The First Anniversary Post

I haven't written any new posts for over a month!!! Not sure how or why that happened? Brain Freeze? Alzheimer? Divine Mercy for my readers on the occasion the holy month of Hajj? Or may be, there is a conspiricy to prevent me from writing? Who knows.

Here is what happened so you can judge for yourself.

I was planning a special post on December 3rd, which was the first anniversary of my blog, but then my Ibn Batouta husband decided that we should go visit his cousin & her husband in China (I have no idea how he comes up with those crazy ideas, but what really puzzles me is how the heck does he convince me to go along with them. I am suspecting hypnosis!!) So I was too busy packing, and the anxiety I suffer from before any trip made me decide to write my (so called) special post in China.

In China. and for the first couple of days, our sleeping patterns were all messed up. The cousin & her husband were on China time. Ibn Batouta & I were five hours behind them. And when Ibn Ibn Batouta joined us there, he was 12 hours behind China time. So we saw each other in shifts, and at any given time only two or three of us were awake (well, kind of).

Ibn Batouta's cousin, finally found the perfect cure for this timezone problem. On a rare occasion when we were all awake, she took us to a foot massage place. Two of us (not telling who) were completely out the moment they placed their feet in the burning hot water bucket, and the rest hit the snooze button as soon as those master masseuses started working their magic on our very tired feet. Well this is what I think has happened since when I woke up, we were all well rested and finally on the same timezone. Rumor has it that some of those foot massage places also offer what the cousin calls "Massage with a Happy Ending". Hopefully we were not in one of those. (But if we weren't, why did the guys keep wanting to go back??)

Now that I was sleeping "normally" and was well rested , I thought I'd have time to write a post. I was wrong. Ibn Batouta had other plans. He was determined to see as much of China as possible in the short time we had left. We would wake up every morning, eat breakfast, and then follow in the tracks of Marco Polo. BTW, I am not complaining. I loved visiting so many places, and getting to know more about the people and the culture that will probably dominate the world in a few years. I was really impressed by most of what I saw. The only area the Chinese need to work hard on and improve drastically is their so called food. And I don't mean what we usually find in Chinese restaurant outside China, cause this has nothing to do with true traditional Chinese food. Hello!! Chinese People!! Ni Hao!!! I love you and love your country, BUT, having rats, cockroaches, bats, dogs, crocodiles, scorpions on a restaurant menu is NOT cool!!!

Any ways, back to my dry spell. Between site seeing, traveling to Hong Kong & Macau, and hunting for Arabic or European restaurants to find edible food, I had no time to write.

Now the plan was to write a new post as soon as we return home safely. But guess what, when I arrived home, my OCD took over and I had to unpack and return each travel item back to its designated place. The next day, I finally sat down at my recliner with the laptop on my lap to write. But I discovered that my laptop was acting crazy and was painfully slow, so I spent a day or so, doing disk checks, defragmenting, and running all the stupid tools that are supposed to fix your PC but never actually do. Up till this moment, I had no problem accepting that all those events were nothing but coincidences.

But what happened next was just too much. The moment (and I am not exaggerating) I had a working (but far from perfect) PC, I lost Internet Services. When I called the service provider to ask when will the problem be fixed, I was told that three submarine cables were cut and that they had no idea when they will be fixed!!

So excuse me if I invoke the conspiracy theory doubts that I was trying to ignore all along. Someone is determined to silence me. And this person must be the one I write most often about and who most probably is the one I embarrass the most by what I write!!!
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Allah y sam7ak ya Ibn Batouta.