random occurrences on a Thursday

1) I have lunch everyday at the school canteen. I was beggining to get quite used to what to expect: soup- usually a chicken-like broth with a few vegitables and sometimes meat and sometimes some noodles or potatoes and then a main dish consisting of unknown meat + unknown sauce + startch (rice, potatoes or pasta- usually all cooked to the same muchy consistancy) every so often this main meal is a stew, a thick bean or lentil soup- this does not, however, mean that there is not still the first soup so we have soup followed by soup.
Yesterday however I was thrown a curveball. We had the usual soup with potatoes and then, the main meal was jelly doughnuts. yes, jelly doughnuts. I don't get it either. When I mentioned how odd I found it to have jelly doughnuts as a maian meal, for lunch done the less, the other teachers were equally surprised to hear that we eat doughnuts only for breakfast and never as a main course. So there you go- doughnuts as a cultural difference.

2) The teachers at my school have all been wondeful and very nice. Yesterday (the random Thursday) one invited me to her house after belly dancing for a beer and to give me some covers for the armchairs in my apartment- very nice of her. It is so nice of her that how do I say no? I don't, and now I know what it would be like if instead of furniture I had albino Wookies to sit on, they are...lovely.

3) But none of this mattered because as I sat on my albino Wookie armchairs and tried to digest my lunch of jelly doughnuts I smiled in a state of happiness that can be brought on by only one thing. World news in English! Yes, after much work from Jonny (my contact teacher's husband) and alot of random button-pushing, I now have CNN in my apartment, and BBC. Apparently it was there all along but in a strange between-channels world that we had to find and then manually program into the TV.