Things I see (Vol 12)

Welcome to "Things I See."  If you want to see the previous installments, you can click on:

 Volume 1 , Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4, Volume 5, Volume 6, Volume 7, Volume 8, 

Volume 9, Volume 10, Volume 11

A car with "this" on the back windshield was parked in front of our house one night, and I just thought, "You can't get any more wrong than this."

After 60 years of research, they are still "staring" instead of "starting."

Yes, you are seeing correctly.  This woman is watering astroturf.

We use one gas bottle for a long time on our stove/oven.

These are the weekly exchanges of gas bottles outside of a naan (bread) shop.

That's a lot of bread, folks.

Bread is a serious business here.  

People line up at 6am for their morning bread, 11ish for their afternoon meal, and 7pm for their evening meal.  

You just lay your money under a piece of long rope, and the man at the window takes the bills closest to the window and asks whose money it is and how much bread they want.  Then the next bills get asked about and so on.  It's quite a system.

The shop above was being charged rent that was too high, so they started construction 3 plots down on their own shop.

You can see that the size if very unassuming, but it is still the heart of the neighborhood.

Reminders of all of God's promises are a happy thing here in the Middle East, because sometimes the darkness feels heavy, and knowing He's near is a beautiful thing.

I still don't understand the Christmas and Easter decorations in this country.  The people really don't understand the meanings of any of them, but they adopt what they see from the West.

After I heard that some people think we worship the Christmas tree at Christmas, I can't imagine what they think about celebrating Easter with eggs for.

Life at the French school.  This is what happens when you say jé instead of jai.

She didn't seem to mind, and apparently, she wasn't the only student that got drawn on.

This reminded me of how big of a splash "Covfefe" made in May of 2017.

Things I See (Vol 8)

Welcome to "Things I See."  If you want to see the previous installments, you can click on Volume 1 , Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4, Volume 5, Volume 6, Volume 7


Nothing to see here, just your every day traveling Dollar General.

I've always wanted some Shose and Bages!

I have NO idea what this t-shirt is trying to tell me...

I know I've mentioned this before, but I can never get over the size of this bread!

And the taste...wow!

If you are looking for old furniture, you've come to the wrong place.  Only "young" furniture here.

This coffee shop called Cappuccino is also spelled out in Arabic on the left as "Cabutsheenu."

When there is no "P" in your language, you just have to make do...

That's why all the Pepsi here is "Bebsi." ☺

Parking in our old neighborhood was hard to come by.  This guy didn't even try to park parallel.

I'm still taking pictures, so I'll share some more "Things I See" soon.

Six Days a Week

Two times a day, six days a week, something special (according to me) occurs in every neighborhood in this city.

Hundreds of naan and samoon shops make bread for all the citizens in the city every day except on Friday, their holy day.  The people here enjoy bread with every meal, and they wait in line twice a day to get it.

I LOVE hot bread right out of the fire oven.  Three or four times a week, someone from our family walks to the bread shop and brings home hot bread.  

We only go during the evening times; however, one week when Kylie was caring for a neighbors' chickens that ate this certain bread, she and I would get up before dark and go wait in line with all of the ladies.  I was half-asleep, but I remember being C.O.L.D.

Thankfully, the bread is hot, and it's so hot, in fact, that it melts parts of the bag they put it in when they hand it to you through the window. 

The treat for being the one to volunteer to go buy bread, is that you can snack on it all the way home.  Yummy!

When we walk up to the bread shop, it's usually very crowded.  On this night, we went very early, before the crowds, because we didn't want bread.  We wanted dough to make pizzas, and they are so gracious to sell it to us.

There are two windows.  

One for women on the left.  One for men on the right.

Karis is at the woman's window.

A lot of "men" don't wait outside.  They go into the shop where the men are baking and stand inside to be warm while they wait for their bread.  Women never get to do that.  I put "men" in quotes because many mothers send their sons to pick up bread for the family.  And, if the shop is busy, which it usually is, the men's line is served first.

This is my usual view at the woman's window.  It's actually a great time for conversation because the women all stand around waiting in a huddle.

What you can't see is a bungee cord attached to the cabinet in front of both gender windows.  When you walk up, you take your money, roll it up, and put it in line under the bungee cord behind whatever money is already there.  When hot bread comes out, the workers will come up and ask whose money is next and how much bread they need.

The men inside are working hard and have been for some time at this point.  

And they do this TWICE a day!

 They have EARLY mornings, just like a bakery or doughnut shop.

All of those wooden trays are full of dough, pre-shaped for baking.

Then, one-by-one, each tray is lifted up, and the dough is transferred one-by-one onto a long, wooden paddle, brushed with oil, sprinkled with sesame seeds, and shoved into the brick oven.

Then, the baker takes his empty paddle and slides it under a line of bread that is already cooked and ready to come out.  He slides them off into the big box, and the circle of bread continues.

The only slightly scary part is that when one or two breads come flying off the paddle and miss the box, a worker will just pick it off the floor and put it back in the box to be consumed by some blessed individual.

**Note:  For those of you who call or facetime or skype us, we are now only 8 hours ahead of you instead of 9.  Happy Daylight Savings day!

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.