Blog entries from Yemen
I was going through photos from the past several months (can you tell I’m procrastinating from writing my book today?) and I came across a few gems from Yemen that are too good not to share. Things have changed since Mr.YemenEm and I left Yemen in May. But when we were there, the kind people […]
I was slightly annoyed by the incessant noise in our Manhattan apartment before, but it really got to me during last night’s sleeplessness and today’s endless honking, yelling, and traffic noise. I’ve been sticking to the apartment and writing through the morning. I thought this was working out fairly well. But today, the yelling Iranian […]
I’m writing this from the Bahrain airport, sipping a ridiculously good draft beer in a smoky airport bar. It’s not that Stella is even a particularly good beer. It’s just that after not being in a bar for a long time, and not having a draft beer for a long time, this is a feeling […]
There’s a saying in the State Department that people who come to difficult posts such as Yemen will end up one of five ways – as a skunk, monk, drunk, chunk, or hunk. Those first two refer to losing the will to clean oneself (and probably wallowing in depression as well) and to not getting […]
Mr.YemenEm woke me up out of a deep sleep Tuesday morning by telling me “There was a terrorist attack at the finish line of Boston Marathon.” First, I just heard “there was a terrorist attack” and assumed it was in Yemen, possibly near the U.S. Embassy, our place of work. Then I processed the second […]
“So, what do you think of Yemen?” is a question I’m commonly asked by Yemenis. My usual response is that I haven’t seen enough of the country to form a strong opinion. I live in a hotel, and I work at the embassy, and I see very little in between (not to mention, I pretty […]
One day in high school, it dawned on me that was time to apply for college. I walked down the guidance counselor’s office and waited in line for my assigned counselor, who was tasked with seeing students with last names L-Z, which equaled about 2,500 students at my particularly large suburban high school. I had […]
Before I met Mr.YemenEm, I don’t think I knew what a diplomat was. I probably grouped diplomat with words like plutocrat, Argonaut, and Gangnam Style that I’d read and meant to look up, but never got around to. After I learned that a diplomat is a person who represents their country abroad, I still didn’t […]
Last weekend, Mr.YemenEm organized a volleyball tournament at the hotel for Yemeni high school students who recently returned from doing exchange programs in the U.S Every student desperately hoped they’d be placed in a a high rise apartment in New York City, but instead, they were placed in some really random places. (Albeit places that […]
There are several “quick” vacation spots from Sana’a that people at the embassy are known to travel to when the isolation of being in Yemen gets too much. Istanbul, thanks to a new somewhat direct route from Turkish Airlines, is an option (and Mr. YemenEm and I took this trip back in October and it […]
The Next Dinner Party 