Algerian Cuisine

With the dawn of this new semester, I've taken on a couple of new responsibilities. Two nights a week I tutor a seven year old boy in the ways of English. As you can imagine this usually amounts to little more than me talking to myself and hoping that he slowly pick up the language. There is usually lots of card playing and me just generally wrestling with the kid. I'm not sure if its working, but the parents generally enjoy my company and they keep paying me so I think I will continue.

In a few weeks, I'm going to start tutoring a high school student. It sounds like this kid is a lot smarter than I. He is studying at a German high school, speaks English, and is currently touring around Canada. I'll let you know how that goes.

Also, my new internship at the Defense College has proved more interesting than first thought. The Algerian guy I met the first time, was the only one that showed up at the second meeting. We had a verry long chat about Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, and even Budapest. Its remarkable some of the vocabularly he knows but some of the words that he doesn't.

Well this Algerian guy offered to take me out to dinner on Friday, so I agreed. We went to this famous Turkish restaurant that is known all over Budapest. It just happens to be next to one of the apartments for our program and we happen to frequent it every other day. I showed up at the agreed to time and half hoped that my man, Abdallah , wouldn't show. He did in fact show and I had the most delicious, and filling dinner in quite some time. He spent over $20 on the two of us which is a small fortune for this restaurant. Bread, lamb. chicken, beef, tea, and soup was all included in this feast. Trouble is Abdallah wanted to hang out all night, which got a little quiet towards the end but it was still pretty good. Now my mind is working on ways to get to Alegeria. After looking at the State Department's Travel Advisory (i.e. Americans are not allowed to travel outside the city without an escort) I was slightly deterred, but the gears are still working on how to organize a trip to Algiers. We'll see. Hopefully this friendship will brood some more free meals and some interesting info on Algeria. I'll let you know.