Happy Thanksgiving

While Canadians enjoy a Thanksgiving dinner this weekend, we want to share some of our food stories.  This week Simon was excited to see pumpkins show up at LuLu's.  The cost of one of the small pumpkins is 200 riyals (about $50)!! These pumpkins are imported from U.S.A. It was a treat to be reminded that it is Autumn in Canada.  It is also autumn here, but seems like summer to us.

LuLu is the name of the local grocery store.   We have LuLu Express next door to our compound and there is a LuLu Hypermarket downtown (something lost in the translation). We can buy almost anything here.  Tomatoes from Syria.  Carrots from Australia.  Cucumbers from Saudi Arabia.  Lettuce from Lebanon.  Green chillies from Jordan.  Pomegranate from Egypt.  Peaches from Turkey.  Grapes from Italy.  Our fridge is an international cornucopia.  And because shipping costs are not a big expense (gasoline is 25 cents a litre) these items are very reasonably priced.  Despite the miles these fruit and vegetables travel, we actually find that most items are less expensive than in Nova Scotia.

There are also some fun things that we have discovered about food.  Max and his pen pal, Matthew, are holding very large pita called Arabian bread.  They make wonderful thin-crust pizza.  The great thing is that they cost just 1 riyal (about 25 cents) for a package of FIVE big ones!  The same price will buy us a package of 10 smaller ones.  Needless to say, pita is on the menu for breakfast, lunch, and supper. The deli-made hummous is also delicious and very inexpensive so Lisa doesn't make her own here.   We hope to get to a Lebanese bakery to see how they make the bread.

Obviously we eat lots of fruit and vegetables every day.  Lettuce is one of the things that is more expensive so we have a salad just once a week.  This one was so good with feta cheese and lupini beans (yellow beans).  Lupini beans are a new food for us.  They are grown in the Mediterranean and require huge amount of preparation to take the bitterness out.  And if they are not prepared properly then they will kill you.  Really!  Toxic legumes!

Just for fun, here is a can of Coke.  The Coca-Cola logo is written in Arabic of course!  Read from right to left.