Sharjah- Day 9

Today, our friend Sulaimon came back to take us out.

We left our hotel around noon ( I had been reading and writing all morning of course!) and cruised around a bit and then went to lunch. It was a decent buffet, nothing to write home about.

After that, I made my one request of the day, which was to sit somewhere and drink some American style coffee. Arabic coffee is ok, but I don't like to drink a lot of it. It doesn't seem like it's been roasted long enough and the taste is tangy and bitter. We had some coffee, laughed about how much all teenagers are the same EVERYWHERE, shopped for a minute ( I got my Sheik Zayed T-shirt. YESSSS!!!), and left.

Next we hit the historic district of Sharjahm and let me tell you, this is where the REAL shopping is. Like Sulaimon so sagely put it, "stuff in a mall you can buy anywhere, but thiese things are unique." Well, that's sort of what he said.

The first thing I looked at were some woven wool rugs. I like the kind that are about 1.5' x 3' and the first vendor spread a half dozen beautiful rugs out for me to choose. When I asked him how much for one, he came back with 350 AED (Arab Emirates Dirham), or roughly $95. Abargain in the states, but WAY too high. Sulaimon admonished the guy and he told me to make an offer. How could I? I had no idea what they were really worth. Sulaimon told me we could get them for AT MOST 150 AED, or $40, so when the guy came back with 200 AED we just walked away.

If you've never had to haggle for prices before, I can tell you it can be heartbreaking, but you must be firm. It also helps to have someone with you who knows what stuff is actually worth. The next shop had all sorts of brass, copper, pewter, silver and other types of jewelry and trinkets. There were swords, rifles, tea-pots, rings which bore the seal of some animal or Arabic phrase, necklaces, bracelets, and more stuff I just can't remember. There were ancient Arabic vinyl records too, which I was eyeing greedily.

He wanted to have us look at his rugs, and having heard the last guy try to ruin us, he sarted at 200 AED. He wouldn't come down below 150, so we walked off again. They tried SOOOO hard, I swear I thought I was killing his children.

At this point I must give all praise and honor to my friend Sulaimon and his masterful bartering abilities. I did pretty good, but without him to give me a price baseline, and to haggle a few more Dirhams out of the merchants, I could now be a poor poor man. Instead I'm am a slightly poorer man with a lot of interesting stuff. Huzzah!!!

Next came some more stuff, which I can't write about here because it involves secret gift detials that should not be divulged. All I can say is that this place is probably the coolest shopping experience I've had in this land of shops and malls. In fact, I think that as a tourist, Sharjah is a cool place to visit. It is much more down to earth than Dubai, has really beutiful mosques and other architecture, has a nice lake front Corniche (street by the water), decent shopping malls and hotels (gotta have those), and a really nice fine arts and historical area. One thing of note is that there are realtively few Arabs around here; most of the people are foreign workers--Iranis, Bangladeshis, Indo-Pak, and Filipino. Another thing to note is that like Dubai, the city is completely under construction, and if I came back in a year, I doubt I would recognize very much of it.

Let's see.... after this time killer it was full on rush hour, and that is a very very bad thing in the Emirates. You have three choices: wait in it, wait it out, or go the opposite direction. We went the opposite direction of everyone else and came to another mall type area with a bunch of restaurants. We ate some stuff, and then called it a night.

Now I'm here typing this, and soon I will be done. In the morning we are off to the emirate of Fujiera to see our friend Hammoudi and prepare for his wedding feast.

In Sha Allah!

Sharja- Day 8

Today was a complete breather. It was Father's Day actually. Happy Father's day to me and all! And as such, I instinctively felt the need to sit on the couch and veg all day.

I was feeling very sore and beat up from the day in the desert, so I took my last 600mg Ibuprofen and lounged about sleeping, writing, and watching some Arabic TV.

The weirdest thing I saw on the telly was this music vieo from Iraq. It was sort of like a children's song, led by two Raffi type guys and a chorus of Iraqi children. The raffi type guys (RTG's) were aping about on the tv, flashing american money, climbing trees, and looking really sad as they were rotting in a jail cell. When the chorus came the kids all sang and clapped, and then it cut to a row of about 5 people all dressed like the Abu Ghraib tortured prisoners. It was surreal, grotesque and shaming. Try to tell me were screwing these people up royaly. (One good thing about 'liberating' Iraq, however, is the fact that a bunch of Iraqi hotties now have a music video show where they all dance together in some kind of late 70's disco hall. One of the guys here called it arabic pole dancing, even though these girls were all fully dressed and hardly being erotic)

After sleeping off my pharmaceutical coma, I went out and took a trip to the Mega Mall down the street. By the way, the girls were out doing their own thing today, Al Hamdelela (God is Great), so I could be by myself. I bought a few books at the bookstore and had some coffee in the crappy cafe they had there. I bought a nice sci-fi book for mind fodder, and two other ones for later.

One book is calle 'The Alhambra' by Irving Washington of Sleepy Hollow fame, and the other is excerpts from the travells of Ibn Batuta. Ibn Batuta was a middle ages traveller, much like Marco Polo. He is pretty famous in the Arabic world, I think, and it looks really interesting becasue it's basically history, philandering, and adventures. My kind of stuff!

I went home and read till my eyes popped out and I fell asleep.