Klutz in the oasis in the desert

Well, I had my first mishap here. My friend and I were at the mall shopping for the Fourth of July BBQ.  We had gotten our groceries and were heading to the store that sells charcoal briquettes.  As we were walking along, I noticed that one of the little shops had decorative ropes/cords that I might be able to use for holding our Arabian carpet onto our upstairs patio swing.  I have mentioned our problems with this swing in past blogs.  I said to my friend, Oh, look at those decorative ropes.  I will have to come back here another day to get some for my swing problem.  She said Let's just do it now.  So we turned to the shop, with me going first and I ran right into the glass door.  I just did not see it (or even think about it).  I literally bounced off the door-sort of like the Windex commercial where the glass is so clean that the birds run right into the glass and slide down.  Well, luckily, I did not slide down the glass.  :)  I was a little dazed.  My friend looked at me and said You are getting an egg on your forehead.  But it didn't hurt and I wasn't bleeding.  (The shopkeeper was looking at us and did not come and open the door and ask how I was.  I guess he thought I am not letting this crazy person in the shop.  :)  )  Anyway, I said Let's go get the charcoal.  We found it and when I was checking out at the register, the clerk was kind of staring at me oddly.  That was my first clue that something was wrong.  Then when we leave the shop, my friend, who is so gentle and smooth, says I think that I need to go to the bathroom, have you ever been to the bathroom at the mall?  I said no, that I usually hold it in until I get home because I have heard about some Saudi bathrooms.  So, I said I would go with her.  I am sure this was just her way of getting me to look at my head.  If I had been in her place, I would have probably just been brash and said, Oh, my god, you need to look at your head!  and of course scared the person to death.  Anyway, we go to the bathroom and when I look in the mirror, I have a lump literally the size of an egg on my forehead.  I thought Oh my goodness, that is why the clerk and the little girl were staring at me.  So, we went to the McDonald's in the food court and my friend got me a cup of ice and I put the ice in the plastic from her Kleenex package and made an ice pack and held it on my head while three friends and I chatted.  But they kept looking at me and making comments about my egg.  I felt fine.  The shuttle bus came and we went home.  I unloaded my groceries and looked at it again. (My friend called and said that if I had any problems call her and she would call a cab and take me to the hospital.)  I thought maybe I better look up on the internet signs of a concussion.  I didn't have any of those symptoms.  But I thought that maybe I should ice it and rest as the article suggested-20 minutes ice, 20 minutes off.  Of course, now I was bored with this process, the egg had gotten better and I didn't think that I needed to go to the hospital and thought Let me take a picture of my egg for the blog.  :)  So here is the picture of the first day, when it was just an egg.

The second day I wake up and my right eye is a little swollen, but it looks like I have put a dark purple eye shadow on my eyelid.

 

I have organized a Zumba group that meets three times a week and that morning we were exercising.  I decided that I had better not exercise just to give my brain a little more time to rest, as the article suggested.  I was telling the ladies that I was going to look weird going to the restaurant outing that night with one eyelid all purple, which my friends assured me was a beautiful purple.  :)  One of the very young ladies suggested that if I came to her villa before the restaurant, she had purple makeup that would make the two eyes match.  Even though it was a very sweet offer, I was afraid that Saudis at the restaurant might think that I was a prostitute and I didn't need that!  But because we have to go into a family room because if it is women and men mixed, your party is in a room by themselves.  The only persons that we saw were the waiters. 
 
I naively thought that the worst was over.  The dark purple eyelid would fade to an ugly yellow and green.  Then, I woke up this morning to this.

Surely, tomorrow, I will get the green and yellow, which should be better.  I am sure that the Filipino workers around here have quite a story about what must have happened to me.  Because the Filipino workers here seem to know everything, except what happens at the mall.  :)

But I do have a "cultural" observation from this whole thing.  It is not an excuse for why I walked into a glass door, but because I keep thinking about how this happened, I realized that in the US malls, there usually are no doors to get into the stores.  I guess every once in awhile there are.  But in this Saudi mall, many of the stores, except the grocery, the appliance type of store and a big clothes store have glass doors to open.  I guess it is for the air conditioning.  But since this happened, I have become acutely aware of glass doors.  After the incident happened and we were still shopping, I went into a jewelry store with my friends.  My friend's little daughter closed the glass door.  I became keenly aware of that reminding myself "Make sure you OPEN the door before you exit!"  :)