When I was growing up, I was fascinated by Roman Numerals.  I thought they looked neat and the simple rules for how to make large numbers seemed quite interesting (you know, MCMXLVII, etc.)  Anyway, I thought I was taught that we used Arabic numbers in our day-to-day life.  Well guess what?  I’m over here in the middle of a lot of Arabian countries, and they DON’T use “our” Arabic numbers.  They use something called “Arabic-Indic” numbers.  The only Arabic I've even tried learning is this number alphabet.  You'd think that since we use "arabic" numbers that they would be the same...WRONG, and wrong in such a weird way.  Check this out:

OK, 1 and 9 look the same, and you can even learn 3 (the pitchfork).  But the rest are not only hard to figure out, they're deceptive.  What we would use for a decimal point is their number 0 (they, and seemingly the rest of the world, use a comma for a decimal point),  7 is really their 6, epsilon is their 4, 0 is their 5 (it's actually a rounded delta) roman numeral V is their 7, backwards 7 is their 2 and what's with the caret (^) being their 8?  So that's going to be the extent of my Arabic learning.  I decided that I should probably get familiar with these numbers for both road signs and for reading the license plate numbers.

And while I’m at pointing out differences, the color palette is very limited here.  The exteriors of most traditional buildings are some slight variation of beige.  Things are truly BEIGE here.  Beige, probably because the sand and dust are beige and so most buildings are finished in that color so as not to fight the eventual coating of beige dust.

That's not true for all the skyscrapers that they're building in the metro area, but they're the exception.  Also, I've figured out two absolutely guaranteed successful business enterprises in Doha, window washing and car washing services.  Everything gets dusty every few days.  Maybe laundry services too.

OK, back to work prepping for class tomorrow (yes Sunday, remember...?) and putting the final touches on Exam II for Modern Biology (Tuesday).