Friday, March 19, 2010

Pics of Life






















Ok, I have just recently figured out to send pictures small in size so they can be put up here. I know, I know...if I had learned this sooner, my blog would have been a lot more interesting, but I'm not the best with technology so these are a little late.
There's one of our house. There are not many concrete houses in the area (most are made of mud), so we lucked out. It's surrounded by a big concrete wall too.
There's one of me getting my nose pierced....yes it DID hurt that bad. Refer to an earlier blog for the whole story.
The next is right outside our gate. Our house is right across the street from a huge mosque. We were walking home from work this particular day.
There's one of a typical meal. It is stew-like with meat and potatoes over macaroni noodles. The bowl gets dumped on the tray and everyone eats off it with your hands. It's messy, but you get used to it. It's better than is looks....promise.
The last one is just one of the many examples of doing stuff here I never thought I would do...like flying a plane. It was just for a minute but I did it nonetheless. Hopefully there will be more pictures soon.
Have a good day.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Always Kill the Man Chicken

Ok, so in order for us to eat a chicken dinner, we have to have our guard kill the chicken (only men kill chickens here), and our house help to pluck it and take the insides out. We get one chicken a week delivered to our house. Our delivery lady sometimes forgets that she's already brought us one during the week and we end up with a couple chickens running around the yard. This is usually not a problem unless we get a man chicken. There is a specific Arabic word for male chicken but we always forget it so how we say it in Arabic is literally translated as man chicken. Now a man chicken doesn't pose much of a problem unless you don't like getting woken up at 5am....which I don't!
Sometimes we haven't planned to eat the chicken for a couple days so we have a few early morning wake ups by cockadoodle dooing. Our guards have come to learn an important rule of the house. If we have a couple chickens, always choose to kill the man chicken first....we need all the sleep we can get.