Story time at the library (and our house is under contract!?!)

I signed Phoebe up to attend Arabic story time at the library yesterday and we met up with friends beforehand so they could finish a game they'd been playing.

Phoebe was very excited to ride the metro again. She loves the idea of being on a train, but is perpetually annoyed that we haven't purchased her a "gold club" membership and instead make her ride standard fare. The "gold club" car is much fancier than the ordinary car and there are two seats right at the front of the train so you can see where you're headed (which is very exciting) rather than looking at the windows at the blackness of the passing tunnel.

When we got on the metro, we found the door between the gold club car and the family car had been left open (and the car was empty). The children enjoyed looking through the car out the front of the train...until Benjamin decided that the door was probably supposed to be closed and shut it. 

Phoebe threw a bit of a fit about that and then spoke to me angrily about all the reasons why she deserved a gold club membership. Because they would just give us back our money, anyway, she incorrectly reasoned (pretty sure they would keep our money). And besides, don't I want her to get to sit in the very front seat and look out the window? 

Poor baby. 

But from the looks of things, I'm not the only mother denying my child the opportunity to sit in the gold club car.

Here are the kids making their way around the library to the entrance:

And here they are walking across the main plaza:

The library is very open, but surprisingly not echoey. We did hear a wee baby yowling as its mother push its pram out the front door, but it was a very muffled from where we were, and conversations don't seem to travel far either. Whoever designed the acoustics knew what they were doing.

Here's a view of the exhibit below the main plaza:

Most areas in the library are open like this, rather then enclosed. The elevator has no roof, for example, nor does the people mover (which, yes, we took a ride on just for the sake of taking a ride).

Here are the boys waiting for the people mover:

And here are the girls inside the people mover:

Rather than moving straight up and down (like an elevator), the people mover follows the V-shape of the library, taking people to the top floor of the stacks on one side, down to the plaza level, and up to the top floor of stacks on the other side of the library.

Here's Zoë pausing by a statue of a large stack of books:

And here's the hallway of flags, which are present for each nationality of staff members at the library, who all share the same commitment to serving the community of Qatar:

Phoebe was quite interested in trying out these bubble chairs:

Story time was in the multipurpose room in the children's library (I didn't take pictures because there are signs in the children's library asking people to not take pictures), but you can find the multipurpose room in this virtual tour of the library. It's decorated in a jungle theme, which the children all seemed to find exciting. 

My presence was very off-putting for the patrons who wanted to attend Arabic story time. One woman walked in and blustered, "Is...is this Arabic story time?"

"It is," I told her. 

Every mother who came in wanted to know the same thing—and oddly asked each other in English whether this was Arabic story time or not.

It was supposed to be, and surely was planned to be, but my attendance made them question about whether that was going to happen.

The librarian in charge of story time for the day came in and first apologized (in English) that the regular storyteller wasn't there, and then explained that today was Arabic story time so the story would be read in Arabic, and perhaps I had meant to attend yesterday's story time (which was in English) and perhaps it would be better if I came to next week's English story time. 

And perhaps we'll try that, but I did actually intend on attending the Arabic story time. When I made that clear the librarian said that we were of course free to stay and listen. So we did. 

I understood little, but learned a lot!

The story was about a little boy seeking out a desert (halwa) and I understood words here and there. But what was most interesting to me was the way the librarian said, "And zen..." every time she turned the page. 

To my ears it sounded like she was saying, "And then..." with a French accent or something, but I knew that couldn't be right. So I made a note to myself to research this little phrase later and learned that انزين (inzeen) means "okay" in many Gulf dialects and is used as a filler word when speaking (making it mean all sorts of things). You can say it when you're listening to someone, to encourage them to keep talking, you can say it when you've had enough of something, you can say it to express joy or surprise, you can say it to express skepticism (really much the way "okay" can mean all those things in English depending on the intonation of the speaker). 

And it can also mean, "Okay...we're going to turn the page now..." (which I suppose it can in English as well). 

The dialect of Arabic here is closer to the Levantine dialect of Jordan and Lebanon than it is to the dialect of Arabic spoken in Egypt, for example, so we have a bit of a leg up in understanding things (having lived in Jordan for a time), but inzeen was new to us!

At the end of story time (which...I forgot to mention started 45 minutes late! ...and then only lasted about five minutes because only one story was read!) the librarian again apologized that it was in Arabic and suggested that I check their website for information on the English story time (which I promise is not on the website, actually, and I am purposely seeking out exposure to Arabic...which is surprisingly hard to come by in the Gulf...so Arabic story time was precisely what I was looking for). 

It was a very interested reception and it makes me wonder how next week will go...when we show up for story time again! 

Because story time ended so late, Andrew was finished on campus by the time we were getting out of story time so he came and met us there (he had spent the day getting his medical examination for her residency permit). Phoebe took him off to read some stories (in English) and I went off to find the rest of the kids (and our friends).

I found most of the kids still playing their role-playing game and sat down to chat with our friends, wondering aloud about where the older boys had gotten off to. 

"They're around here somewhere..." our friends answered. "But where's Phoebe?!"

"Oh, Andrew's reading with her. He met us after story time!"

"Oh, Andrew's here! That makes sense. I was wondering about your sanity, leaving Phoebe alone somewhere to find your older kids..."

We have plans to meet our friends at the library again this week, so we said our goodbyes and headed out into the sunset with our Daddy in tow. 

The sun sets at 6:00 here! In the summer!

It feels so early for a summer sunset, but it's just the way it is. 

Here's the sunset with the library:

It was really quite spectacular:

We took the metro back to the hotel (Phoebe wanted to ride in the middle "hinge" part of the train because it makes for an extra bumpy ride):

And then we grabbed some dinner and groceries and got ready for bed.

Oh, also in the midst of all of this we may have sold our house?! 

Our house went on the market on Thursday. We had an open house on Sunday, along with thirteen private viewings sprinkled throughout Friday and Saturday and Monday. We got some negative feedback (someone literally said it was the worst house they had ever seen because it wasn't at street level (it is situated at the bottom of a hill) and I was like, "Sure, let me just...raise up the house and level the entire geography for you?!!?") which felt disheartening but then we spent yesterday negotiating two competing offers on our house and went under contract at around 1:00 am!

The inspection is scheduled for tomorrow (the prospective buyers preemptively scheduled one, hoping we'd take their offer...which we did end up doing) and then...it will be about a month before we officially sign the papers to sell it...but hopefully that whole process goes smoothly!

Our relator said they're the sweetest little family (she met them at the open house) and...that's just what our cul-de-sac needs is a sweet little family to move in. They are going to love our cul-de-sac.