a few stories

this is a picture from the first restaurant we have been to. they serve basically the same thing...rice and chicken with yummy, fresh naan. the kids all ate it and all loved it! this is through the window in the background of the kabab man putting raw meat on.
this is annie with himdad's daughter, soma. she is 8 and speaks good english. himdad has been very kind to us in helping us find a house and a car and getting us all set up. hopefully we can go play with soma again.
here is another wildflower picture. this was taken alongside the road to the big city. we had to stop because our suitcases on top of the car were about to flop off, they had to be retied. so i took the opportunity to take pictures of flowers, but then i got scared of snakes and scorpions and ran back to the car. so far we haven't seen any scorpions or encountered any weird bugs...yet.

oh i wish i had pictures for this story...but then again some of you might never read my blog again. yesterday i attempted to walk with the kids to the bazaar for the first time. it is a little over half a mile from where we are staying. you have to walk down narrow, windy streets which are all unmarked of course and full of trash and interesting smells. some of the buildings are so old and some are newer. it is so interesting. we finally emerged onto the main road at the bazaar and our first shop that we saw was the chicken shop. it had low doorways and 3 different doors all adjacent to one another. the first door was full of live chickens running around a small room. there were a few women standing outside the doorway pointing and talking. the man inside grabbed a chicken for a woman and handed it to her by the wings, it was squawking and going crazy. she then carried it to the next doorway and handed it to the man. without any ado he pinned the chicken to the floor and chopped its head off with a giant knife. i guess we knew this was going to happen, but it all happened so fast i didn't really prepare my kids for it. they just watched in stunned silence. then the man took the chicken and shoved it neck down into a plastic jug of sorts on a stand to steady it. the now dead chicken flapped and ran in the air upside down. the kids just watched and said nothing. i asked them if they were okay and they said they were fine. of course annie told tim ("ba-ba" is kurdish for daddy, they have taken to calling him that occasionally...so sweet) all about it when he got home. she thought it was a little freaky, but she also found the humor in it. i haven't taken them past the lamb and cow butcher shops yet...those freak me out still. i was so proud of the kids though, they walked the entire way without complaining and went with us to 3 different shops and even each carried a bag all the way home and up the hill to paul and erin's house.