Layers, Cats and Victorian Hats

Here are some photos from a walk I took a bit ago, from one night when cats interrupted my lesson planning, and from my classroom.   

Layers and layers of paint.  Like in a school bathroom where people etch their thoughts and then they are covered repeatedly with some solid color. Here, it goes like this: People. Government. People. Other people. Government. Layers and layers still.  There are many walls like this in Bahrain, but this one is so blue, and there are more layers here than on others, I'd say. The walls around the courtyard at school have paint layers one and two: People, then Government.  I wonder what those school walls will look like five years from now.      

A different brain image of "desert," don't you think?  This is what I see.
  

Bougainvillea, rubbish, and blue.  Near our apartment building.

Peeking inside an entrance-way to a becoming villa, where Indian men construct new parts of the place every day.  There is construction everywhere.  Cinder blocks, cranes, dumpsters, scaffolding, around every corner.      

"Yield."  Another popular form of traffic control, not pictured here, is the speed bump.  It makes driving in a presumably flat desert much bumpier and I think more exciting.      

The cats have secrets, here.  I always hope to see them when I walk.  It's a bad sign when I hear them, though.  They meow and scream back and forth.  It must mean one alley cat has crossed a territory of another alley cat, or something like this.  I wonder why they have territories in the first place.  Maybe the prime dumpsters and the less-frequented dumpsters create an imbalance of where a cat would want to live.  And, when they are hungry, those cats with skinnier dumpsters risk their lives by stepping paw on the fat cat's turf.    

School scene: Yikes.  If I assign a poster project again, it will be worth more points, and they just might work in groups.  Huge pile-o-posters.  Thankfully, they are now graded and waiting to be taken home.  Also, one of my classes affirmed for me this week a general idea I heard about Bahrain: it really does not have copyright laws.  We use many copied *Lord of the Flies* novels in class, and the students explained to me that there are no organizations that regulate copyright.  It is okay in Bahrain.      

"Victorian Aged Ms. Laura" - a gift from one of my students.  I especially like the hat.  

I also floated in the Arabian Gulf, yesterday.  The salt lifted me up, and the water was shallow and clear.  Not too far away, or very, very far away, in that same water, there you were, everyone!  That blue connects us all.  And so I said "helllllooo!" to you.