The Settling in Process Continues

in ways we had not imagined.

Now that we have a space to call our own, we are tasked with finding chairs, bed linens, pots, pans, spoons, and all of the other miscellany that make a place a home.

To complicate matters, we are all succumbing to various illnesses of one sort or another. In between bouts and episodes of Elmo (all hail the omnipotent electric parental unit), we are exploring our hood. There are a host of shops, hair salons (I just got a crop for a buck-fifty), bakeries, super markets, cell-phone purveyors, moto-bike shops, and stalls.

We also have a wonderful open-air market one (or is it two?) street over. This is a hodgepodge of make-shift sunshades, under which (mostly) women crouch or perch while they await a passing glance at their goods. These range from an assortment of wonderful fruits, the names of which I can only guess (we call one spiney fruit), seafood, meats (passing stall after stall of these warming, fly-covered carcasses always evinces in me a certain je ne sais quoi), and vegetables. Hidden behind the women are little homes, the front rooms of which double as shops and restaurants.

 

The restaurants are themselves a cluster of small (1 ½-foot) stools clustered around a table that has a few condiments (usually of the holy-s#*! hot variety) on it and a spangling of used napkins under it. These places often sell only one type of dish for a particular mealtime, something we found out yesterday as our hostess pointed to a number of options and when we tried to order one of them (obviously not the correct one), she called over someone who could speak English. That nice lady informed us that they had meat soup today. Okay, I guess we’ll take a couple then, we said—only to find out later that our definitions of edible meat are quite different than theirs.

Our apartment itself is above this fracas as we are on the 3^rd or 4^th floor (depending on if you’re speaking to an American or a European), and we get a lovely breeze through the place once all of the windows are opened. The place is tiled throughout, clean, new, and we have such Western novelties as a two-burner range and a rather large mini-fridge, into which I recently deposited a few Kingdom beers.

We are in high spirits (or soon will be) as we sit here above the din and think of all of our friends back home. Tonight, as you head into your evening routines, enjoy a few things for us: identifiable food stuff, cotton sheets (top sheets, too, actually), a non-foam mattress, and the ineffable comfort that can only come from having the neon glow from the 2 or 3 (probably 4 or 5) CVS/ Walgreens signs in your neighborhood. Oh, how little I appreciated their warmth when they were so close upon me!