impressions.

David and I were picked up at the airport Tuesday afternoon by a driver who recognized us through a phone picture. He loaded up our bags in his little sedan and drove us 30 minutes across the city to our friends’ apartment.

What is it like here, besides dusty?

It’s brown. High rise brown stone apartments stretch as far as the eye can see, lines of laundry stretched across balconies dancing in the hot wind.

But the brown is punctuated here and there by green trees, ablaze with blossoms so bright they almost hurt your eyes: frangipani, poinciana, bougainvillea and palm trees. Tropical plants are my favorite because of my childhood years spent in Barbados, and it always fills my heart up to see them.

Parts of where we are remind me of India. David calls it a toned-down India.

The traffic presses in on all sides, and drivers use their horns liberally. Lanes in roads are nothing more than a suggestion and cars cut in front of one another so closely it makes me catch my breath. There are people walking, livestock meandering along the roadsides, piles of trash, carts of fruit vendors and even auto rickshaws.

There’s just way less of everything that you find in India. Fewer people, fewer animals, less traffic, less noise. I realize this week afresh that truly India is a world all its own.

Here we trade Arabic for the multiple languages of India. And bright-colored sari’s are replaced with black, ground-length burkas. The capital city is a mix of dress. You’ll find women in jeans and t’shirts (although not many), and then in every form of head covering and burka. This is the first time I’ve seen full burkas, that cover even women’s eyes.

Mainly you notice how much fewer women there are out and about.

The friends we came to visit, Phillip and Vicky, live in an apartment building squeezed into a narrow alley.

With typical Arab hospitality, Vicky welcomed us with open arms. We’ve spent time with her in the States, but never here in her home, and we loved seeing a new side of her. She waited on us hand and foot in the two brief hours we had to tour her flat, eat lunch, let us take delightfully hot showers after our hours of travel, and noticing my nodding-off head, she sent me to lie down in her own bed for a quick nap.

North Africans eat their big meal of the day at 1:30. Vicky told us, half-apologetically, that she’d never be able to get away with serving a North African the meager lunch she served us, but she knows we don’t mind. Digging into the spread she laid out before us at the tiny kitchen table, I wondered what on earth she thinks of the lunches she’s served in the United States. There was baked chicken, potatoes and vegetables, and mounds of sharp, salty homemade North African cheese dripping in oil, followed by chocolate balls covered in shredded coconut.

After 24 hours of airport and airplane food, a healthy, home-cooked meal tasted heavenly.

We re-packed enough clothes for two days into our small carry-on bag, then headed back outside to meet the driver who would take us to another smaller city. At nearly 7:00 in the evening the sun was setting and the fierce heat already eased somewhat.

We drove 5 hours out of the capital city and through the desert to the place where a conference was being held.

Funny story about the drive: some friends had warned us before our trip that there were pretty much zero stops for a bathroom break on this five-hour drive. They said, “You know, it’s in the desert. Men can always find a spot behind a sand dune, but women . . . ”

When Amie heard this, she asked, “Do they know about the Cinderella Special?” This is a family secret from our road trip, driving through a different sort of desert late at night (where rest stops were also few and far between), and all I’ll say is it involved David pulling to the roadside and us opening van doors and forming a sort of shield for the person who desperately had to go. And praying against rattlesnakes.

With as much as David and I have been trying to stay hydrated, I told Amie that our driver just might know about the Cinderella Special before the trip was over.

But Vicky sent us off with firm instructions to him to find “toilet!” when he could, and thankfully we came across two gas stations on the drive.

We arrived in the smaller city after midnight, dizzy with exhaustion, but still noticing the streets full with long-robed men and children in shorts and t’shirts, playing, sitting at roadside cafes and visiting, selling fruit, and chasing goats.

Our driver pulled up in front of a hotel on the outskirts of the city, and several young people there for the conference came to the door to greet us and help with our bags. We were given hugs and wide smiles, shown to our room, and we collapsed into bed immediately.