Afore I Forget…

Here seven weeks now and time to list some of the things that are unusual but which you learn to live with (before I stop noticing them altogether).

1 The weekend. It’s Friday and Saturday. Friday is prayer day (no, I have no idea why and not going to risk making a guess), so nothing happens at all between 11am and 1pm and shops only open at 4pm, though it is possible to get a snack in one of the larger shopping centres before that and the second showing of movies at 2pm goes ahead.

Read an article on Islam and its tolerance for other faiths, asking why in the West, Muslims can’t have Fridays off to pray? The same reason we have to take a day off on Fridays when we’re in Muslim countries I would think, even if it puts working with the Western world out of kilter for three days.

Apparently Muslims will allow Jews and Christians to take Saturdays and Sundays off so they can fulfil their religious obligations. They also allow church bells to ring out although the amplified call to pray is not permitted in many western countries. All I can say is that I haven’t noticed a single church here, but then I probably wouldn’t recognise one anyway.

2 Wet toilets. Creeping in at home – or at least at international airports. Dead giveaway is the showerhead attached to the wall at toilet cylinder level, which is everywhere here. Also the sopping wet floor and muddy footprints. Plus you dare not sit on a toilet seat without giving it a wipe to dry it off. Is it themselves they wash or just the general area? Just asking. A few squat toilets around as well, but definitely not the norm. Ken Livingstone’s proposal that we don’t flush after very pee definitely wouldn’t go down well here.

3 No sun block. As you would gather, it’s pretty hot here; mid-30s at the moment, with worse to come. Yet almost nowhere can you find sun block or factor anything. Maybe it’s because people here cover themselves up so thoroughly and probably don’t sun bathe. As a Westerner, you learn to respect the sun, wearing hat, sunglasses, sleeved tops and long trousers at the very least if you’re going to be strolling about. So maybe not having sun block is a good thing.

3 The electrics. The sockets are three-prong but all the appliances two prong. Solution? A makeshift adapter sold everywhere, with rectangular and round openings on the front, the top and the bottom. The problem is that your two-prong plug just about manages to hang in there and on the bottom, falls out. There’s also the scary red light that glows from within every plug, but that at least warns you to turn it off. But why not sell electrical equipment with no plug so that buyers can put on the correct one themselves? Immediate solution? Buy one of those flat, current buster thingies.

4 The old geezers with the red henna-ed beards. What’s that all about?

5 Women with faces covered. You get used to it, but only begrudgingly. In Turkey, which is a secular state though overwhelmingly Muslin, the veil is banned though scarves are tolerated, but not encouraged. Result? The fundamentalists live in an Istanbul “ghetto” and break the law by wearing the traditional face veil. Clearly it will be a long fight. What is so fantastically arousing about a woman’s hair anyway? The weirdest thing is seeing the hordes of men in white and women in black at the cinema complex, bustling around urgently to organise their mega-sized Cokes and buckets of popcorn before heading into the cinema. Then there are the young lads, strutting about the shopping malls in beautifully ironed thobes (laundries do a big business here), state-of the art mobile gripped in one hand, Rolex watch dangling oh-so-casually over the other. Here’s my big question: does it not get annoying wearing a scarf of one type or another all the time? It would certainly make cycling a bicycle tough (yes, I know – everyone here drives).