Stranger in a Strange Land

I’ve been househunting with Tia and Toto after work the last two days, and have wound up having supper in a very nice hotel poolside bar-resto in an upscale hotel just down the road from the neighborhood I’ll be livingin come Saturday, hallelujah. The hotel also houses a solid fitness center (with whirlpool!) that I will join on Sunday.. so given the gym, the pool, the bar/resto, and my love of reading by the pool, I know how Sunday’s going to go already. The housing find’s making my last two nights of horrific 4AM Arabic alarm clocks a tolerable concept. And I got home tonight to a couple of curiosities.

So the post below this describes the culture clash that IS sitting on my porch with a beer and some music, with all the neighborhood folks heading to and from the mosque at the end of the street… Well, I noticed from the beginning of my week here an office of some sort directly across the street from my carport. It’s got a big sign on it reading “Sekratariat something or other”, and I’ve been meaning to pull out my kamus (dictionary) and figure out just what piece of officialdom it is. I can’t see it from the porch, as the carport blocks the view across the narrow street. So tonight I pull up in front of my house in a cab a little after seven. The whole ride back from the hotel we’d been passing mosque after mushollah (prayer room) after mosque filled with fully-covered white-clothed men or women frozen in the same direction. Occasionally the streets would burst with the same folks unfrozen, apparently having attended a briefer service. I get out of the taxi in front of the carport, and am two metres from the Sekratariat place… through the building’s window I see a heap of frozen men… and I flash back to my last post… had these same men been the ones I’d thought had been coming from their homes down the road past this shirtless beer-swilling rock-loving infidel, and in reality they’d been emptying out from across the street following a prayer service? Needless to say, tonight I type on my porch as a shirted beer-swilling infidel with quiet music wrapping around my patio door into my ear. Meanwhile, the mood’s more playful tonight. Impeccably dressed small children are running up and down the street, a community sits inside across the street somewhere laugh frequently laughing at and applauding something I can’t see… This certainly feels like a warm community I’ve been transported into, but I can’t imagine ever not wanting to be beamed back up to the starship after a short stay. Beam me up Saturday, Scotty (ahh, Jimmy Doohan, R.I.P).