Day 2 - 7 August 2010

Journal – Saturday, 7 August 2010 – Day 2

The morning again started with a wake-up call at 9:20 but from Annie who was calling me to tell me to come over early to help her plug her computer in correctly. (Yes, just plug it in).

I said I’d be right over, but getting ready took a little longer than I meant it to, so Annie just came over. Lauren, Annie and I walked over to the school just after 10am.

Upon arrival, everyone was there. Makhmood was there to hand out money to everyone. He gave us the equivalent of $500 (SP 23,500). We all had money, so we went shopping at the town center. We had to take a cab, and since there were 6 of us, we had to get 2 cabs to fit us all. Mariah, Marion, and Brian took one and Lauren, Annie and I took another.

I practiced my Arabic on the cab driver and he helped me say some simple phrases. We arrived at the town center and walked into this market/bakery place which looked like a dead beat mall. I took care of the payment and gave him SP150 ($3) for the 25 minute ride; it was expensive because it was across town and out of his way so he charged us extra.

Lauren, Annie and I puttered around the store waiting for the others. After another 25 minutes we decided we weren’t in the right place, but probably the place on the next block is where we wanted to be. We walked through the parking lots and over some bushes and found what looked to be way more promising, clean and current.

We found the others right away. The store was like the basement of Ikea plus a grocery store, it was a one-stop-shop.

Annie bought a microwave, an electric frying pan, trash cans, and all sorts of big appliances; she spent almost all of her money. Everyone else spent moderately. I spent about SP 2,000 and got just a few things. I probably spent the least amount.

Well, we barely all fit to come over to the shopping center so Brian called Jim to send the DCS bus to get us. I was expecting the little white bus that I had seen on the roads.

We weren’t sure who was going to ride where or how we were all going to get our stuff in the bus, so luckily someone had a marker to write on the bags. Just as we began to mark our bags, the “bus” pulled up. It was Jim with the mini-suv. kHallad and one of the custodians were also there (what I didn’ tknow is that they were coming from a funeral for the custodian’s dad) and apparently Hani was here too in his car. Since so many people were in Jim’s car, we still couldn’t fit with all our purchases into the 2 cars, so we had to get one taxi.

There were 6 people who had been shopping, 4 people bringing 2 cars, 8 shopping carts, 10 people total, and white plastic grocery bags everywhere!
We hailed a taxi, so the taxi driver started loading our purchases into his car, Jim and kHallad grabbed what they could to get it into their car, Hani (who I hadn’t met) was also grabbing things and getting them into his car. There was other mall traffic backed up because we caused such a commotion that people were honking horns all over the place; DCS people were shouting to be heard, I didn’t know who Hani was, I was told to get into a “yellow car.”

I got in the yellow car and I was surprised at how nice it was compared to the earlier one. I told the taxi driver to “follow that car” he asked me in broken English, “where do u want to go?” I repeated with my arm pointing, “There. Follow that car. Madrassa Amerikee. Ja Hezz Park.”

After about 5 minutes of giving ‘not understanding’ he told me he wasn’t a taxi driver. The girls in the back I guess had caught on to the fact that this was Hani or they had met him before or something. We had a good laugh at that.

As we got back to the school, of course bags were everywhere in each car. As we tried to sort out our bags, there were so many people trying to ‘help’ the 6 shoppers. It got so confusing that it’s not surprising that we were all calling each other later that evening asking if you had this or that.

After unloading and back in our apartments, it was about 3:30, Laurent and I went to find an internet café and get a snack. Annie had to go to the airport to claim her suitcase which showed up.

Lauren and I spent the next 3 hours at the coffee shop. We sent emails and tried to work around the internet restrictions. Yusif said he’d help us, so we’ll take our laptops in Sunday which will be the first real work day since I arrived.

Dinner was at a little lokantasi tonight and it was what I would consider Syrian/Turkish food. Shish Taouk and Doner (chicken chunks and shavings), babaganoush, khobes (flat bread) and some other fun stuff like pickled something light purple, pickles, maybe a pickled green pepper.

After dinner, Lauren, Annie and I broke off from the group to go exploring for a closer internet café, and good shopping. We stopped at a store called dip ‘n’ dip. It was a chocolate everything store specializing in fondue and chocolate fountain sort of dishes. We shared a thing like a fondue with marshmallows, pineapple, kiwi, and decided we’d come back.