Building character. Building character. This is all just buuuuuilding my character.

Detoxing from (yet another) host family experience with help from the Flaming Lips

I….wow. Okay, so every Friday I eat couscous with my host family. The past two days I’ve been sick and coughing so I wasn’t really in the mood to go over to their house today. I didn’t go to work this morning and instead spent the first half of the day wrapped up like a burrito in the World’s Warmest Blanket and counting all the things I should be doing but won’t because it’s too cold outside my tortilla.

I was debating if I should go over and have lunch at all, but decided to suck it up and get out of the house because if I didn’t, they would just come to MY house and then start trying to fix me.

So I get dressed and head over around 1 pm as the mosques are letting out and knock on the door. It’s strangely quiet, considering the general volume of my host mother and the fact that four sugar-fueled small children live there. After some time my brother answers the door and I quickly see that it’s just him and Gramma, who is shuffling around the kitchen making couscous in the absence of my host mom, who usually does the cooking. Mom and the three youngest are out of town visiting her sisters.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Gramma, but she’s a bit bonkers in her old age and the idea of her fiddling around the kitchen by herself seriously concerns me. I ask her if she wants help, forgetting that she never understands anything I say, and she shoos me out. So I sit on the ponj straining to see what the hell she’s doing and if she’s going about couscous roughly the same way my host mom does.

After about 45 minutes she comes teetering out of the kitchen with a huuuuuuuge plate of couscous for three people and we start to eat. So far so good. Veggies are cooked, couscous has the right consistency, I can pretend I didn’t see her pull a dirty spoon out of the sink, shake it a few times then use it to add more sauce. Everything’s going okay until we get to the meat, which, granted, is always a stressful time for me. You never know what kind of meat it’s going to be, or what part of the animal you are eating. She starts tossing pieces of meat my way and I dig in with my fingers, separating the fat from the meat. As I put a piece in my mouth and start chewing, I distinctly hear her say “lehem l’3id!” which means “meat from L’3id Kbir.” As in, the meat I’m now swallowing is a mystery piece of sheep that’s been sitting in a freezer of questionable quality since the end of November. Updates to come on my future gastrointestinal status.

The rest of the meal went pretty normal. Gramma scolded me for “not eating anything” then told me I need to wear more clothes (I’m currently wearing two pairs of socks, long underwear, jeans, a tshirt, a sweater and a really big scarf) then tried to make tea but couldn’t get the lighter to work, at which point I escaped…until next time, that is.