Rachel
posted about our camping trip during the week-long
Eid Al Adha break, so I'll just refer you there for that story. Here are some other videos and pictures, though:
We were right at the southern tip of
this little spit of sand. I'll add that snorkeling there was nice to stay cool, but it simply couldn't compare with my first ever snorkeling experience at
Sharm El Sheikh in the Gulf of Aqaba during my BYU study abroad to Egypt. That place was just amazing. Thanks for ruining every other snorkeling site in the world for me, Dil Parkinson!
This year, Eid happened to coincide nicely with my birthday / Halloween, so we spread out our celebrations throughout the week. Rachel and I went out for dinner and exploring at
Souq Waqif the first night after school got out. We enjoyed getting lost in the
twisty alleyways inside until we really started getting hungry. So I pulled out the GPS on my phone and got us to a Malaysian restaurant where I had squid and Rachel had a chicken mushroom dish. It was still pretty warm that evening, but the weather has been cooling off quite a bit lately (high 70s to mid 80s).
Well before my actual birthday, I spotted a
Carrom board for sale at the Lulu Hypermarket. Having fond memories of playing Carrom at the home of the Sun family and during my mission to India, I asked Rachel to buy it for me for my birthday. She did, and I finally got the chance to break it in by playing a few rounds with our compound's Indian security guard, Haris, after he went off duty one night. Elliott was so excited to hear us playing that he refused to go to sleep and instead of fighting with him about it, I just let him sit and watch, and then let him play a bit when we were done. His version of the game consists of guiding discs into the pockets with the striker held under one hand and just sliding it around to push the discs rather than flicking it to strike them. So he may not understand gameplay, but he sure paid attention to the terms and rules Haris explained them to me and as I re-explained them to Rachel later. "This is the striker," he says, "and you have to flick it like this. You put this dust on the board to make them go faster. The black ones are worth two and the white ones are worth eleven." Well... not quite, but we got a kick out of him explaining it.
Rachel found a very affordable dark green pumpkin at the vegetable market (for $4, maybe? Orange ones in stores cost something like $15). It was just a normal size pumpkin, but when I cut into the top, the flesh of it was easily 3 inches thick. So I took out a lot of that and removed all the innards myself, Elliott being far too squeamish to grab that goopey glop (though Playdoh is no problem). I think it was the only jack-o-lantern in our whole compound.
Raisin bran was a daily staple for my breakfast all through college and basically up until we moved here. It was cheap and filling, and I liked the taste. However, it costs something like $5 a box here, which is just absurd, so we've been eating a lot of other things like foul (Egyptian style) with pitas, oatmeal, eggs, pancakes, etc. As delicious as all that sounds, I still really miss my simple bowl of raisin bran and milk every morning. So for my birthday present, Rachel made me raisin bran FROM SCRATCH. It was pretty amazing, and very thoughtful of her. I was completely surprised by it, too, despite having accidentally walked into the kitchen before she was done cleaning up the evidence of her preparations. I thought she'd made pumpkin rolls or something, judging by the parchment paper I saw. But raisin bran had never crossed my mind.
We had dinner on my birthday at the clubhouse, and went swimming in the outdoor pool, probably the first time I've ever done that on Halloween.
We visited another beach called
Fuwairit (say "fwearit") the next day, which was much cleaner than the one at Al Wakrah. My neighbor and I swam out a good half mile from shore, and the water never got deeper than my neck. But we saw a crab with a body as wide as my hand is long, about 100 sea urchins, some live oysters, plenty of small fish, and even one foot-long fish that skipped several times across the surface of the water.
We had dinner this past Friday at the home of a delightful family from the UK who used to live in a country cottage they rented from a little old lady named
Elizabeth Windsor. They told the funny story of how they went to look at the place not knowing whose it was. The person really grilled them about their family and lifestyle ("Do you have a dog?" "No." "Good answer. How many children do you have?" "Five." "Good, you couldn't rent it if you didn't have lots of kids."), then when they asked if they could ever buy it, he said, "You can rent it forever, but it will never be for sale." "What, you mean we could put all sorts of improvements into the place and then just get kicked out when the owner likes what we've done the place and decides to move in?" "Trust me, the owner is never going to move in here." "Who is it?" "Have you heard of Queen Elizabeth? She has plenty of other places to live."
Then yesterday afternoon, Rachel took me to the
Museum of Islamic Art, which was like the Islamic Art
exhibit at BYU we visited this summer, but about 10 times
bigger, more beautiful, more varied, and more valuable. We took in about 1/8 of the museum before deciding we'd better just come back another time to really appreciate it. Then we walked along the corniche.
So many stories to tell, and so little time to type them up. So a few more pictures and videos for good measure:
