Week of Fun

Our reminder email for the week

All this week, we are proctoring exams.  This basically means that for two to three hours everyday we go and help an Arabic teacher make sure the students aren't cheating.   Other than that, we have nothing to do.  To alleviate boredom, and to help fend off the impending cattiness that inevitably ensues when you leave 30 women in a room together with nothing to do but gossip, a few of the teachers decided to have a week of themed events.  The schedule included Salad Sunday, Motivational Monday, Taco Tuesday, Workout Wednesday, and Thirsty Thursday.

On Salad Sunday, we were all supposed to bring various salad supplies so that we could have a big salad bar. I opted to bring red cabbage since I already had it in my fridge and wouldn't need to buy anything special since I'm still on a budget.  The trouble is, Sunday is our Monday, and after a long weekend, I forgot all about Salad Sunday.  I felt really bad.  But not bad enough not to enjoy the salad bar anyway.  It was delicious!

On Monday, we were all encouraged to put up our favorite motivational quotes around the office.  It's really interesting what people come up with as their favorite quotes.  I've put together some of my personal favorites from the office in this collage for you.

Some of our favorite quotes

On Tuesday, we had tacos, and even though it is slightly unconventional, my contribution was the shredded cabbage that I forgot to bring on Monday.  If nothing else, it added a bit of color to the meal.  Some of the ladies had never had tacos before, and it was amusing to watch some of the Saudi Women attempting to cut apart their tacos with knives.  Don't worry, we schooled them in the proper method of devouring tacos.  Much hot sauce was consumed, and everyone laid around the rest of the day feeling too full to do anything.  I took a nap outside and nearly missed the bus home.

I was most looking forward to Wednesday.  I have been somewhat successful at doing Yoga every morning, and thanks to my lack of funds, I have been eating less.  I think that I have shed a pound of two, but with no scale, it's hard to say.  I had wanted to go jogging around our outdoor area with some of the other girls, and even brought my tennis shoes once or twice, but it just kept working out that I was teaching when they were free, or they were teaching when I was free, so instead of pushing myself to do it on my own, I had just given up.  Having a group workout sounded like a wonderful excuse to get me going.  At first we had planned on going to another room to do the workouts, but it turned out that there was a man in the hallway, so we had to stay put, or put on our abayas and hijabs just to walk to another room down the hall.  We opted to do our best in the tiny hallway.  We did a few warm up stretches, then we did squats.  We did 3 sets of 20, and one set of 15.  I know that doesn't seem like much, and at the time, it seemed like no big deal.  But then we decided to run up and down the stairs (3 stories) three times.  By the end of it, my thighs felt like jello.  I was barely able to do our cool down, the electric slide.  Now, if you have never seen 20 women trying to do the electric slide in a 4x15 foot hallway, with no one who actually remembered how, I highly recommend it.  It was so hilarious, I forgot all about my aching legs.  At least until I got home that night.  Getting up and down from the  couch was torture.  Going up and down stairs was worse.  I was glad I only had one day of work left so I could sit in my room and recover the rest of the weekend.

On Thursday, different people signed up to bring different drinks so that each hour, we had a small sample of each different type of drink.  I was able to have the first drink at 8am, hot chocolate with marshmallows, yum!  Unfortunately, I had to proctor an exam at 9am, so I had to miss out on the 9 am and 10 am drinks.  I was pacing up and down the back of the room, trying to think how I was going to make it through standing for the next two hours on my soar legs, when there was a knock at the door.  Low and behold, one of the teachers was going around bringing the drinks to the teachers who had to proctor.  It was so sweet!  I was so grateful.  On top of that, it just so happened to be my new favorite drink, lemonade with mint!  There were several interesting drinks the rest of the day, including carrot juice, hibiscus juice, a gross spinach and cucumber thing called green goo, and something that tasted like black jelly beans (maybe it was fennel?).  Our final drink of the day was supposed to be mock-tails (virgin strawberry daiquiris and pinacolodas) but the ice had melted and the blender gave out earlier, so we just had extremely thick mix.  It was a disappointing, yet sugar filled end to a whole day of crazy flavors.

At the end of the day, we all also received certificates of participation in the week of work fun.  It was fun.  And I now have a pink certificate that tells me my efforts were "admirable" to prove it.