i wanted to call this section “tiv tam and tomatoes” – because it’s only a detail of a short shopping trip.  But it was such a strange and funny detail.  

I noticed today when I dragged Ezi to Tiv Tam in search of a turkey for thanksgiving that the store was almost empty.   It seems that the times it is crowded are when most people think no one is shopping – nights and weekends.  So the fact that everyone was speaking only Arabic in a Russian supermarket was very obvious.  Anyway, we were picking out vegetables when a lady in a hijab complained in Arabic that the tomatoes were not the best quality.  Immediately the clerk began rolling the un-picked-over tomatoes from the unreachable top of the piled-high tray down to her.  Luckily we understood and waited until she’d picked her tomatoes.  Then we picked ours.  Bandoora.  Always good, as the cat said, to learn a foreign language….