Church City, license plates, and little things

Church City is a designated quarter of the city where churches with official status can rent out buildings for their congregants to worship in. Our friends attend the Anglican church, which shares its facilities with the Seventh Day Adventists. There's a Catholic church as well as a Coptic church, Greek Orthodox...and a handful of other officially recognized religions. And they all meet in that quarter. 

We've haven't actually been there yet, so I don't know if their names are allowed on the outside of the building or anything, but I do know that no outside symbols are allowed (no crosses, etc). 

Our congregation is too small to be recognized, so we meet in a rented-out villa elsewhere. It's unmarked so can be tricky to find (we wandered around in the heat for a good twenty minutes before texting a friend for help finding the place—she sent her 6'7" son outside to find us and shared her location so I could lead us there with GPS) but we're happy to be able to meet together.

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Today we saw a 3-digit license plate. 

We've seen two 4-digit license plates. 

Most of the license plates we see are at least 6-digits though. 

License plate numbers inversely correspond with social class: the smaller the license plate number, the higher the class of the vehicle owner. Only the wealthiest can afford to procure a low-digit license plate. A 3-digit license plate can go for as high as $400,000 (which, for the record, is about the price of our house in Georgia).

So it feels pretty cool to spot a 3-digit plate out in the wild! 

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We took a couple of Ubers today and rode around with our real estate agent for a bit. I feel like we could create a bingo car for conversation topics. So far on our list is:

• The importance of education
• One driver said, "You can be born poor and you can't help that. But if you are poor, don't be ignorant. You can do one small thing every day to teach yourself..."
• Another driver said, "No education, no life, no good!" He himself admitted to having only a little education, but his children have all done very well. His son is in his last year of medical school in London, he's becoming a cardiologist, and he earned good marks and did it for free
• Colonization
• "When the British came, they wanted to control everything. Have you heard of this? They call it colonization!"
• (A lot of our taxi drivers hail from post-Colonial nations)
• Donald Trump
• "I think he is jealous of third-world dictators. He called el-Sisi his favourite dictator—you know this? I think he is jealous. I think he wants unchecked power. He wants to be a dictator."
• The weather
• "How do you find the heat?" 
• This inevitably turns into a conversation about where we're from and where they're from and how the climate compares.
• Children
• "Mashallah!" "So many!"
• Most taxi drivers seem rather excited to load "All the small ones in the back! All the small ones in the back!" (as our driver enthusiastically called out tonight as he helped Phoebe, Alex, and Zoë into the back row of jump seats—when we order an extra-large taxi it's usually a five seater vehicle with an extra row of seats in the trunk that can be popped up and truly little people fit back there best)

And...I think that's all that we have on our bingo card so far. We've used the metro more than taxis, honestly, though we just put in a bid for an apartment building (fingers crossed) that will require a bit of a taxi ride to get to the metro so we'll likely be using more in the future.