Barber Shop

Last night Michael and I went with one of our Arab friends to the barber shop. Michael wanted a hair cut, and I wanted to get my beard trimmed Arab style, so our friend took us to the barber that he goes to every week. Michael went first and decided he was going to go for the buzz cut, but as soon as the barber had made it a third of the way through, Michael realized he had requested it way to short.


The real adventure though comes in the care of the facial hair. This was the first time for me to get a shave from a barber with a straight blade, so that in itself was an adventure. I ended up with some Arab style sideburns and a short beard with some great lines. The only thing is my hair is too light to really pull it off right.


All this sounds normal, but the last step is the kicker. After shaving, there is always that little bit of peach fuzz on the top part of the cheek just below the eyes. I never bother to mess with it because it is not noticeable and it is very close to the eyes. But here they have a special way of removing that hair for nice, smooth cheeks all around. My friend who has lived here a while calls it the "black thread of death." What they do is they take a piece of string a make a triangle between their mouth and two fingers. Between the fingers it is a double string. He then basically rolls that part over the cheek bringing the two strings together and pulling back with mouth and fingers to pluck out the small pesky hairs. Needless to say, it can be a very painful experience. Because of this, when my Arab friend first told the barber to do it on me, he said "No, I think it will be too painful for him." But we convinced him in the end so that Michael and I could get the cultural experience. Of course it hurt, but it was not that bad. My Arab friend even said that he thinks I am strong because I did not flinch.


Now there is no way that words can adequately capture the process of the thread, so here are some pictures to help you get a better idea:

Typos

I would just like to note the importance of proofreading before publishing things online. The original version of the previous post had the title of "It's getting out in here..." and the first line of the post said, "It's not getting out, it is HOT." But thankfully for Jessica, she has a husband who pays attention to such things and within two hours of her posting, he was able to catch the mistake and lovingly correct it.

And to show that this is not a problem just for my wife, she has already made two corrections on my short little post during its composition, and I will make sure and run the spell check to catch any other mistakes that we might have missed.

I think the heat is getting to us.
Or maybe it is the city that sounds like a war zone outside. But don't worry, it is only fireworks, but it has been going on constantly all over the city for almost three hours now.

It's getting hot in here...

No wait, it's not getting hot. It is HOT!

I'm not sure what the temperature was today, but tomorrow it supposed to be 107. Today we went to the Balad which is the downtown area of the city where you can buy a lot stuff for cheap (for example: I bought season 2 and 3 of Lost plus a movie for 11 JD or about $15). Anyway it was really really hot walking around down there. I had planned to go eat with the rest of the group but it was just too hot and they were going to do more shopping afterwards and I just didn't want to be in that heat. So to escape the heat B and I joined up with our husbands in the nice air conditioned van and managed to find ourselves in a few air conditioned buildings like KFC and Safeway. JM and I considered going to Starbucks just to be able to sit in the air conditioning this evening, because our apartment is HOT, but we're going to brave it and watch a movie here. Anyway, thinking about missing air conditioning made me think of other things that are going to be really nice to have when we get home.....

real milk
the freedom of my own car that has air conditioning! ( a lot time the taxi drivers don't use their air)
time to cook a meal rather than eat fast food
not having to turn on the hot water 30 minutes before you want to use it ( but now that it's so hot, we take cold showers to cool down!)
seeing our families
not having to catch a taxi
having lines you actually wait in when you are paying for something or ordering at a fast food place ( this is probably my only pet peeve of this culture. They are impatient when it comes to waiting in lines! You could be waiting to order for 5 minutes and some person will just walk up in front of you.)

flushing the toilet paper (rather than throwing it in the trash, for some reason you can't flush it here)
no water restrictions

taking showers in the mornings because I won't have to be fresh to go out at night

Fireworks in the Sky

Last night Jessica and I got to bed rather late, sometime around 12:30. Just about the time we had fallen into a deep sleep, we were awakened by the sound of explosions echoing through the city up into our bedroom. Now the Middle East and explosions may not sound like a good combination, but without hesitation we knew that it was only fireworks. Arabs like their fireworks, and they like them loud. For example, on the fourth of July a friend and I sat on top of our roof and watched three or four firework shows going on all across the city. It's most likely these were in celebration of weddings. The unique thing about the fireworks last night was that they just kept coming and in great succession. So when I rolled over in bed to see if I could catch a glimpse, I quickly realized that this was not the typical small set of fireworks but rather it was something special. I grabbed my glasses from the bedside table and went to the other room to get a better view. Jessica soon joined me and we enjoyed watching the end of a wonderful fireworks show from the comfort of our extra bedroom.