I woke up today, not thinking much of the fact that it was April Fool's Day. After all, we are in Yemen. I went to school as normal and our first lesson was about holidays and celebrations in our countries so I tried to talk in Arabic about Bonfire Night, Pancake Day, and Bank holidays, since the Americans in the class had already explained about Christmas and Easter. If our teacher had known about April Fool's Day, maybe she would have had her doubts about my stories about a special day for pancakes and about how everyone burns Guy Fawkes on a bonfire every year and have done so for the last 400 years!
"You failed your exam!"
During break time, one of our Yemeni teachers, Fatima, having heard about April Fool's Day, decided to play a joke on one of our classmates, Nicola, who was at home today. She phoned her and told her that she had failed her oral exam from the previous day.
"What will happen now?", asked Nicola. She then overheard giggling in the background and realised it was a joke.
"Where is the real exam?"
In the next lesson, we decided to play a trick on Fatima by changing all the clocks and our watches to one hour before and sitting in our previous lesson's classroom to make her think she'd got the time wrong, but she was not fooled. She just walked in and gave us our exam. She had made us an eight page doubled sided exam which is twice the normal length and a couple of the other students began to look through it in horror. I put my hand up and asked, "Fein al ikhtibar al haqeeqa", (Where is the real exam?). Fatima had indeed produced a double length exam just because it was April Fool's Day, in addition to the real exam.
The exam was not too difficult and I could have done better if I had not been so adventurous with some of my sentences but I think that it's best to test yourself to your limits in an exam rather than to keep it simple to get full marks.
Car search continues
After lunch, Kate went to visit the neighbours with Kira, while I went out with a Yemeni friend to look at second hand cars. I have been going out a lot recently, a couple of times with a South African friend, Scott, who is a very good mechanic. With the budget we have, we are looking at getting a Toyota Prado which is about 6 or 7 years old, but most of the second hand cars have been mistreated badly over the years and aren't worth considering.
"They must realise that it's April Fool's Day"
We returned to a dealer where we had seen a Prado before which Scott had said was mechanically very sound, but it had two problems- the air-conditioning made a terrible noise and there we lots of bits of white plastic on the bonnet which were the leftovers of the plastic sticky stuff which is put on the car when it is made at the factory. Yemenis like to keep this plastic on the car for a long time so that everyone thinks the car is still new but then the sun bakes the plastic and makes it very difficult to remove, which looks ugly and could devalue the car later. We found today that they had fixed the aircon problem and told me that if I gave a deposit and committed to buying it, they would clean all the white plastic off. "They must realise that it's April Fool's Day", I thought to myself, and told them that I would not make a decision on the car until after they had done their best to remove the white plastic.
Special prices for foreigners
We then went to another dealer which had phoned my friend saying that they had a Prado for sale. When they saw that I was a foreigner, they started telling me that the price was $3000 more than they had told my friend on the phone. Maybe they knew it was April Fool's Day too. I will resume the car search tomorrow, when it's not April Fool's Day!
