OK, jumping back into blogging with a domestic update.
In Syria there are two times a year when you wash your house. Yes. Literally. You move all the furniture and stand on impossibly tall ladders and spray water all over the blooming place. You clean out closets and cupboards and underneath the fridge and stove. You turn over the mattresses and (I am not kidding) vacuum them. This inane procedure is called Tazeel.
The one good thing about tazeel is that you don’t usually do it alone. You hire a lady to come in and enjoy the torture with you. So that helps.
If we were in the States I would snort and walk away when tazeel is mentioned. However, here in Syria we have an insidious enemy. Dust. Not innocuous, innocent, floating-in-a-sunbeam kind of dust. Evil, fine, aggressive dust with LOTS OF FRIENDS. We ave dust bunnies that could eat large cities.
So this dust actually gathers on the walls and in all the nooks and crannies, and actually needs to be washed away every six months.
So we do it in the fall when we put down the persian rugs and set up the sobia (diesel heater), and we do it in the spring when we put the rugs away and store the heater. The spring tazeel is even worse than the fall one because you have all the soot from the sobia added to the dust.
So it’s December and I’m trying to enjoy the soft, cozy heat from the sobia but in the back of my mind I’m trying to figure out how to escape tazeel come next April… Please send ideas!
