Evening Explorations
Trip Start
May 01, 2008
1
8
92
Trip End
Ongoing
Fujairah, United Arab Emirates
Saturday, May 17, 2008
After having chosen a seemingly derelict motel, which was in fact just a bit old, I headed into town, to try see what life was like around here. The market was not huge, but there were as usual fruit and vegetable shops, local and imported, all of them fresh. The butcher's lane, the fish shop, and all the tailors.
I spent some time there, wandering around and choosing some fruits for my dinner. Another part of the market was across a speedy road, under a high rise. These places they usually call "Iranian market". There you can find tin stuff, from normal size to huge couscous pans for dozens of people. There are mattresses and cushions, horrible printed fabrics, and even worse carpets. There were nice carpets too, but this was not the place to look for the reputable Persian workmanship.
Across the road again, a strip of 200m of only cellphone shops. There was a crappy mall as well, small and old, so I went in to see locals just hanging out bored.
Driving deeper into town to find something, whatever, there were loaaaads of Indians on the side. So I parked there, and just walked along to see the animation. There were agglutinations of them in front of electronic shops, as all the Indians would stop by to see a few cricket throw on TV. What a pity. Cricket!
At some point there was a big pink sign called "the vegetarian palace" or something, and I went in for dinner. The guy explained me all of these small stuff they had, kind of samoussas or nems with nuts or chicken (yum !!!). I went for two of these, asked for not spicy at all. The boss understood well, passed the order onto the guy who was preparing the food in front of everyone. Of course it took me ages to eat the stuff, as it was damn too spicy!!! But it was so gooooood! The little fried things had in fact been half-crushed into a plate with rice and the hot spicy sauce, a delight with a good sweat.
It was a cool, quiet, yet busy atmosphere in the street. But at the same time, there were almost no women, and you could see the men were around just because of work. No Arab in sight actually, mostly Indians, and a few Asians. Some were having a quick chat, others were sitting and doing nothing, the air was very hot, not even warm, even though the sun had been gone for hours. And wherever you are there are always cars speeding not too far (a few
meters I mean), but that just becomes part of your environment...
The Indian speeches can be fascinating or plain irritating, not sure if that depends on the talker or on the mood of the listener. But I guess I could say the same for any language.
There we are, this is actually a nice evening. Things are different, things are new, yet just feel normal, I feel at my place, out of place. Just like anyone else.
