Thursday, May 29, 2008

Da Moose Goes Shopping


Maryanne really likes hanging around on the farm but every once in a while she decides to go into town to do some shopping. The other day she decided that we would go into Maddi to shop and she took me along. The first place we went was a fruit and vegetable store to pick up some of the less common fruits and vegetables, like the ones that don't grow on the farm. Fruit here is really good. In Canada it's so cold in the winter that the fruits and vegetables don't grow, but they have to be brought in by trucks. We were looking at pears, peaches, plums, melons, kiwi fruit, pineapples, apples, and some funny fruit Maryanne called harankash. She said that the pineapples, apples, and kiwis are imported from other places, but most of the rest are grown here.

Inside the store, Maryanne bought some lettuce and some sweet red and yellow peppers because the weather at the farm has been too hot for them. The eggplants and chinese cabbages are big...some of the eggplants are white rather than purple. Maryanne says that the Egyptian women like the white ones to stuff with rice and cook them. They also sell sweet potatoes, zucchini, and big bags of garlic. Nice veggies. We moose are big veggie appreciators.

After doing the fruit and vegetable shopping, we went to a mall in Maadi where Maryanne was looking for some shoes before she went to New York for a couple of weeks to see her kids. We looked at a bunch of shoe stores and in the Nike store I got to try on some sandals, but we didn't buy them. The mall is called Maadi Grand Mall, and it's pretty big, but it's not as big as the big mall in Edmonton in Canada. Still, they had lots of places to buy clothes, some book stores, and a lot of shoe stores. Some of the clothing stores had some odd things in them, like the clothes for women were very different from things I'd seen in Canada.

Many of the women wear scarves that cover their hair. But they still like to wear bright colours and pretty things, so they make their scarves and their shirts or dresses match. But a lot of other people wear the same sorts of things that people wear in Canada too. Most of the kids I see wear jeans and tshirts just like everywhere else in the world.

Maryanne isn't too crazy about shopping and we'd been walking around for kind of along time, so she said that we should have a nice lunch. We looked around the mall to see what we could have. There's a place called Arzak that makes really good fuul and ta'ameya, sort of bean sandwiches that are pretty yummy. There's a coffee shop called Costa Coffee where you can get sandwiches and some pretty good cake or pie or cheesecake. I liked that idea, but she wanted real food. Huh! So we ended up going to a place called Makany. It's a small restaurant with a garden near the coffee place and its name means "my place" Maryanne says. They have good sandwiches and some salads and some cakes too, but Maryanne decided to have sushi. I'd never seen sushi before but it was pretty to look at. Maryanne said that it's raw fish wrapped in seaweed and rice, so I decided just to have some of the lemonade while she ate it all. She said that it was really good, and I think that I will just take her word for it.

1 comment:

Rambling Woods said...

I came via Dina's blog and I am so glad that I did...wonderful!!!!!!!!