It is good to hear that TU throughly thrashed Houston on their way to a conference championship. Dustin's mentioning of a tailgate ham made me think, why hadn't we thought of that before? I was somewhat dumbfounded to see that Kansas and Missouri are both ranked in the top ten, I guess you leave the country and everything goes to hell.

Last weekend I left Akjoujt for the first time in two months. I and the other volunteers in town (Hayley, Christine and Aaron) all went to visit other volunteers in Atar and have a halloween party. It is the peak tourist season in Atar and it was interesting to see tons of white people walking around. It felt weird to be somewhat anonymous again. We had a fun time in Atar, but mostly it was nice to get out of town for a few days. We will be heading back that way for thanksgiving and then further east to Chinguetti to do a three day camel trek over thanksgiving weekend. Chinguetti is an ancient town and the seventh holiest city in Islam. After that its only three weeks or so until we head to Nouakchott/St. Louis.

Prior to going to Atar for halloween we attended a party at our "club" for our friend Mario who was leaving Akjoujt to go to work in Zambia. Mario does an awesome karaoke version of all of Bon Jovi's greatest tunes. For this party we had a karaoke contest, with the winners recieving some spirited beverages. The karaoke machine gives you a score if you are on pitch and have the correct rhythm. A singles and a duet champion were proclaimed, I am proud to say the team Peace Corps won both prizes. Aaron won the singles and Hayley and I the doubles.

The next night we went to the home of Mario, he lived with a number of other filipino miners, and had a meal. I have never eaten so much good food in my entire life. We had fried chicken, steak, prawns, french fries, some delicious filipino meat bread, doughnuts and about ten thousand cold ones. I almost exploded...and then we did it again the next night. The filipino's have similar hospitality to the mauritanians, which is you should eat until you are considerably uncomfortable. Their food, however, I like.

In work related news, I gave a test this week to my English classes. I had to fail six students because of cheating. Generally, these were students who had not been attending classes and so did not know the material. These students decided though to cheat off of other students who hadn't attended classes. I would hope that if you are going to give the effort to cheat that you should at least be smart about it.

Thats about all thats been going on...I'll try to update again in the next few weeks.