Hypermarketing

"Mom, what is a hypermarket?" asks Silas from the backseat of the car after our latest adventure at the Lulu. He has been gazing out the window at the garrishly lit front of the Lulu and probably noticed for the first time that it is not just "Lulu" up there in neon, but "Lulu Hypermarket".

What is a hypermarket? Do I tell him that it is a highly flammable, Indian-owned chain of stores found in the Middle East? No, the flammable thing would spawn a whole new set of questions. Do I tell him that it is just what it sounds like--a "hyper" market, like Tehva is a "hyper" child? No, no, best to go with honesty here.

"Silas, you have been in that store a million times since we moved here. You tell me what a hypermarket is. You've been there. You were just there." In response, Silas crumples into a whining heap since neither he nor I can very easily define hypermarket.

A hypermarket is, at all times, like a Super Wal-Mart on food stamp Friday, just before a massive hurricane is set to hit. Got that picture in your mind? Okay, now stack another Wal-Mart on top and put a stairless escalator in the middle of the store--that way you can get your cart (but at Lulu it's called a "trolley") up to the second floor. Done? Okay, now take away half of the registers and shrink all of the aisles so that only one and a half carts can fit. Finally, make it an absolute requirement that a gigantic motorized floor cleaner troll the aisles like a snow plow, rearranging the surge of humanity, especially during peak shopping hours.

That is a hypermarket, in a nutshell.

So yesterday, for some unknown reason, we decided we needed to go to Lulu Hypermarket on a weekend in the evening. This adds an extra element to the tranquil picture I have painted above--Omanis. Going to Lulu on a Friday means risking stepping on hems--both women's and men's, running down small Omani children who are playing catch between the shopping carts, and waiting at a register for a minimum of 20-30 minutes. It is like my above Wal-Mart scenario on crack cocaine. But we simply HAD to go, so off we went.

Tony and I decided to split up and attack the floors seperately. This means that the children naturally have to come with me since I am only half as mean as Tony, and all of them want to hold onto the sides of the cart, which defies the laws of physics since two items cannot occupy the same space at the same time. But they all jockey for the honor of holding onto the sides of the cart. We enter the spice aisle, Tehva and Silas kicking each other, which means that I have to search for spice satchets while all of the Indian subcontinent stares at the two of them.

Finally I seperate them, placing Tehva on one side of the cart and Silas on the other. However, I can no longer see Tehva for all of the people who have suddenly crowded in on my right (apparently everyone needs turmeric this week) and so I have to trust that she will behave properly during the five minutes I cannot see her. When the fray clears (thank goodness for the massive floor cleaner--whisked everybody out of my way) I see that Tehva has knocked over every box of dumpling mix and is working on slowly and methodically punching each box of Jello off the shelf as well.

Silas is, at this point, laying down in the middle of the aisle. I tell him to get up before he gets trampled. He responds that he is looking at the lights on the ceiling. The masses trip miraculously around him without harming him and, seemingly, without noticing him either. I kick Silas and he finally gets up, complaining that he is tired and hungry, and asking how much longer he will have to put up with this.

Tony appears and puts everyone in order. Tian asks why we are so crabby and harrumphs at the injustice of being grouped together with her siblings when it comes to misperceptions of behavior. Tehva is placed into the cart, and we head upstairs on the stairless escalator. This floor is the one that has the banks of televisions, electronics, appliances, clothing, toys, sports, and school supplies. A batallion of men stand in front of the TVs and oggle a commercial where a woman is showing her midriff and moving her hips like she has spiders in her panties. We find what we need and get in line, set for the long wait to be checked out.

Our cashier looks like a pastel-wrapped iceberg. If she were an American she would be cracking her gum. She is a mountain of a woman with gaudily painted nails, cakey make up, and a perennial sneer, who sits wrapped in yards of black abaya and an ungodly amount of colorful head scarf. She scowls at every single item that she has to scan as if it has been put in front of her namely to threaten her manicure. Her eyes scream her distaste for the latest Omanization Policy whereby all cashiering jobs must go to Omanis. I am completely entertained watching her work.

When we come to the front of the line and she begins to scan our purchases and we discover that somehow extra items have crept into our lot of groceries. Tony stops her and says, "That is not mine. I don't want that gum. It's not mine." She scowls at him and throws the gum toward the bagger. Whether or not we like it the gum is ours, as is the scarf we accidentally put in the cart. The risk of breaking a nail while pushing the "Void Item" button is too great for her to risk removing things from our order.

I think back on all of this after Silas asks again, "But what is a hypermarket?" It is an experience, especially on a Friday.

Jesus Likes It When...

If you have been following my blogs for years and years, you might remember the Sunday about five years ago when we told Silas to dress up for church. And you might remember that he came out of his bedroom wearing a tiger costume because, well, we told him to dress up. And you also might remember that that was the church where we met The Sunday School Teacher Who Channeled Jesus.

She was a wonderful person who knew all of Jesus's likes and dislikes: "Jesus likes it when we wear macaroni necklaces." And, "Don't peel that sticker off your shirt. Jesus likes it when we wear stickers with churches on them." Jesus also liked it when we finished our snack of Goldfish crackers, said "Excuse me" when we burped, and cleaned the paste off the chipped wooden tables. Outside of the New Testament, this woman was the most definitive authority on the persona of Jesus that I had ever met.

If The Sunday School Teacher can say with such authority that Jesus likes Goldfish, macaroni necklaces, and stickers, I can say without much doubt, that He must be a loose and easy kind of guy who also likes other things that make life worth living. Take, for example, pancit noodles. There is nothing finer than well-made pancit noodles. The Filipino community at the church here always serves pancit noodles after church on Fridays instead of donuts and cookies, and it is just GOOD, so I think it is pretty safe to assume that Jesus would like that.

The church here also runs with the idea that Jesus loves flag dances, as evidenced by the video at the bottom of this post.

And on Good Friday, we learned that Jesus also likes storytelling on the beach, followed by a good sail out into the Gulf of Oman. We broke from the approved Protestant Church here to attend a more informal gathering on a small beach. The church building was a series of three EZ Ups strung together with grey duct tape, and was carpeted underneath with plastic beach mats. A motivated set of moms laded an eight foot stretch of table with freshly cut fruit, finger sandwiches, sausages, and **GASP** sliced pork roast! People traded their Easter bonnets and sundresses for bathing suits and floppy beach hats.

An enterprising mother buried an Easter egg hunt--she nestled chocolate eggs in the sand, only to have them melt, and another put jelly beans in ziploc baggies and buried them, too. Unfortunately only a third of the bags was found, but those that were found were much appreciated. An older couple gathered the children together before they all set off aboard kayaks, boogey boards, and sail boats, and told them the story of Good Friday. They read a little scripture, gasped over the crown of thorns, half-heartedly looked for the missing candy bags, and then sent the kids down to the surf to spend the rest of the morning in the ocean.

Jesus likes it when we sail, lose candy in the sand, and eat watermelon on the beach. I think it reminds him of the good old days.

Roaches

The seasons have changed. Our once benign, even pleasant, climate has turned convection oven on us and life without aircon has become unthinkable. Until suddenly, last week, it did become a reality. Really, though, there was no drama in the situation. The aircon in the girls' room went from their best friend to their worst enemy as it began to blow hot air instead of cold. We placed a work order with the housing department at the university and voila, a work crew came and replaced the coolant. Fixed.

The drama came in the work crew--all three of them were Omani. I will type that again for those of you who missed it--the entire work crew was Omani. For those who are not appreciating the shock value of this situation, I will place it into perspective. Imagine having your heat pump go out in the States and calling Blahblah Cooling and Heating Services. They agree to send some guys to fix it and said guys show up stark naked. Well of course you would have to look again and again to make sure that those workers were really naked. You would smile, you would giggle, you would call your friends and tell them that the guys who fixed the heat pump were naked. It would be unbelievable.

That is what it is like to have an all-Omani work crew fix your air conditioning unit. We stared and giggled and called friends to let them know that we had had a whole group of three Omanis fix our air conditioner. We acted like such absolute imbeciles because, until two months ago, there was no such thing as an all-Omani work crew; as a matter of fact, the words Omani and work very rarely went together because Indians did all the work here. That little incident you may have heard about in Sohar changed all that: we have effectively learned that burning a Lulu will get you a job. Those 9% of Americans who are now unemployed may want to consider torching a Wal-Mart to see where that gets them.

So after the Omani work crew restored the girls' air conditioning, the children and I began to speculate on the likelihood of having an all-Omani pest control unit come to our house to do something about the insects that are currently in season here. We survived fly season, mosquito season, and ant season, and now it is roach season.

Our roaches come in two flavors--large and lovely caramel, and dark but tiny chocolate--and have staged a coup and overtaken a corner of the kitchen. The dark tiny chocolate variety blends in smartly with the dappling on the granite counter top and know that if they do not move we will not see them. They are clever and still and only make a break for the trash bin when they know we are not looking.

The large and lovely caramel have a higher mortality rate as they stick out like sore thumbs and are, frankly, not very smart. They do dumb things like drop out of cupboards into our food, and crawl across cutting boards while we are cooking, making them easy targets. Additionally, the caramel roaches have recently endeavored to expand their territory by sending out tiny parties on reconnaissance missions to other areas of the house.

Last night Silas and Tehva stood still as statues staring at the tiling near the sofa. "Mom," whispered Silas. "There is a huge roach over here." When I demanded he kill it, he paused. "No, I'm watching it." I smashed it with my house slipper. Silas looked like I had crushed his science experiment.

The night before that Tian found a caramel roach crawling up the wall outside her bedroom. She was not so reverent as she screamed and jumped up and down, swatting at it with a fuzzy pink slipper and shrieking, "A roach! A roach! Ewww! Ewww!" The roach just sat there on the wall and waited for Tony to come kill it.

The count down has begun and in a mere 25 days the kids and I will head back to the US for the summer, leaving Tony to wage a solitary, six-week war with the roaches until he, too, leaves for a vacation in North America. And where does that leave the roaches? In control of the entire house for a whole month and a half. Time to start checking around for an all-Omani pesticide control unit.