I don’t know where to begin, really.
My alarm went off at 4 a.m. I’ve been waking up early to get
some hw out of the way before I head to work. My plan was a success. I had a
very productive morning, as I managed to eat breakfast and begin my workday just
fine. Even when I got to work, I was able to find some key parts of my
research. It was, overall, a productive morning. Despite feeling really tired
and overwhelmed in some ways, I was happy that it looked like it was going to
be a good day.
When 12 p.m. rolled around, my friend invited me out to
lunch. There’s a great Kurdish restaurant down the street from the office, and
we were craving one of our favorite meals. When he was ready to go, I saved my
work, put on my shoes, and headed out the door to the restaurant. The
restaurant has two sections: a family section and a man(?) section. I don’t
really know how to describe the other side. I’ve only seen men sitting over
there. It’s loud, and … just for men, I guess, so we sat on the family side and
ordered our meal.
We get the same thing every time. I think it’s called
“Sada.” For this meal, you’re served a bowl of rice with raisins sprinkled on
it, and there are multiple other bowls filled with vegetable toppings in the
middle of the table. It’s pretty good stuff, and we enjoyed it. During the
meal, we were stared at, and, lately, our
reaction to the stares has been to figure out which one of us is doing something
wrong. We can normally figure it out, but this time, however, I couldn’t
think of anything, which is a good thing because it normally means we’re being
stared at because we’re foreigners. However, we later learned that we thought
wrong.
After our meal, we asked for tea, and went to the front of
the restaurant to pay. I handed my friend $10,000 dinar, so he could pay. We
waited for a while for change, and I again felt the eyes on us. I rubbed my
head and did motions that covered my face, so that people would stop staring at
me, and then I nervously fixed my ponytail. As I adjusted my hair, I looked
down, and figured out what the big deal was…
It was me (being
culturally inappropriate, again). The left side of my dress was not zipped.
Great, I thought. Way
to keep it classy, Yvette.
I tend to layer my clothes a lot around here, and I normally
am extra careful with how I dress, but to forget to zipper? Really? It didn’t
make sense, especially since I had such a productive morning. And out of
everything I could have forgotten … this was it? Well, that’s not even fair.
“Inapprop,”
at it’s finest (in this culture).
Yes. I had spent half the day with my
dress half-unzipped. I walked to work like this, and to the restaurant like
this. Luckily, I was wearing a tank top and pants under it, and you really
couldn’t see anything, but in this culture, that doesn’t really matter because
what was seen was my dress unzipped. Awesome.
When we left, as most of you can imagine, I panicked a bit. I felt so embarrassed. But not too long after, I couldn’t help but
laugh. What on earth? This was such a random thing to happen, and of all the
places … in one of the most culturally
conservative countries.
That’s.just.wonderful.
I felt so scandalous, and couldn’t help but laugh on the walk back to work, which is also not completely appropriate, especially if you're walking with someone of the opposite sex. It makes you look flirtatious.
Oh, this was no longer my day.
When I tried to stop laughing, I had a huge smile on my face, so I just covered my mouth with my hands on the way back to work. Yes, even my smiles could get me in trouble. This was a problem because I just could not turn off the smile. Being scandalous was totally not the look I was going for, and I definitely nailed it with my unzipped dress and my smiling face.
When we returned to the office, we
told a colleague the story. He shook his head and laughed with us. I still felt
awful, as it was an honest mistake, but at this point, there was nothing I
could do.
In my colleague’s words, “In the States, that’s nothing, but
here … You just flashed half of this city.”
Fabulous. Pray for me <3
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