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!

Samoon Dough

Well, I told you before about samoon bread that we like to eat.

The last time I went, I asked the baker if I could take some pictures, and he said, "yes."

He has helpers that put the samoon dough laid close together down the length of these boards.

You can see the many sacks of flour in the back.

The store makes bread twice a day. 

At lunch and at night.

So since the locals eat this for breakfast, they buy a double portion at night.

The way this works is that when the bread is gone, they close.

Simple.




The baker works by the fire taking the dough out of the tray, putting it on a long wooden paddle, shoving the dough into the oven, and then scooping it up again with the same paddle.  Another worker then scoops them off into a large tub where they are bagged by boys who work the order windows for the different genders I told you about in an earlier post.

All the parts work together like a well-written symphony.

This particular samoon shop is next to the laffa shop where we buy the samoon sandwiches.

This man cuts open the bread, scoops in the meat (chicken, beef, or falafel),

and then you can put on whatever toppings you want.

Another favorite way we like samoon is to order just the dough.

Yep...the dough.

In a bag...

and then knead it.

 

Then roll it and put it on a pizza pan.

We bake the crusts and chop onions, garlic, and jalapenos, and also add pepperoni that some amazing people in Texas sent us, and then we put it all together.

Before we had pepperoni and even now, we make buffalo ranch chicken pizza, and it's pretty good.

Then, the leftover dough is a gift that keeps on giving. 

As it grows in my fridge each night and spills out over the container, I can decide whether to make cinnamon rolls for breakfast or rolls for lunch

That's a good problem to have.

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.