Bits and Pieces

I am currently all dressed to go running yet I am sitting around my apartment waiting once again for the refrigerator repair man.  He was supposed to come yesterday but that didn't happen.  Today, he was supposed to come by 9:30 and he showed up at 9:30 on the dot.  But, I still have to wait around while he fixes it, so, I may as well post another blog.

In all honesty, I am a little bored of posting pictures of myself.  Also, I have been a little lax about taking pictures.  However, I do have a few pics of things that I found funny.  So I will just post those.  But just for the record, I did purchase 2 new abayas, one of which is still at the tailor getting the hem and sleeves shortened.  The other one, I am wearing all the time.  When I get the other abaya back from the tailor I will post pics of both.  (Get ready to laugh... I think this is my best abaya yet!)

Anyway, speaking of abayas, one of my main concerns which I have mentioned before is getting it sucked up into the escalator.  Since most of them snap up the front, I can just picture having to pull it off to avoid getting crushed and then being left exposed. It would not be a good thing.  Therefore, I am always careful on the elevator.  Apparently, this must happen because I saw this:

Yes, I will be VERY careful!

I also saw a few interesting food things, so I took a few pictures.

So glad that I can still find my Mixican Bread!  Actually these were not very good at all.  I mainly bought it because of the label. They are very thin and taste pretty bad.  I did find another brand that comes frozen and tastes much better but not funny.  

Anyone for corn in a cup?  I keep seeing these all over the place.  Kind of reminds me of Macau because they had it a lot over there.  In fact, you could buy it in the Mc Donalds there.  I think it was considered a dessert.  Here, I guess it is just a snack.  You never know when you may want some corn in a cup.  I haven't wanted any yet, but you never know!

And I was so glad that I was able to find that cookie recipe that I was looking for!  

And something else that I was a little fascinated by was the burkini.  It is a very real thing!  I haven't seen anyone wearing one but I don't live anywhere near the ocean and I have yet to go to a public pool.  Never the less,  I did see them for sale.  I didn't buy one, so I cannot therefore model it for you and anyway, I said there would be no pics of me in this post.  So here is a pic from the internet that shows someone else, modeling the burkini.

This picture was uploaded from my iPod.  I am not very good at uploading pics from the internet and the iPod lets me take a screen picture so... until I become a little more computer literate, this will have to do.  I just love the hood.  Very smurfy. 

Here is what they look like in the store.

So these are the tops.  I tried to get them both in one shot but they are actually very long and I didn't want to cut them off.  I am assuming that this is to cover ones rump.  (That part I get...)

These are the bottoms.   Of course the ensemble would not be complete without the hood which is pictured in the center.  I really don't see myself ever purchasing one of these.  I think I would just rather not go swimming.  But since I live on the compound I have no shortage of pools or opportunities to swim.

The last thing that I wanted to post was this:

Obviously, this is a gas pump.  To fully understand the significance of this picture requires a little math. First off, notice that Premium here is 95.  The other one was 91.  I hear that there are lower grades than that but I have never seen them.

Now the price for 95 is .60 Riyal per liter.  The price for 91 is .45 Riyal per liter.  Now we figure approximately 4 liters to the gallon.  The first one says 32 Riyal for 53.33 liters.  Lets figure that this is about 13.5 gallons.  Next we need to divide 32 by 4 because the conversion is approximately 4 Riyal to the dollar.  So basically 13.5 gallons of super premium 95 grade gas is about 8 US dollars.

Now if you want to downgrade to the 91 grade gas (which we did) it was about 20 Riyal for 43 liters.  Converts to about 5 dollars for 11 gallons of 91 grade gas.  Basically, gas is cheaper than water over here.  A liter of bottled water costs about 4 Riyal or about a dollar.  There is definitely no pinch at the pump over here!  And not one picture of me!!