Come, eat fish and swim!

I have gotten kinda bad at updating the blog. I can't believe it has been almost a month since I updated--and it has been a busy few weeks! This is one story that I intended to post from July 3! So I will do this now and then write what I was going to write about for today.

So one Friday night, I was on facebook, and my friend Natalie started chatting with me and asked me what I was doing on Saturday. I didn't have any real plans, so she invited me to go with her and her friend to "eat fish and swim!" It was going to be fun and we would do it in the cultural traditional way, she explained. Well, how could I resist that?! So we worked out the plan for me to take a bus to a city an hour south of where I live--that is where he parents live and she lives there on the weekends. She would pick me up from the bus station and then we would go "eat fish and swim!" Just for you outsiders-the $1 bus did not have ac or comfy chairs, but it did have open windows carrying a nice salty breeze and a great view of the Sea--and it all its blue hues (some days it has a least 5 different blue hues!)

The bus trip went fine, and Natalie picked me up then we went to go pick up her friend Hussein. By the time he was ready the fresh fish market was about to close, so we settled for the fresh fish flown in from Turkey at the local grocery store. You go and pick out which fish you want (there are 20+ varieties) and they clean the fish for you-which is nice! And of course this area of the store had a very fishy smell. So we got 2 kinds of fish and shrimp!

Then we headed to a second town, even further south. This town has a special area, called camel-although I am not sure why it is called camel. (It has long been joked that here there are only 1.2 camels in this country--at one of the famous tourist places just to keep the stereotype of camels in the middle east alive for tourists.) Anyways, to get to camel, you go through narrow, windy, 1 lane roads that cars drive in both directions on. But when you arrive the area is full of small family restaurants on the Sea, from which you can swim. So we chose one of the less crowed places, so they could cook our fish faster. It was past 2 by this point so we were hungry! While we waited we swam.

Then the food came:
first came the shrimp:


and then the fish!


They also ordered some traditional appetizers. We had hummus, baba gnanoush (pretty much hummus, but made from eggplant), fattoush (salad), french fries, and grilled eggplant with a pomegranate sauce that I loved! when you grill eggplant, it gets this savory texture and then with sweet pomegranate sauce it was sooo good. I didn't get a pic of the last kind of fish but it was also deep fried whole with head and tail still attached!

After lunch, we rented jet skis by the minute. Natalie and I rode ours for 10 minutes and I got to drive for half of it! It was so freeing to go whatever direction I wanted to go and as fast as I wanted and to hit the waves! I don't drive here so it was kinda nice to be in control of a vehicle for a little bit.





Close to sunset, we settled our bill. I think it was about $20 for lunch--which is the same price just to get into some of the beaches around here, and we got a great meal with our beach day!

On the way home, we had to take an alternate route, because fans of Germany were celebrating their 4-0 World Cup game win! Seriously, there were teenage guys on scooters with flags and cars parading with people hanging out with German flags. And we were leaving an hour after the game had finished! We made it back to Natalie's home, where I met her mom. Her brother was there and was going to give me a ride back to my house in my city, because he was going there anyways to watch another World Cup game with his friends. But first we had to all sit and talk and have their Filipina maid serve us juice and a snack first-which is culturally appropriate.

I got home almost 12 hours after I left from a full, but yet relaxing day! I should "eat fish and swim" more often!