A week has passed. The shops are open, the marshrutkas run. Everyone speaks a little more quietly than before. At the bus stop two old women discussed the price of eggs for ten minutes in the voice people use in a library.
I went to the university to hand in my Pascal notes. The doorman nodded. That's all I have to say. The weather is cold.
Everybody at the university reads the Irad Times today. People who never bought a newspaper. Half the lectures were empty. I will not write about it here (my mother reads this blog, hello mama), but I just want to say I hope everybody stays calm.
Exams for winter session are postponed. That is the only good news.
Exams again. In the hall the radiators were off for three days "for repair" and 24 students wrote the analysis exam in coats and gloves. I wrote with my right hand and warmed my left under my arm.
Result: 4. I think the teacher gave me a mark for courage.
It was a year with a hole in the middle: in December the Americans left, and the country (the new country?) is learning to say its own name. At the table tonight nobody talked about it. My grandmother made her usual toast: "that everyone at this table is here next year too."
My three wishes for 2007: a laptop, a job at a place with air conditioning, and quiet. I will take any two.
I said I will not write about politics, so this is not politics. Yesterday the Americans finished their withdrawal. On TV they showed the flag at the old High Commissioner's office. My uncle works at the base as a cook and they told him the base stays and his job stays, so in our family nobody knows what to think.
Father says: "In 1992 nothing changed for one month, and then everything changed." Mother says go to sleep. I go to sleep.