23 October 2006

Here are the highlights since the thunderstorm on Friday:

#1 Ever since my three weeks of sickness my sleeping patterns have been getting weirder and weirder. I have progressively had to go to sleep earlier and get up earlier. Until last week I couldn't stay up past 11 and couldn't sleep in past 8 or 9 am. As of last week, I am up bouncing out of bed, at ... 4.30am! This weekend, despite some serious late nights of 1am, I was up bouncing out of bed, at ... 5.30am! On a weekend! I tell you what, it makes you feel like you have had a 4 day weekend though! :( From 5.30am to 12pm feels like one day, then you have lunch and start the rest of your second day. It's amazing.

#2 I got to work dreading a week of not seeing nor hearing from him again since he is finishing all that hard work of a thesis. Then he emailed me around lunchtime and I could feel my body light up from the inside. I was *REALLY* good though and didn't reply for three hours - thus keeping my knees from spontaneously combusting as they are fond of doing when I think of him. So I sent him a reply finally and HIS reply came back in 15 minutes. My knees got a bit luke-warm then, he is so cute *scuffs the ground*

#3 I got an invitation from Ishan (the Muslim boy that I have an intellectual crush on) to join the UWA Muslim Student's Association for the feast to celebrate the end of Ramadan. I was SO pleased I was walking on air for the rest of the afternoon. It was amazing - Ishan invited me but he was in the male section of the prayer room and I was behind the screen in the women's section with all these amazing Muslim women from all over the world and they ate and laughed and prayed and made me feel so welcome two hours went like two minutes.

I was the only non-Muslim guest amongst the women and I was a bit of novelty. ESPECIALLY as I gather Ishan is quite the best man in the group and the girls cannot talk to him as much as I can. Each time I head over to him and start talking you can see all of the girls crane over and each time I head back to them they quiz me on what we talked about. I have such unthinking freedom interacting with other people it blows me away sometimes the rules that I break without knowing they are there.

The food was amazing, and I got a rather cool henna tattoo on my hand and I got to play tictactoe with a lively six-year-old while the adults were praying and I had so much fun. The funniest bit was as I was leaving one of the young boys was sent into the women's section with a message from Ishan to me. The little boy was so funny, he came charging in and demanded to talk to me, and his message was 'Ishan says that he has to go and he says goodbye and that you have to become a Muslim' (!!) Funny as it is, it is an incredible feeling to know that this young man trusts me enough to bring me into his faith group and is so desirous of my presence in his faith.

And now I am home, staying up late in defiance of my drooping eyelids to wonder in my own time at how a day can start out so conventionally and end so wonderfully in a place so totally unexpected as a Muslim feast.

May your travels bring you cool lakes and romantic scenery