Sana'a: First Blood

It's difficult to get your bearings here. Totally alien culture, nonexistent English, and the street numbering system seems like it hasn't changed since the Crusades (probably because it hasn't).
Started out the day bright and early in order to make a 9 am tour of the college, grab breakfast and meet the school president. There are about 11-14 of us here this term including some people doing research. I'm one of the rare undergrads but on the upside almost all of the students are American and all are fluent in English. After taking an oral and written placement test, which made me feel like Ray Charles discussing the color wheel, we ate lunch at a shop in the nearby square - a group of qat-chewing men were kicked out because 'these people will pay me!', according to the shopkeeper, and we were served chicken halves, lamb and grilled fish with the heads and scales still on, which was surprisingly delicious; for six people, with multiple plates of food person, our entire bill came to under $24. This city is the opposite of geneva.
We were then paired up with teachers depending on our level of Arabic and taken on a walk to the Old City, with them pointing out sites along the way. When my group came to the Knife-sellers' Souq (market), our teacher gave us our assignment, made sure we had business cards with the university's address in Arabic, and left us there to fend for ourselves - immersion course this most definitely is. Through gesticulating and my group's sad Arabic skills (we were put into the n00b team), my group found its way to stalls filled with every spice you could imagine and bothered shopkeepers, asking 'ma hadha?' (what is this?) in order to get the Arabic names for things, which was sometimes foiled by the stallkeeper saying something like 'it's garlic, American' in garbled English. Always makes you feel bad when the foreign shopkeeper thinks you don't know what a potato is. We then managed to find our way back without getting too lost.
Throughout the entire day, we only ran into one other foreigner, a big guy in a tshirt with tattoos up his arm (he stood out - tattoos are considered extremely indecent here, and even tshirts are frowned-upon), though he pretended not to see us. The children, a pack of which claimed every street, loved coming up to us and using any basic English they knew, and the older Yemenis would at times glance in surprise at seeing foreigners and give us a friendly wave, save for the older Yemeni woman who muttered 'God have mercy' when she saw us.
All the horror stories you hear in the news have definitely driven people away, even though a foreigner in Sana'a is far, far safer than a tourist in New Orleans. But then again the only time Yemen makes the news is when something horrible happens: Houthi rebellion claims more lives, al-Qa'eda vows to kill more Americans, southern separatists gain steam. Crime of any sort is close to nonexistent; people will leave keys in the cars with the doors unlocked, and violent crime is unheard-of.
Although Yemen is a Gulf country, which are typically the most conservative of the Arab states, I was slightly taken aback by the profusion of niqabs, the black head-to-toe coverings worn by devout women. I could count the number of Yemeni women I saw not wearing one on my left hand. Since I arrived last night and saw many Yemeni men but no women it was a shock to head onto the street this morning and see the masses of black robes stacking groceries on their heads. Tomorrow classes start at 9 and I think that with the 4 am call to prayer at air-siren noise levels, I'll be up in time to make class.

And as I'm about to post this we're hit by a blackout. Until morning, then.... and on getting back after class, another blackout. So here it is now.

Today was overcast and rainy - I'll wait until a sunny day for pictures of the spice and knife markets