look what we found in the middle of a shi'a neighborhood...

so my friend stacey and i took our youngest kids on a little bit of an adventure today. she needed pots for some plants that she just bought, so she suggested we find the pottery place just outside of town and check it out. apparently there is a pottery area where people make different pots, big-tall-short-wide, by hand. you can walk around and watch them make the pots and then you can buy them really inexpensively. sounded like a good idea to me...

until we drove up to the first pottery store. i use the term store loosely here. we drove up and she parked and she said "is this ok?" i started to get a little nervous. i was looking around and all i saw were black flags. we were told when we arrived that we should stay out of the black or green flag areas as those are shi'a neighborhoods. the shi'a muslims are a large minority group and the sunni muslims are the ruling party. the shi'a and sunnis have strong political differences that spark shi'a demonstrations weekly regarding different things they are angry about. to make things a bit more sketchy, when we rolled up to this neighborhood there was something very different adorning the round about we drove through. there was a mannequin dressed with black pants and a red ninja mask holding a long sword over his head. the sword was directed at a very large statue of the koran. i looked at the koran statue and it looked as if blood had been splattered all over the pages...and the sign behind it too. hmmmm?? i'm sure we'll be safe here, right????

so...we decided to head down the road in a different direction and we managed to find a couple of other cool pottery places. the men there were so very nice. they took us back to meet the potter and he even pulled up a chair for reagan so she could spin a small pot with him. it was a great experience and we really enjoyed ourselves.

check out our pics...again iphone...toooooo hot to carry the good camera. (first photo is the potter, the second is the potter showing reagan how to make a  pot, the third photo is a bunch of pots :) and the last is one of the other pottery shop)

so...all was well and we felt great about our pottery experience. as we are driving back to the main road, we see a bunch of big dirt mounds. what the heck are those?? they were prehistoric burial mounds!!! i will go back and take photos of these things but they belong to the dilmun civilization and date back to 4000 BC to 600 AD. (yes...i still us BC and AD.)

much much more too come!!!

Comments

[Becky P]

oooooh! I want a pot! Although maybe not from the blood spattering folk, yikes!