. Sand for as far as you can see. We could see all the way to our school, even with the smog. The sad thing was that there was so much garbage out there. Apparently, there is a dump nearby where they burn garbage. However, some people are lazy and drop their garbage on the side of the road before they reach the dump. There are trash bags heaped along the whole desert road. When we got out to the wadi, there were tons of plastic bags caught in the desert brush. Think of all the plastic bags in this world. I think half of them had blown out into the wadi.

Despite the trash, it was a really cool sight. There was a nice breeze out there so it wasn't intensely hot. The weather has actually been cooling off a little. Instead of being insanely hot, now it's just hot. Today, we are going to try to have a quiet day alone. We will see what happens. Being alone in a city of about 20 million is virtually impossible. We are anxiously waiting to see if our laundry comes back to us. We were fed up with the "washing machine" so we sent it out to be laundered. Of course, we could barely communicate to the boy who picked up. I think I told him to wash and iron it. We think we're getting it back today.

We hope that all is well in the U.S. We are thinking of all of you.