Yemen: Yeah Man!

The city of Sana'a has to be one of the most beautiful places i have ever visited... Up there with Edinburgh and Venice. Pity I have no photographic record of its beauty. My photos from when I was here in September where stolen with a pile of other Cd's (including all my photos from Egypt). And now my camera itself is stolen. I know I mentioned it in my last post... but I'm still feeling it and what's a blog if not a place to share ones pain.

It rains frequently here. I got caught in a drenching the other day. I couldn't help but notice that within an hour all the water in the city had conveniently drained away to the main roads that are about a metre below the rest of the city for this exact reason. It just works. there are no puddles, no mud, no festerng mosquito breeding grounds. I love it when humans get together and think about stuff before they do it. Even though there are no festering puddles, I am covered in mosquito bites.

The food is great. Darius and I have been overloading on chicken. It's not like you can't get chicken in Ethiopia, you can in nice restaurants in the form of spicy chicken and onion curry. It's flavored with burbery which I think is the only spice used in Ethiopia, so it kinda tastes like every other dish. Here we have had chicken grilled, fried, boiled, curried, minced and in some indistinguishable form on the flight over. Yum.

On the flight over I was surprised to note that none of our airline hostesses had their heads covered. In fact they where wearing very tight high waisted slacks and very light weight blouses, too much makeup and VPLs. This is all in stark contrast to the black triangles seen on the streets after exiting the plane. In one of the markets I was surrounded by hundreds of them, They are very menacing looking in large numbers. They just don't look human. Darius and I were counting how many pairs of Yemeni women's lips we could spot. In our first couple of days we got about 4 pairs. What Sana'a lacks in women's lips it makes up in boys eyes. Stunning greens and blues on olive skin. Simply beautiful.

Darius has left for Aden, a former British colony or protectorate or something by the beach.

I decided to go and get a waxing. It turned out to be a bad waxing. So in case you are not familiar with the hidden arts of the beauty salon: a good waxing is when a lady smears luke warm goop over your flesh then fiercely rips it off taking with it all your hair by the roots. What makes it a good thing is that the lady is wearing white and she smells pretty and she does things with fresh white towels that protect your modesty there is tranquil music playing softly in the background of the small neutral toned private room. So even though you are lying half naked and in a fair amount of pain as you have half your thatch ripped from your body you kind of feel special and like it is some sort of luxurious treat.

A bad waxing is much the same except you don't feel like it's a special treat worth all that money you have paid for, and you leave with a lot of prickly hair still jotting out of your red-raw flesh. In Yemen there appears to be two levels of female modesty. there is the extreme cover-up outdoors, then there is the oh-we-are-all-female-there's-nothing-to-hide attitude of the beauty salon that has one room. I got my arms, legs, pits (called "underarm" in respectable beauty salons) waxed in front of continuous traffic of women and all their herds of children. Some of the kids were looking a bit too over 8 and male to be watching.

When it came to getting my bikini line done I looked apprehensively and the onlookers and the lady (not wearing white, not smelling pretty and whose left eyebrow was over plucked and right eyebrow in desperate need of tweezers) who didn't speak a word of English smiled and and took me behind a curtain to lie in the concrete floor amongst some manky towels and old pots. She started off enthusiastically to the point of furiously. As I'm not circumcised I felt she was getting too close to territory that she probably has no experience of. So I stopped her, paid her and left the salon with patchy prickly hair and red skin from shoulder to toe. I'll going to have to fix this up with a razor at some point.

Bad waxing, but fantastic cultural experience. I'm off to London tomorrow. I have more luggage that I have ever had before. it's ridiculous