Thursday, October 28, 2004

Brain with chips

My first laundry here was a success. Just to clarify, it's not my first laundry in my life but rather here in Bahrain. It's a success which I need to declare because the washing machine does not have labels on the switches and knobs. There are only uncognizable faded icons which were not very helpful. Hence, I bet on the pot of luck and picked number 8 on the knob. And voila! I see the washing machine doing it's business alright. The second major tussle was to open the glass sliding door in order to hang my clothes out to dry. The lock is so hard that I reckon a bruise will form on my thumb sooner or later for pressing it with force beyond my means.

While waiting for our takeaway dinner from Century Restaurant, I browsed the menu and to my horror and dismay to find out this item, 'Brain with chips'. There's a corresponding photo of that item on the menu which amplifies my horror. It first strucked my mind, "Nah..probably they make out something like minced meat to look like a real brain". After clarifying with the waiters there, indeed the brain is an actual sheep's brain and this is a very common arab food itenary. Goddamn. I chose fried noodles instead.

In the muslim countries, their weekends that is to me, Saturdays and Sundays falls on Thursdays and Fridays. That means, given a 5 working day job, one would need to work from Saturday till Wednesday. It's Thursday today and I have to come work and finish up the materials for today is the deadline.

I was watching an episode of TVB's "Ha Yat Zham Choi Hung" series last night and suddenly felt sleepy. I paused the movie and took a nap. And as usual, sleep swarmed in and I'm out. I woke up 7 AM today to find my the lights still on and the laptop with a flat battery. Haha.

Shajan helped us to negotiate the rental dispute we are facing with Ashraf, the caretaker of the apartment. Both of them originated from India and when I enquire what language did they use in their conversation then, was it Hindi or Tamil?

"It's malearab. Everybody from Kerala speaks malearab" said Shajan.

For your information, it's pronounced as Mah Leh Arab.

The problem now with the lease agreement is that we need to pay upfront 3 months of BD 500 and if we were to leave anytime before a six month stay, we still need to pay a full six month's rental. This clause is to bring down the rental to BD 500 a month rather than BD 600.