Monday, December 04, 2006

Toto - we're not in Kansas anymore!

The last few days have been very busy but full of things that have made me say, “I really need to write about this for my blog!” Now I just have to remember them…

Last Friday, as I was walking back to our church’s office, I was greeted with a sight that I had never seen before. Our office is where we have our youth meetings every Friday afternoon, and as the students were coming in this past week, they got to witness two chickens being slaughtered! Right there in the “rrugica”(literally a “little road” – what we would usually call an alley), standing over the drain, one of the neighborhood ladies was cutting the heads off of two chickens! At least she stood on their feet afterwards to keep them from running around the alley after the deed was done! She did one first, then let the blood drain into the drain in the middle of the road, then did the other one. I kind of wondered what the second one thought while he waited for his turn… Yet another reminder that I am no longer in the US!

Yesterday, we took one of our co-workers out to the airport. Along the way we were forced into a detour of sorts – due to the heavy volume of traffic, and a guy who was very impatiently honking his horn at me, I took an alternate route. It turned out to be a really bad traffic jam for a while. We got to see a sign though that made it all worthwhile however! I have to go back sometime and get a photo of it to post here, but it was a large building that housed a business that sells generators. Painted in huge letters on the side of the building was “BAD Gjenerator”! Cindy noted that obviously it was painted by someone who did not speak English, and we laughed a while on the rest of the way to the airport!

I cannot remember the other things, but maybe they will return to me eventually. No doubt there will be other things too. We love life here, but sometimes things are just a bit… --- I don’t know if surreal is really the right word, but things are definitely different from what we grew up with!

2 comments:

Warbler said...

I might miss you more if you would stop blogging altoghether....

~B. said...

aw man... chickens, goats, cows... seen it all and even done some of it myself!!! :) that's hilarious about the sign, we used to see stuff like that all the time in senegal... or have you ever read the english translations on things that were made elsewhere? usually they are translated literally - to the point that they end up not making any sense!! i miss it over there...