Our ticket to deeper cultural interactions

We are now half-way through Ramadan. Traffic in the afternoon on the way home is still horrible- everyone in all of Abu Dhabi appears to be released from work between 1-1:30pm. Still no food, drink, gum, etc in public during daylight hours. Supermarkets remain open, but all restaurants are closed until dusk. I called to check on Ramadan hours at the clinic we planned to go to for Anastasia's 2-month vaccines. The answer: 8:30am-2:30pm and then again from 7:30pm-1:30am. Can you imagine taking an infant for a shot at 1 in the morning?! The malls and post office follow a similar timetable.

Other interesting cultural phenomena we encountered this week came from our nanny and some Chinese couples that Randy ran into on the Corniche while walking Anastasia. In Misrak's country, New Years was this past Thursday. Happy 2001 for them!! The Ethiopian calendar is different from the Gregorian in the spacing of months and they are about 7 years behind the rest of the world. You should have seen us trying to use the internet to discover Misrak's birthday in our calendar! We finally settled on June 1, 1984. She knows it as Ginbot 24, 1977.

And the interesting tidbit from Randy's stroll: Chinese babies are often kept indoors for at least 3 months.

We are still getting stares, smiles, claps and requests for photos when we take Anastasia out in the BabyBjorn. She's quite the cultural barrier-breaker.