Linguistic Awareness…and Musaffah

An Aussie, a Kiwi, and two Americans were in a meeting. One of the Americans (that would be me) said, “I’m knackered,” and immediately cringed. “That sounds just horrible in an American accent, doesn’t it?” she said. The Kiwi and Aussie were momentarily polite enough to not agree with the linguistically introspective American. (The other American was keeping well out of it; besides, she was Italian by birth.) Finally taking pity on the American, the Aussie commented that it wasn’t quite as bad as saying “I’m buggered” in an Aussie accent to an English person (English meaning from the country, not English the language). The phrase has distinctly different meanings in the two different countries.

If you don’t know, I’m not telling. Look it up. That’s what the Internet is for.


And now for something completely different…

We have finally moved into our permanent accommodations, in the heart of the lovely town (that’s sarcasm there) of Musaffah (alternate spellings: Mussafah, Musafa, Mussafa, etc…). Shockingly, we all now have gas for cooking, and most of us have hot water. None of us have landlines or Internet connections, except our resident techie who got wireless broadband a month ago. He’s going to get really sick of us all knocking on his door wanting to borrow his Internet… With any luck (a commodity which, admittedly, has been in short supply around here), we will have Internet in a couple of weeks. It’s doubtful that anything will happen this week, as Ramadan draws to a close, or next week, which is the Eid al Fitr holiday. So, best case scenario is Internet early in October. (“Oh, pretty please?” she prayed to the gods of Internet.)

If my technologically-challenged brain can handle it, I’ll post some pictures of beautiful downtown Mussafah, or what I assume is downtown, as one block looks very much like the rest here. There is water somewhere nearby, but we have not been able to find it…