Catching my eye

There are several things here that are just different.  Some, I can't explain, but I always know them when I see them.

The meat section in a major super market.

A squirrel on a leash by a busy street.  No wonder he's jittery.

 Can you see him on the metal table there hunched down?

 Going out to eat wings (for Mother's Day) and everyone being given plastic gloves.

Eating fruit with my neighbors (not weird), while listening to their dinner (see below) right outside (weird).

Going to buy naan at night (not weird), but the money thing is weird.  Do you see the rope running down the middle of the blanket?  Everyone puts their money under the rope, in order of how you arrived at the naan stand.  People fold their money in different shapes and do all sorts of interesting things with it, so that they know that it's theirs.  

The lines are long.  Everyone here buys bread, every day.  The government supplements every family with flour, and the families usually sell their flour to the naan shops in their neighborhood so that the bread can be made for each area of the city.

We like to buy samoon bread more often than naan.  This is what it looks like.  It's got a crunchy outer shell and it's hollow in the middle.

 This is one of the things people do with it (make a falafel sandwich).

The interesting part about buying samoon, is that there is a "Woman's" window and a "Man's" window to buy from.  Sorry.  No pictures of that one today.

Another different thing is the use of parks here.  People in America love parks, but not like they do here.  These cars on the side of the road are but a small remnant of all the cars parked along the park.  This was taken at 7 o'clock at night, and they will be double and triple-parked until well after midnight.  Out of the multiple parking lots made for this park, only one is a decent size (parking well over 400 cars), but the rest are not nearly big enough (maybe 50-60).

They LOVE their parks.

And one last one for today, and this one is very African as well...whenever I ask a taxi driver if he knows where a location is, he almost always says, "Yes," whether he knows or not.  They don't like to disappoint.

Below is the only driver I know the name of, and it is because he parks right outside the chicken butchery to hang out with his friends.  He is hardly every "taxi-ing" around, so I use him when he's there.

However, whenever he says he knows where to take me, I have seen him call someone and ask how to get there.  He has also stopped at a red light before and asked another taxi driver out the window where such and such place was.  (I know enough of the language to figure out what he's saying).

He is not alone.  This has happened multiple times, and since I've taken many different taxis to get to Karis and Caleb's soccer practice, I have been lost many different times.  It's always a blessing when I see a landmark I know and I can give instructions in the language to get them back on track, but twice I've had to call someone who has better language that I do and put them on the phone.

I'm always on the look out for "different," and sometimes I see it and just don't take a picture.  I'll try to be more aware of that when something catches my eye.