Stranger in a Not-So-Strange Land

Early this morning (or late last night, depending on how you look at it) Abir, my friend and host, and I drove to the airport to pick up her brother and his family who were flying in from Belgium. We were sitting at a stoplight and I turned to look at the car beside us. The man turned and looked at me, turned back to the road, and then looked back at me, as if he had woken up. The light changed and we both moved. A few seconds later, I looked back and he was literally driving with his head turned fully sideways, staring at me, not the road. Abir and I both laughed. I told Abir that he probably thought he had fallen asleep and awoken in a different place.

The whole thing reminded me of something that happened my second week here. Abir and I were standing at the window of her sister Sousan's home, watching people on the street below. It was just before iftar, the evening meal that breaks the Ramadan fast, and everyone was hurrying home. A crescent moon and a star decoration, like Christmas lights, was illuninated in our window and in many of the other windows on the street. The man who lives across the street pulled up to his driveway, but there was a car parked in front of it. He honked and talked to pedestrians and waited. It's not an uncommon occurrence here to wait for someone to move his car so you can get where you need to be, so he was still in a good mood. He looked up and saw Abir and I watching the scene unfold. He smiled and motioned and said something jovial in Arabic. Abir laughed and then translated. He was talking to me. He said: "What's going on? You are dressed for another place, not this one." I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans and had my hair pulled into a low ponytail. Abir stood next to me in a hijab and a long robe-dress, her beautiful, almond-shaped eyes rimmed in kohl. We all looked at one another again and laughed.

p.s. The speed limit for cars on the highway to the airport is posted as 100. In my sleep-deprived delirium I forgot that that is in kilometers per hour, not miles. I just realized it this very moment. Ah! The beauty of the metric system.