Prayer Times and Shopping

My sister says that I need to write less and post more pictures.  Too that I say pshaw! Just skim sistah!

So, something that I don't think that most of my friends back home realize is that over here they pray 5 times a day.  At specific times.  There is a prayer schedule that changes each day by a few minutes.  Here is yesterdays schedule as copied from Yahoo Maktoob.


Fajr         Dhuhr Asr        Maghrib Isha
04:20 11:50 03:18 06:01 07:31
AM         AM          PM    PM         PM

The top part is the name of the prayer.  Underneath that is the time and whether or not it is AM or PM.  The prayer times vary in length and I am unsure about how long each one is.  I am sure that I could look it up but I am not sure where to do that just yet.

Sometimes the prayers last for 10 - 15 minutes and sometimes they are a half an hour or longer.  Pretty much everywhere that you go, there are prayer rooms. There are separate rooms for men and for women. They are in all of the malls.  The thing about prayer times and shopping is that when they happen, they pretty much close up all of the stores for the duration of the prayer time.  They announce it first.  Something like, prayer time is in 15 minutes and the store will be closing.  Basically, if you are in the store when prayer time rolls around.  You will be locked in.  Not forever, mind you, just until prayer time ends.  We were in the Danube Hyper Market once and they announced it and then they just started rolling down the doors.  We were already in line at the time and we made it outside before the prayer time started.  If you don't make it out in time, well then you just have to sit down and wait and hope that its not a long one because basically you aren't going anywhere.

The 5K race the other day was over by the IKEA, so afterwards we went there so that we could exchange a duvet cover.  (It was too small.)  We went inside and went over to the return area and there was no one around.  After waiting around for about 5 minutes we figured out that it was probably prayer time.  I went and looked around the check out area and I just saw a bunch of people waiting around and no one ringing anything up.  Yep, definitely prayer time.  I took a quick video.  Nothing great, just to give you an idea of what it looks like.

I looked at the video after I posted this and I could barely see anything, so I am also putting up another video that I took.  Still nothing great, but I guess it's better than nothing.

Since the IKEA is so big, I guess that they don't lock it down.  Kind of like the mall.  The individual stores close, but not the mall itself.  Anyway, we stood around and waited and after about 10 minutes they announced that all IKEA employees should return to work and then things just started right back up again.

Another day, we went to the mall over by the Four Seasons Hotel.  I took a few pictures. Oh, and by the way, I think that Grandma showed up!

Hi Grandma!

Here is a picture of the directory from the mall by the Four Seasons.  It shows where the bathrooms are and also where the prayer rooms are.

And this is a picture of where the ladies prayer room is.  The door isn't open... but its in there.  I peeked in once and there are diagonal rows on the floors.  They put prayer mats down.  They just look like little rugs.

This particular mall also has a ladies only section.  Notice the sign up above.  No men!  It's roped off and they make sure that only women can go up there.

I am not exactly sure what goes on up there, because I haven't actually been up there.  Matt isn't exactly patient.... so I just don't see him waiting around for very long while I go up there and have a look around.  But one of these days I will go up there and have a look around.  Then I am sure that I will blog all about it!

Anyway, prayer times do make it a bit difficult to get things done sometimes because they really need to be taken into consideration when planning something.  Basically, if you think that you are going to be doing your shopping, well you better check the prayer times first because you may just end up waiting outside the store or, as mentioned earlier, waiting locked up inside.