daboos: a linguistic adventure

I'm leaving to live with the Bedouins for a week tomorrow morning. I have my dress, and my hijabs, but what I didn't have were pins to keep them in place. So after having dinner with a friend, we went to Carrefour to pick up homestay gifts and pins. Actually, the taxi dropped us off at Mecca Mall so we got icecream first. They have different icecream flavors here, with pistacios and such. But I got lemon, because I was craving fruit, which means I'm dehydrated. Not that any of that was at all important. Anyway, it's deceptively ridiculous to get from Mecca Mall to Carrefour. They are bizarrely close for their size, but don't share a road or a parking lot. It was fine, because I'm down with going off-trail, but I ended up falling into a spiny bush while we scrambled down a slope and got my right hand splinterized. I think I've got most of them out now, and it's just the cuts that are stinging. But I digress, because the important part is the Daboos. Oh those dabaabees...

As I've already indicated, Carrefour is epic to the point of ridiculousness. And tonight it was ridiculously crowded. I would have taken pictures, but they told me I couldn't when I saw the camera in my bag. In any case, I was looking for pins. Straight pins, the kind you use in sowing. The kind almost every woman I saw was wearing. But I couldn't find them in the hair-care section, so I asked a salesperson. Pins, if you didn't know, are kindof hard to describe. They kept saying "pin", and knew the word, but didn't actually know what I was talking about specifically. I kept making hijab-like gestures, and indicating the proper length, and it was kindof maddening, because the women I talked to were actually wearing them right in front of me. But you can't just reach out and grab at someone's face. Eventually I managed to point closely enough that the three of them figured out what I meant, and then they yelled "ah, daboos! daboos!" and cracked up laughing. And then told me that they don't sell those here. No pins, at Carrefour? Clearly not the case. So we left cosmetics and went to the jewelry section, but when I asked the man behind the counter for daboos, he said "In English", and I said "pin, daboos", and he brought me over to the earrings. So I gave up on him, and we kept wandering, but then ended up in electronics before I steared us to the women's clothing, hoping they would have some pins by the actual hijabs. I asked someone there, and he knew what a daboos was and started taking us there. He then proceeded to lead us all the way across the store, and dropped us off in hardware. Because who doesn't keep hijab pins with automotive repair? There were nails in the vicinity, which I guess were what he thought I was looking for. At that point we left, having acquired an epic story, if not anything to pin my clothing.

Moral of the story: daboos means pin. Among other things.