price of life

Last weekend, I bit the bullet and went to a barber. Or rather, a "saloon." (I taught my class the difference but they didn't think it as funny as I did. Typical.) The Iraqi barbershop is rumored to the be the best and I had been wanting to go for some time. The barber spoke minimal english, so I used a lot of gestures to explain what I wanted which of course didn't happen. I don't think I've ever gotten what I wanted when I pay for a haircut so I wasn't really feeling at such a loss. I was more feeling that I should grow a goatee and start coaching women's lacrosse. But, I showered and look/feel less like a creep now. The amazing part was the price, two hundred riyals, which is only a dollar. Still more than dad would pay. I was shocked though, that's dang cheap. At this rate I can fulfill my personal dream of getting my hair cut every week (if I can settle on a decent look) for a year for the price of two cuts at Bishops, but minus the High Life.
In general, things are cheap here. The exchange rate is roughly one US dollar equaling five hundred Yemeni riyals. But the biggest note is a thousand, or a five dollar bill, and prices generally reflect this.
Food is inexpensive for the most part. I buy produce from the vendors on the street corners. I'm faithful to one stand in a cluster of stalls. For an eggplant, a koosa, a couple carrots, and a chili it's fifty or a hundred riyals and enough for dinner. But to cook I have to buy gas, which is done by waiting around for the kid with the propane tanks in his wheelbarrow to come down the street, banging on the tanks with a stick so you can hear. Haven't had to buy yet so I'm not sure how much that costs. Food in most restaurants is wicked inexpensive and delicious mostly. Taryn and I get lunch together often at a traditional place. Waters, sometimes a soda, two small bowls of brothy soup, a salad which is just cucumber and tomato slices, zahowiq which is this delicious pink salsa with cheese, a boiling-lava hot stew called falsah, another broth to pour in the cast-iron stewpot, khobz which is the bread made from just flour and water to eat the falsah and zahowiq, a couple bananas dipped in orgasmic honey, two cups of shai (tea, and not chai), and another banana each to go, all for 8 hundred always, or four dollars. Dinner is even cheaper.
Meat of course is very expensive, as it should be. Chicken is cheaper (and real, unlike the American anti-agriculture freaks). Some places you can bring your own, which is definitely what to do with fish. The fish market is awesome, but a rip-off when you're a foreigner. You buy your red-at-the-gills fish and take it across the street to the mukbazza and they bake it or something with red spices in this big kiln sort of. I've had the most amazing shrimp of my life here. A few hundred riyals.
Unfortunately, buying water is necessary. The most inexpensive way to go is by filling up a tank if you live close enough to a store with a bigger tank (you have to carry it, I guess you could toss fifty riyals to a kid, but my conversation skills/ macho pride prevent me from doing this). Otherwise it's all bottled. I spend maybe two or three hundred riyals on water every day. The tap-water is safe to drink, no bacteria or anything, but its salt content makes it terrible, along with other metals which destroy the teeth. But cooking and brushing your teeth is fine with the tap (except at places with a really big water tank with crows that fall in and drown and then people start getting typhoid, like at the school). I'm not sure about dental services here, haven't looked into it and probably won't; you can sometimes tell where people are from by how brown their teeth are from the awful water. Dental floss is about four or five dollars for a spool, so most people use a miswak, or stick that you sharpen and scrape against your teeth, which is probably cheap. My students just give them to me because they're so tickled I use it. About once every month or so one of the older students is in hospital with kidney stones because of the salt content in the water, so I've been keeping cranberry juice in my fridge, at 8 dollars for a liter. It's worth every penny, and I'm pretty sure the price reflects an actual cost. Where is cranberry juice from? New England or the Pacific Northwest? Really the only other things I keep a stock of are peanut butter (which, according to these two adorable French girls who were backpacking through and sleeping in my mufraj, is ridiculously American) at two dollars a jar and Nescafe which is maybe four dollars for a month's worth. You can buy local coffee which I'd really like to do since coffee originally comes from Yemen, originally exported from the port town of Moka, where the drink gets its name. But to buy local beans you go to the real market and pay per kilo from a burlap sack, which is what to do for most grains and spices. Also, coffee pots are wicked expensive, filters are nonexistent, and for just one cup of joe in the morning, I'm willing to forego this for a year.
Booze, is forbidden, and expectedly expensive. You can find it of course at a couple tourist hotel restaurants, at the Chinese restaurant, and at the so-called brothels for lack of a better word. A can of Heineken at the Chinese restaurant is four dollars. A bottle of bath-tub grade alcohol can run as cheap as twenty bucks at the brew-thru or upwards of sixty (after bartering) at some of the brothels. You can however, buy just a half or even quarter of a bottle. The cheap, grow-hair-in-your-throat whiskey is Teacher's brand.
Transportation makes a lot of sense here. The yellow and white Toyata Hiace vans, or dabub, are everywhere and can get you to almost everywhere for between twenty or forty riyals. The dabubs are really really great for so many reasons. They can fit fifteen people plus a driver who is almost always chewing qat, and there are no seat belts. Sometimes even, a seatbelt has been cut and is used to tie the side door to the frame of the van to keep the door permanently open. The dabubs are almost always total pieces of junk, dented and smelling like they've rolled off a cliff and into the sea, sputtering, sweaty-sticky hot, and the seats are always too small for me. This is mass transit though, and not public, reflecting an organically grown infrastructure to fill the failures of government. There are buses which run, and are thirty riyals if you want to save a nickel, but the one time I tried the bus it went the wrong way. Taxis exist, and aren't too bad, maybe three or four hundred riyals to get pretty far. Long-distance bus is cheap too, as are the shared taxis. I can't remember exactly how much we paid for the five hour bus ride to Ibb, but much less than a thousand riyals. Airfare can be inexpensive in the region also. I've seen deals for round-trip flights to Dubai for under a hundred (but with a six-hour layover in Kuwait (look on a map)). Some travel agencies in Aden will comp your flight to Sana'a if you must connect through there.
I was researching sending stuff home, like for Christmas, and was shocked and dismayed to discover that to FedEx 8 kilos from Aden to Oregon would cost minimum of six hundred dollars. I sent some postcards in June for a dollar each, but I don't think any of them ever arrived. So, like in America, Quail Mail is still the best option.
Rents are comparable to America. A decent place is around three or four hundred. You can find cheaper, but you definitely get what you pay for. My last place was three hundred for two rooms and air conditioning in the living room and I'll have permanent scars from the termites. Utilities are cheap: ten or twenty dollars for water and electricity every month, five bucks for phone units every few weeks. However, it's 79 cents per minute to call Oregon, and since I can only load 8 hundred riyals on my account, the most I can get is a five minute call.
Enough. I'm attempting to keep the blog up, for this session at least, since I have stumbled upon a decent connection to the internet.