Wedding

After a sunny week with cold nights, we are having a grey and rainy day which is a god gift for the villagers, but not for the foreigners living in the city.

Monday morning, we left for Palmyra along my favourite route through the desert. There are many villages still with beehive houses and stables. We saw some Bedouin women making bread the traditional way and stopped to ask for some. As always, the Bedouins are more than generous. In the next village, we stopped to have the car cleaned and I was invited to have tea on the corner of the street by a whole bunch of curious men and woman. The conversation was in Arabic, of course. As usual, the tea was very sweet and I prefer tea without sugar. The Bedouins put the sugar in the teapot. They presume everybody has a lot of sugar with their tea.

The car needed to be spotless, because we were going to a wedding in the evening. The party which is not mixed. I mean, the men have their party and the women another. At the end, the bride and groom are driven around town with a lot of cars following them to tell the whole town about the marriage. Needless to say this is accompanied with a lot of hooting and even shooting in the air.

Back in Aleppo, I decided to go to the hairdresser. The hairdresser is Armenian and has a big salon in Azizieh, the mondain part of Aleppo. Even though it is in this part of the city, I only paid 4 Euro for a haircut and I'm very pleased with the result. I am not afraid to walk around without a scarf.

The baby still didn't arrive. The doctor - another one - said it is only due after 1 week. Serwat and her husband walk around the city the whole day, because she needs the exercise. During her whole pregnancy, Serwat has almost never been out of the house and now it is hard to find them in the house. When they are at home, they are sleeping, because - as you can expect - they are very tired after these excursions. I can see the despair on Serwat's face. She is very worried. Fortunately, her belief is helping her through these times.