PAYBACK

My improvised sewing table.

Dearest Friends,

That first week in the new apartment was a crazy one!  First of all, we had to figure out how to use the space.  A middle-eastern floor plan is very different from a western one.  Usually there is one big room in the center of the house, surrounded by much smaller rooms on all four sides.  The tiny pieces of rattan furniture we had ordered would have been dwarfed in that huge center room, so we decided that would be our dining/party space, and we made a cozy sitting/TV area (yes, we would finally have TV again!) in one of the smaller rooms.  Another tiny room, only about 6x10, that had a window into the central room, became my sewing/ironing space.  I still wonder how a Bahraini family would have used that space.

We had yet to find blocks to set the bed frame on, but I was done with sleeping on the floor, so we filled it up anyway...then spent another sleepless night trying to control our chattering teeth.  First thing the next morning I caught a taxi downtown, and spent most of the day searching for some kind of mattress pad that could insulate us from the bone-numbing chill of that water-filled mattress.

I didn't have any kind of washing machine yet, and hadn't seen anything that looked like a laundromat, so I figured I would just wash our clothes in the kitchen sink for a while.  First though, I had to clean out our little back walkway, so I'd have a place to hang them.  I was beginning to understand that this "premier" ground floor apartment might not be so premier after all.  You see, the Bahraini garbage collection system was a bit different than what we were accustomed to.  It was not unusual for people to just toss their trash out doors and windows each night, and since we had several apartments above us, much of that landed on our front stoop and back walkway.  The rats got first dibs, then early each morning a little fellow with a broom and cart would come along, to gather whatever was left.  My mom told us she boo-hooed when she saw the photos of our neighborhood, with all the trash in the street.  That's when we decided that perhaps it would be better not to share every little detail with them.

The Lemon

One day I went to meet John at the office, then we had to go get eye-tests (two hours of waiting, five minutes of testing), a prerequisite for getting our driver's licenses.   Another day we had to go get more shots (ick!).  In between all of this, I was busy painting kitchen cabinets, searching for curtain fabric, and planning what furniture we needed to scavenge or build.  John spent his lunch hours trying to find us a car -- not an easy task when you have a wife who doesn't know how to use a stick-shift, and really, really, really doesn't want to have to learn how in a foreign country with such strange traffic rules (or lack thereof) and a million round-abouts.  Against his better judgement, he bought that Chevy Vega, which ended up spending more time in the shop than out of it (there was no Chevy dealership in Bahrain, and all parts had to be shipped from abroad).  I felt kinda bad about that, but then again, he did make me leave that comfy hotel and sleep on a hard terrazzo floor.