Last night I went to visit a good friend and neighbor for the Eid . I found her at her mother in laws house along with half of the tribe . Lots of children , sister in laws , aunts , and cousins were there and the chaos that comes with the territory .Lots of kissing and hand shaking , where have you been all year , and how are you's . It was good to see them all again . I always am made to feel welcome when I go to visit . My husband is slightly related to them so it was especially good.
We quickly exhausted all topics of conversations as a group, so my friend and I sat and talked quietly for a while among ourselves, always keeping an eye on our hostess for signs of any disgruntledness of our conversation making her feel left out .
After a while we noticed that we were being watched as a curiosity rather than a part of the group so we decided that it was time to speak in Arabic again , to include the rest of the ladies . I was at a loss for a topic since we had already talked about the usual things such as our husbands, our children , Ramadan , food ,who was sick, dead , and dieing . That about covered the whole spectrum as far as I could figure out except marriage and we had covered that one two hours ago .
Then I remembered a thing I had read from one of my e mail friends about the nose being as long as a persons thumb . I knew a couple of other things like that so I asked them did they know that their thumb was approximately as long as their nose ? That started them all measuring their noses with their thumbs .
We all were laughing about that . I then asked them who could roll their tongue ? That was really funny to watch while they contorted their faces trying to roll their tongues. Some could , while others couldn't . Just as they were recovering from that some one asked who could put their leg behind their head . Well , by this time all the kids were in on the act and doing what kids do best .This moved on to walking on crossed knees, pressing the thumb back against the inside of the wrist , much laughter , and measuring the foot along the inside forearm from the wrist to the crook of the elbow to show that it was the same size . By this time we were laughing so hard that we had tears streaming down our faces because these somber dignified women had become like little children having old fashion silly fun .When I left to come home some of the women were still trying to recover from their acrobatics . It was a fun time .
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