Happy New Year everyone!

We've had a lot of visitors coming through, which is great for Iola and us too. It started with John's sister Melanie, who came for Christmas. We went to Jordan with her. Iola started calling her Titi. She left on New Year's Eve's afternoon, which we celebrated after dropping her off at the airport in Dubai on her way to Paris. We drove back to Abu Dhabi and invited a couple from downstairs to hang out on our patio. 

Colin Wambsgans came on New Year's day, and was here for twelve days on his winter break from CalArts-composing-grad-school. He'd been really excited about going to Yemen, but the US and British embassies there closed down because of the bomber connections, and it didn't seem like a good time to go, what with the ongoing war going on in the north and south of Sanaa too. I was secretly relieved about the embassies. I'd been nervous about bringing Iola. I probably would have stayed inside the whole time, looking at the city -- purportedly the most beautiful in the world -- through hotel windows. Instead John and Colin went to a Yemeni restaurant, and loved it. We did go to the Mussandam peninsula in Oman, though, and camped on a beautiful little beach right by an ancient Omani cemetery. We went swimming in the morning, the water was perfect and there were little tropical fish everywhere, and we hiked up a cliff and looked down onto sea turtles. We drove to Khasab and explored a fort museum, and took a boat out for two hours to see the archipelago from the water. It was a lot of driving for just one night, but still great to get out and see it again. It had been a year since John, Iola and I went with Lauren and her Portuguese friend. That time we camped on top of the cliff, not realizing our little car could make it down to the beach. You have to do everything at least once here, before doing it right the next time. On our way back to Abu Dhabi we tried to stop at the Burj Dubai/Khalifa, but it was too frustrating. You have to enter from the Dubai Mall, the biggest mall in the world, which is a terrifying place. Last time we went to that mall John and I lost each other, and Iola was three months old, and neither of us had our phones, and I couldn't remember where the car was parked. I sat outside a restroom and cried for forty minutes until he found us. He'd been frantically running around to multiple restrooms looking for us. Maybe the Dubai Mall will require three times before we get it right.

We had a couple days to ourselves and then my friend Maggie Cummings came with her fiance Matt from Boston on their way to India. They only stayed for two days and were really interested in markets and old stuff, so we went to the fish market at Meena and the old souq and museum in Dubai. We also stopped in time for the tour of the grand mosque, which gets more beautiful every day. Now they are gone; I dropped them off at the airport this morning.

We are breathlessly waiting for Nathan and Kelly to come day after tomorrow with their baby Loretta. We haven't met Loretta yet, despite being so close for so many months. We want to go camping with them too, maybe to Wadi Bih, but we have to rent a bigger car to fit the babyseats and all of us. Right after we drop them off, John, Iola and I are heading to Cambodia. John is doing a story on the resettlement of Phnom Penh after the fall of the Khmer Rouge for the Review, dusting off some old notes from when he lived there, and I'll write something on traveling with Iola. We're staying with Brian Calvert, who we lived with in DC and haven't seen in two years. We'll be back on the 31st of January, and then... John and Martha arrive on February 2nd! They will stay until the first week of March.

In the background of all this, we took on a roommate to reduce our rent. Mohamed is a New Yorker-Egyptian, we really like him, he works a lot and Iola calls him Hamed. He's 22 and comes from a big family so he jokes with her a lot. I don't know how long he'll stay with us; but it's nice for now.