Highs and lows...

God, this day has been both utterly fantastic and completely shit.

The fantastic bit was in the morning. If you've been reading my blog, you'd know by now that Saturday morning=shopping. Found this fantastic shop which sold all sorts of household stuff including A RICE COOKER!!!!!!!!!! I was so happy, I was practically skipping. I think my designated driver for the day thought I was definitely off my rocker but was far too polite to say anything. If that wasn't enough, I also found a supermarket that sold chopsticks and proper soy sauce, not to meantion Haagan Daaz.

Life was good. At least until Jack and I made it to the office in the afternoon.

Yesterday, we had finally sorted out all the bugs that were plaguing our financial system and got a very close approximation of our year end accounts. All that was left to do was to tidy up loose ends and alter a few donor allocation journals. But no, the Powers That Be obviously decided that they had to really fuck us up but good. After a couple of hours of happily passing final journals, we did our final check with one hour to go on our server (it shuts down automatically at 5pm every day) and voila - back to square one with no end in sight.

On a more positive note, found that a friend of mine who's just arrived in Beirut for a month's stay is actually not going to be working in a Palestinian camp. I'm usually pretty oblivious to danger but I was pretty worried about that. Now I'm just jealous of her and missing Beirut like crazy. She also reminded me of Forbes annual "Most dangerous destinations" list for 2008 - they are as follows:

1. Somalia
2. Iraq
3. Afghanistan
4. Haiti
5. Pakistan
6. Sudan
7. DRC
8. Lebanon
9. Zimbabwe
10. Palestine

I won't even start to go on about how stupid this list is (Haiti more dangerous than Sudan? Lebanon more dangerous than Palestine?) except to note that the person who wrote the accompanying article also wrote an article on healthy airport food. And besides, how can you categorise whole countries - some larger than Western Europe. Sure, dining at the Ritz in Khartoum is probably less dangerous than walking around Cite Soleil in Port au Prince dripping with jewelry, but how about South Sudan or Darfur? Those are bloody war zones... And I really can't believe Lebanon is even on that list: as long as you're not a Palestinian or a politician, and you're not stupid, Lebanon's fine. Except for the huge SUVs and no traffic rules.

Upshot to this list is that I'm feeling well hard having been to half the places on it ;-). Another five to go...