What's a Dukan Disagreement?

In Africa, we called them dukas, but here, they call them dukans.

It must be some kind of Arabic word..

The only time I seem to have mentioned dukas in my Africa posts was in a post from Aug 2011 (close the end of the post).

It's simply a small place to shop - smaller than a grocery store.

And just like in Africa, the goods from the store tend to spill out onto the sidewalk.

But unlike Africa, these sometimes sell fruit & veggies, and they are a bit cleaner.

This is right next to the chicken butchery, which is right next to our house.

More outside stuff...

The inside is usually one room, but this one has three aisles!

And the only cold stuff is ice cream inside, sodas, milk, and yogurt outside.

Kylie was in the middle of cooking (hence her apron) when we ran next door for some ingredient we ran out of.

One day two weeks ago, we went to buy some bottled water for guests that were staying with us.  The bottles were stacked under blankets on the sidewalk.

We bought them, walked home past the chicken shop where they were unloading chicks (and a little bit more, as evidenced by what's in the street), and went inside.

Shortly, there was a knock on our gate.  The same gate the man knocked on to tell us to stop running water.

It was our landlord's brother who runs the chicken shop with our landlord.  He lives behind the chicken shop and his walls bump up to ours.

He was telling us "No water," and pointing to the sun, saying the word for "sun" and spitting.  He told us to take back the water to the store (at least that's what we understood).

We slowly gathered the flat of waters asking ourselves if we had understood him correctly.  We walked past him, nodding a hello, past the chicken shop to the dukan.

As we stood in line at the store to return the water (alone), I told Kylie it surely would be nice if we had that man to tell the dukan owner what we were doing (because we surely didn't know).  Within seconds, Kylie went to get him.

When Kylie returned with him, there was a "bit" of a disagreement, all in a language I could barely understand.

Our friend was telling the dukan owner that his water was bad because it sat in the sun (I'm guessing).

The dukan owner disagreed and tore open the plastic covering the flat, yanked a bottle out, quickly twisted off the lid and sloshed water toward the man to drink.  He wouldn't, so he shoved it in another patron's face to drink it.  The patron did, and then finally our friend did.

There were still heated words back and forth while we stood there, and finally we were handed back our money, our friend smiled, and he pointed across and down the street and told us to go to a store where the water was kept inside (at least that's what we thought he said).

We quickly left the dukan, headed down the street, and came back with "good" water.

We showed our friend.

He smiled.

All was well.

Of course, I was a little nervous about going back to the dukan again, but so far, it's been as if nothing happened.

So that is what a dukan disagreement looks like.