Saturday 17 April 2010

An Easy-Peasy Kind of Saturday

It really felt like spring today, so wanted to go out for a wander-around with the kids. Decided to head for the library, which is usually a bit of an experience because my kids struggle with the concept of keeping quiet.

Was still returning my books (and paying off the fine as usual), when I turned around to find the kids exploring:



The library had an exhibition of photo's from Pakistan which I really wanted to see.

The pictures were fascinating. I have been to Pakistan a number of times, but so many of the pictures illustrated completely new faces of the country for me.


This lady smoking hookah reminded me of one of my husband's aunties (the kids just could not work out what she was doing).


I thought this scene was beautiful. The sand looks like snow and so the ladies look out of place.


This was probably my favourite, the angle looking straight into the the courtyard from above was wonderful. The scenes reminded me of the courtyards in my grandparents village in Jhelum.



I like the title of this photo "Tan Man Neel o Neel" or "My body and soul are blue", a line taken from a famous poem about the Punjabi lovers Mirza and Sahiba.

This one with the big bloke and the film posters reminded me of Lahore, although I suspect it might be a smaller town in Punjab somewhere.

As I was leaving I found that the library was having a book sale. The kids got to pick a few each for 20p each. For the adult fiction, the price was £1 to fill a bag with books. I bagged the following for my £1:


I have heard lots about "Girls of Riyadh" and it's a fairly new book, so was surprised to find it there, Annie Proulx and Dean Koontz are writers I enjoy, I originally read Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy" years ago (boy was that a long book) and fancied trying another by him. The others were horror novels or short stories which I love or various titles that looked vaguely familiar for various reasons.

So now, while the kids are napping (enforced), I am catching up on e-mails and blogging. Still have some of this lovely sunny day to enjoy and have been invited to an aunt's house for dinner tonight (so can carry on pretending the kitchen is just somewhere you float through on your way to garden).

Our new sister in-law is well mash'Allah, I can see how much effort she is making to fit in with all of us and everyone adores her. My kids are in awe of her and I am really pleased she is my sis-in-law since I only have one brother. Who incidentally we have never seen so much of as since she has arrived!

She visited a few days ago and brought along every kind of cream cake you can think of. Girl knows the short cut to our hearts:


2 comments:

  1. Assalaamu Alaykum,

    Sounds like you had a lovely Saturday ma sha Allah. I LOVE buying books and got to buy some today too! But mine were mainly for the kids. I'd like to know what Girls of Riyadh is like. I have seen it at my local bookshop but hadn't thought to get it. And the Daughter book too, I can't remember what it's called! I hope you'll let us know what that's like :)
    I recently read Three Cups of Tea and that snowy Pakistan photo is the kind of image I got from reading the book.

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  2. Walaikam-assalam Sis,

    It's "Things I want my Daughters to Know" by Elizabeth Noble. The title caught my attention right away. I'll post reviews if I ever get to reading them.

    (I'm reading Three cups of Tea at the moment, I'll share my htoughts on that too insh'Allah).

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