Bountiful Complexities....

Alrighty, I've heard from you and have discovered I need to do a much better job of keeping up with this...so here goes. My friend Jerri K (whose blog I've heard many of you have been keeping up with...can't say that I blame you since she posts more than once a month)...anyways, she has been posting pictures of some of our daily activities. I'm not quite that organized, so I'm just going to post a picture a day or so, and then tell you the story behind it and/or activities that might accompany it--I'm shooting for a bit of randomness, I guess. Hopefully this method will bring a smile to your face (or outright laughter would be swell!), a bit of insight into life here, and perhaps be a small bright spot in your day. Here goes....

This lovely picture represents one of the many cultural lessons Jerri K and I have learned from experience! This is a picture of the door of a little (or perhaps, considering it's location, a rather large) shop in a "neighborhood" of Dubai called Satwa*. The store name is called City Man (you see that in the red and yellow boxes on the door there), but do not let the name fool you...I've been told that it a good place to get rather inexpensive churidars (traditional blouses worn by Indian women).  Jerri K and I ventured out in hopes of discovering the merits of this establishment for ourselves. I will not, in this space, attempt to fully disclose all the details of our adventure in its entirety, suffice to say it was one of our earlier outings when all the roads and routes were even more confusing than they are now (after 2 months of driving them!), and the traffic in Satwa is an excellent reminder that we do, in fact, share the roads here with people from countries who have less stringent driving laws than we do. After circling the block, or rather the strip of blocks, where this store is located, we finally determined this was our destination and located an unintimidating and rather uncongested looking parking lot nearby. We slinked into our choice of spots (conveniently located near the parking meter--they have those for entire parking lots here...that may occur in other large cities, but it is a new concept to me...shoot, paying for any street-side parking is a relatively new concept to me!!!), gathered our wits about us, and stepped out to conquer a new adventure...the parking meter. After squinting against the 2:30 sunlight, we determined that the little screen was informing us that parking was free until 4 o'clock! Such luck!!! After walking a couple of short blocks back to where we had seen the shop, we were feeling rather confident that we had managed well....

I now direct your attention back to the picture. You will notice beneath the store name a section labeled "Timing". Since I have the advantage of making the original picture larger on my computer, I will read it for you...ahem...

"Timing 

9 am to 2 pm

4 pm to 12 pm"

You will recall I mentioned the time a bit earlier...shortly after 2:30 pm. We have probably not looked that much out of place before or since as we just stared at the door for a good minute or two. We did decide that a two-hour lunch/nap break (while very unfortunate for us) is really a very brilliant idea before we started our defeated trek back to our lonely car in the free (until 4) parking lot. We have not yet attempted this excursion again, but now, at least, we have a better understanding of the street layout in Satwa and have learned a little more about the enigma that is the parking meter!

*Dubai is broken up into MANY different "neighborhoods" or "regions". I really don't have a good guess as to how many blocks it might encompass (look it up on Google Earth if you must know!), but some of them are primarily residential areas, some are primarily retail areas, etc. Satwa is like a large market--at least the portion we went to.