nickels and dimes

today has felt like a lifetime. being inside all day on a rainy, gray day felt a lot different than the last couple of days where we were so busy all the time.

this morning, i was woken up because traditional music was being blasted from a few blocks away. i'm not sure if the music was live, but there were two singers who were horribly off key. it was soo loud and it lasted for the whole entire day. i still hear it right now but i'm not sure if it's just been permanently imprinted on my eardrums or if it's actually still going on. here's a rough approximation.

this afternoon i caught up on blogs, friends and the news and cleaned my room a little bit. i guess i've always been a pack rat, but even i'm amazed by how much stuff has accumulated in here. there's no way it's all going to fit in 2 suit cases on the way home. but everyone who comes in comments on how it feels like a "real room," which was the goal.

martyn and i went to a thai place in carrefour for lunch. i always order the same thing, green curry and coconut chicken. it's always delicious. but today i thought i'd try something new, so martyn and i both ordered thai chicken something-or-other, and i had been talking up the restaurant the whole time, but when we got our food, it was disgusting. it was like they just cut up a whole chicken and threw it in the soup. it wasn't hot, spicy or temperature-wise. it just tasted like oily coconut soup.

katherine sent me a link to a new food blog and i found this recipe for curried lentil stew so i made it tonight with the lentils i brought back with me. it was pretty good but i couldn't find tomato sauce, so i bought a can of prepared pasta sauce and dumped half of it in. it was alright, but it had green and black olives in it so it added kind of a weird surprise to a few bites of stew.

i posted some pictures from the trip in the post before this if you want to go check them out.