Yes, the food was yummy. No, you cannot have any! Actually, it was an Italian restaurant and I had a calzone with the MOST AMAZING tomato sauce ever. It tasted as if the tomatoes had actually been allowed to ripen and were freshly turned into sauce that day.
I’m not sure I could explain shisha, so you are better off with consulting Google or Wikipedia. It seems to be a fruit, molasses, tobacco concoction smoked through a water pipe. The smoke actually smells nice due to the small amount of tobacco and the large percentage of fruit.
Women and dress – you will see it all here. Abha is actually an Indian and has opted for western dress. The Indian women I work with wear a form of traditional dress – not the sari (which is considered too revealing by the locals), but the salwar kameez. Personally, I’m heading toward that myself. It is a loose fitting pair of pants (salwar), a long tunic (kameez) and a scarf (dupatta). Muslim women wear a variety of clothing also, depending on which country they come from and how traditional or liberal they are. The head scarf and lack of bare skin are the common factors. The Emirati traditional dress is the black scarf (shayla) and black robe over their clothes (abaya). Some go so far as to wear black gloves and a veil over everything but their eyes, so that there is no skin showing except the small area around the eyes – and some even have a solid sheer black veil with no “eye holes,” if you will. But these conservatives are in the minority of the minority.
Basketball – yes, they do “play” at playing basketball. The hoop was put there on “sports day” which was a special event to encourage the students to participate in a variety of physical activities. It was popular, so has been left out for use. No one is playing serious one-on-one, but any physical exercise is a good thing. And, yes, they do it in their abaya. 🙂
The coffee cups and tea cups are marked as being made in Japan, so I suspect that they are really just tea cups. One can find a variety of coffee here – Americana, Latte, Cappacino (funny thing – the Arabic for Cappacino in the menu where we had shisha was Al Bachino – Ha! no “P” in the Arabic script, no intentional homage to Al Pacino either), etc. Turkish/Arabic coffee is very strong, served in small portions. It is supposed to have grounds in it. We often get tea at the end of a dinner which is served in small glasses (almost shot glass size) and is usually sweetened for us. It is very close to being syrup – the ultimate sweet tea.
Finally, and most importantly, a full English breakfast at the Horsebrass pub is most definitely on the top of our list of things to do this summer in Portland. Along with tater tots and a Ruby at any and all McMenamins. I told Daddybird that we should just put out the word to everyone that we would be at McMenamins every night and they should drop by if they want to see us.
Living the Travel Channel 