Missouri trip, Day 3: Saturday

Sharon and I went grocery shopping. She turned into the parking lot of Wal-Mart, and I was so horrified that she left and drove to a local supermarket!

Today it was raining. Hard.

We went to an ethnic grocery owned by a local man who came from Iraq with his family. A pillar of the community. He recently got into some ridiculous trouble with some government agency just because of where he's from, despite being completely innocent. I can't remember the story now. Sharon told me in detail. Now I have to get the story from her again.

Funny how much the subject of Islam is coming up on this trip. It ordinarily barely exists for me. Apparently Friday night was something called "Eid," the celebration at the end of Ramadan. Sharon and U and I were walking in her neighborhood, and she saw a man and woman evidently dressed up for a nice evening out, heading for their car. The woman was dressed in Muslim-type clothing. Sharon told them, "Happy Eid!" They were thrilled that she knew that it was Eid. I had never heard of it. One of the most important days of one of the world's most populous religions.

What with Sharon moving to Turkey, the topic is coming up regularly. Sharon is atheist. Her fiancee is a moderately religious person in a country where Islam is the religion, so naturally that is his religion. His family is not religious. But the people of the country, apparently, in general are. Even though the separation of church and state has been very complete there pretty much throughout the twentieth century, even more so than in the U.S.

The market was marvelous. Such wonderful smells. They gave us some samples of their homemade baklava. Mmmmm. I bought a packet of spices from Pakistan. I don't know what it is or what to do with it; I can't read most of the label; I'll just put it in a pot with some meat and cook it and find out. I'm sure it'll be good.

Sharon bought ingredients for Turkish burek. Serbians have a similar dish also called burek. It's a layered filo dish made with cheese and spinach. Dill was one of the main seasonings. It was lovely.

We also did some baking. Ulysses helped. Ulysses found that Sharon had an apple Peel-Away corer and peeler. It was all we could do to keep him from peeling every apple in the house.