Birthday

We're still working on getting the jeep fixed. There will be more on that later.

Today was my daughter's fifth birthday. We were considering throwing her a small party at an amusement arcade or restaurant until we realized that nothing is open in the daytime during Ramadan. Instead, we took Tia and Lucas to see Toy Story 3. With the show being at 12:15 on a Friday, I figured the place would be swamped with tons of kids around so we got there 30 minutes early. Including the four of us, there were seven people in the movie theater.

One nice thing about it not being crowded was when Tia told one of the ushers that it was her birthday, he came back with a glossy Toy Story 3 picture with a nice birthday greeting written on the back. The cost was 47 dirhams each ($12.90) and that was with us already having the 3D glasses from Shrek. When I see it written in dollars, it doesn't seem as much, but in dirhams it was a little bit of a shock.

Afterward, I wanted to take the kids to a play center, but it wasn't open until 6:00 pm so we just went home and had cake. I still can't get over how things specifically aimed at small children here don't open until late in the evening. There's a free Sesame Street show that's playing from 9:00 pm to 1:00 am at the shopping mall near our place. It features "everyone’s favourite Sesame characters – Elmo, Bert, Ernie and Khokha ."(Khokha?) In the end, we had a pretty good, low key day with friends in our apartment building. For me, that's better than trying to cram in as much fun as possible until we burst.