Working at the YCMES

Stephanie and I had some time earlier this week to take some photos of the immediate surroundings of the YCMES campus. The following photo is of Stephanie's favorite building...

The main campus building is 7 stories high, and growing in height. It's a great spot to see the city from on high.

There's a cafe next to the campus building that serves snacks and drinks during the day. The guy who works there (Nasser) still can't figure out why Stephanie orders tea without sugar and milk, but always puts lots of sugar and milk in her Nescafe!

Stephanie took this photo to either prove I was tall, or that Yemenis were short. I find myself bending over every day to go in and out of buildings!

Stephanie's workspace:

Power is pretty unpredictable here in Yemen. Outages are pretty frequent and can happen at any hour during the day as the grid is over-taxed and (so the rumor goes) the Germans built a wonderful new grid that doesn't run on the proper Yemeni grade of fuel. The best part of the day for power to go out (to a company such as ours which has yet to purchase generators to run the administrative buildings for more than 5 minutes after an outage) is during work. When the computers go down, nothing can be done! The other day the power went out and Stephanie and I climbed the 8 stories of the main college building to get a good look at the city.

Stephanie loves the following building with its quadruple balcony: architecture in Sana'a can be pretty intense.

Sana'a is situated on a mountain plateau, and mountains surround the city.

What they call the "President's Mosque" can be seen from the roof as well. An extravagent mosque built by Saleh, it has 6 minarets and was extremely expensive to build in the poorest of Middle East countries...

Not to far from work (and home) is the Prime Minister's residence. If you expand the following photo and look closely, you'll see that he has some of his shrubbery (don't say "ni") manicured to look like ducks.

Stephanie and I plan to go out and do some more exploring tomorrow. It'll be the first day since we've gotten to Sana'a that we've had the entire day to ourselves, so you can expect more photos soon!