Day 61

Sunday. October the 30th.

My camera was still dead. So I have no pictures from today, bummer. As always today was a freeday. I went out with Lauren, Leslie, Katilyn, Katie, and Kara. We first went to Alladin's, then Katie and I ran over to Omar's where I finally paid of my olive wood debt to him. I only had to sell an arm and an leg to pay him off. We met back up with everyone and shopped around the clothing stores just outside the Old City. There are surprisingly a lot of cute clothes here, I don't plan on buying any until right before I leave. Because they are mainly Fall clothes. Although it is getting really cool here. We are now allowed to turn on the heat! In the mornings and evenings it gets really cold. Wow, side tangent. Back to my day. We then continued to shop in the Old City, where we of course went to Shabans. But I haven't been for a few weeks, so it was fine. We wondered over to the Dome of the Rock and got in line to wait for it to open at noon. But by 12:30 they hadn't even opened it up, so Lauren, Leslie and I bailed. We went and got some pastries, yum, I hadn't brought my sack lunch so I was hungry. We then went to Sam's office! I love Samach, we stayed for three hours and talked with her. She doesn't actually get paid by her boss, because he is lame. So she basically can do whatever she wants. She is a blast to talk to because she is so open. She isn't very religious either and she is super funny. She wanted us to wait until she got off of work. So we did. We actually ended up going to her house, it was a long drive because the traffic was so bad. And then her car couldn't make it up a big hill to her house, so we walked. We had stopped on our way and gotten groceries so we carried those up. Her house is super small it's attached to her parent-in-laws house. It had the parent's room, a bunk bed in a little 'room/hallway', a small sitting area, then the tiny kitchen and a bathroom. Sam has three daughters, well sorta four because she also basically raised her husbands little sister. Her daughters were all super excited for us to come, because they got to practice their English with us. Except only the older girls, age 13, could sort of understand us. But they were too shy to speak it with their mom there. Sam gave us a bunch of snacks, which I ate a ton of. Sam's youngest girl has the same name, Samach she is four. And the cutest child ever. She was so excited that we were there, she brought out all of her shoes and dresses for us to see. She even had us paint her nails, she wasn't shy at all. We weren't there for long because it was starting to get dark outside and we had to get back to the center. Sam said that she knew a short way back to our house, so we left later than we had planned. She started driving us, little Samach came and played with my face the entire car ride, but then her car broke down in the middle of the road. After a minute it started to work again, but once we got close to the center it broke down again. By this time it was basically dark, so we were all stressing a bit. We didn't want to just leave her with a broken car, so we waited with her for a little while but then a few people stopped to help her. And she didn't want us to get in trouble so we ran home. But too late. As soon as we went into the lower gate we were met by security and told to go to the upstairs office. Crap. We were all stressing for the entire eight flights of stairs up. We were asked why we were late and what we were doing. But it was hard to even answer, because they security guards wouldn't really listen. They just kept telling us that they didn't want to hear our life stories. They told us we were in a lot of trouble because it was our second time being late. And we were out when it was dark. And apparently we are not allowed into peoples home without written consent in advance by the head of security (we had never heard of that rule before). They talked in Arabic to each other for a while and called in the Shift lead. Basically we were supposed to be written up and be grounded in the center. But for some reason they decided not to punish us. On two condition's. We were not allowed to tell anyone what happened and we were never to do it again without permission. Because if we told someone and the head of security found out they would have gotten in a lot of trouble for not punishing us. So shh..don't tell anyone, it's supposed to be a secret. We didn't even feel guilty, because we felt like we hadn't done anything wrong. So it was a bit of a downer on the rest of the day, but I still loved going to Sam's house.