With Christmas travels coming up, all our extra funds have been funneled to our vacation account. But I have a weakness for carpets. When a friend hosted a rug flop I should have known I’d come home with something.
Like this gorgeous, bold, Caucasian tribal. The name doesn’t mean it was made by a group of white people, but that it comes from the Caucus region — from one of those countries north of Turkey and Iran and south of Russia (I had to wikipedia that).
And as long as we were taking one home, why not throw in a second? It’s not like I have any other red carpets. (Lie: I have 4 other red carpets, not counting the new one above. Or 5 if I count the one that I forgot to count.) Can you have too many red carpets? I’ll let you know if I get there. But they are so beautiful and made of wool and durable and only about $200 each. Thank God I fall in love with the cheap ones. I mean, I fall in love with the expensive ones too, but usually restraint wins out. If we find out in a few months that we are leaving the Middle East, I may have to hoard a few more “just in case” carpets before we depart because I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to bring myself to buy a machine made carpet ever again.
This Saturday was the opening weekend for our winter Farmer’s Market that runs from December through April. I love this place with all the Bahraini families shopping and picnicking.
Josh and I got to spend the morning with Caleb while the others stayed home.
Gorgeous vegetables, all grown on our island. It’s amazing that they can pull this produce out of our desert ground. There used to be natural freshwater springs that ran under Bahrain and in parts of the ocean around the island — Bahrain means “two seas,” where the salty ocean and the fresh water meet, but in the process of making our island bigger and reclaiming land, the sweet water springs have been disrupted. I’m not sure how many of them are left.
We stopped and got breakfast. This new stand is called The Waffle House, but it’s nothing like what you’d get in the US. They were serving American-style waffles with Middle Eastern breakfast items on top. I love this idea.
One of my favorite Arabic breakfast dishes is balaleet — mildly sweet, cardamom spiced noodles. Caleb’s waffle was topped with sweet noodles and sprinkled with ground pistachios.
The other waffle we got (not pictured) was topped with a mixture of seasoned ground beef, potatoes, and peas, topped with tahini (sesame) sauce. The mildly sweet waffle was a perfect complement to the savory meat and potatoes.
We stopped by the local honey vendor and picked up some honey and the guy gave Bob his own tiny jar.
These paper thin crepes are made by spreading a see-through layer of dough on a hot stone and then scraping it off with a paint-scraper-like tool. As she scrapes it off, she rolls it up and it’s a crispy, melt in your mouth wafer. A perfect Saturday morning snack.