Well, it is official - our end date has been moved up and we will be coming home after our vacation in Egypt and Jordan, around the middle of November. We are quite sad about it, as we were looking forward to doing a lot more exploring in the cooler temperatures. However, it has been a great experience and if we were offered the chance to come here again, we would jump at the chance. Anyway, I am realizing that there are lots of things I have not yet put on the blog and also we had another trip to the desert last weekend, so will try and add to the blog each day this week to try and catch up. We will be doing a lot of catch up ourselves with all the things we had put off seeing until the weather was cooler, now we will have to get busy to fit them all in.

Anyway, these next pictures are for my textile friends. I thought the fabric souq was going to be terribly exotic, but in fact there are several large department store type buildings all in the same area. Each one containing masses of little tiny stores, with a few larger ones. Over time, you get to have favourites. But each store has a real mixture of dated fabrics, silks, japanese cotton which is very thin and fabrics of unknown origin and fibre content, well known cotton brands such as Liberty and Hoffman, a real mixture. Often the men (only men) selling the fabric dont really know the difference between cotton and polycotton, or silk and "silky" and short of burning a piece on the spot - I can't tell the difference often.

This is a picture of Souq al Dira which is the more expensive fabrics. The ceiling is quite exotic! with its chandelier and it is all air conditioned with a fountain in the middle of it, although it doesn't seem to be functioning!

This is what the little shops look like, and there are masses of them. Of course you never pay the listed price, but have to bargain. Sometimes you are offered tea and the local ladies all sit on chairs and have the fabric bought to them and the fellows show them yards of fabric with a flourish! I usually just poke around to find what I want. The cheapest I have bought was around 4 QAR which is about $1.30 and it was definitely a polycotton, but just right for what I was looking for. The silk goes up to about 35-40 QAR, around $10 - 15 for heavy charmeuse and around 44QAR for fine silk dupioni at the Bombay Silk Company which is in another area of town. It doesn't seem to matter what I pay in the same store for the same thing either, I think it has to do with how much they have sold so far that day and how hard they or I want to bargain. Who knows!

The fabrics can be quite elaborately decorated with lots of beading and stitching. These are more like 100 QAR and up. For reference it is around 3QAR to 1 C$. I am told there are some you can pay hundreds of dollars for, but they are still cheaper than you would pay in the west. A friend and I went shopping yesterday and she introduced me to her tailor, so he is making a few things for me before I leave. It was fun to go shopping with her as she is much better at bargaining than I am.

I normally shop in souq Asiery, "the escalator souq". This was the first souq to have an escalator in it as opposed to the usual stairs. The stores on the top floor have better prices than those on the ground floor as their rents are cheaper. So I usually stick to the upstairs ones for cotton, and downstairs for silk. This is some fabric I bought yesterday to be made into an outfit. It actually is a set for Indian ladies, with an elaborate piece of fabric for the long tunic top, some more floaty stuff for the pants and this thin organza type for the sheila? the shawl. The whole set came to 120 QAR which was probably pricey, but I loved the pattern and hope the tailor can make it into a nice outfit for me. It is probably a total of about 6 or more metres of fabric. I have to start thinking of how to pack all this stuff, so had better slow down on the shopping! I did do some dyeing last week with procyon dyes on some silk. It worked very well, but a bit nerve racking trying to do it in an appartment with white tile floors, I was paranoid about drips! So think I will now wait until I get home to do more. I bought some silk dyes to paint on from a local shop, so will probably use those up before coming home, I think they are more like setacolour as you iron them to set the colour. I will add a few more in the next blog.