Shopping

In my fifth (and Ya Allah hopefully my final!) trip to the tile store where I get to be a little black cloud shooting videos of different shades of wood, an Arab woman approached me. She immediately spoke English because she probably heard me narrating the descriptions of textures and colors of the wood into the camera.

She got right to the point.

Excuse me, do you have a sister here in Jordan?

Since I do, in fact, have a sister in Jordan I assumed she must know her and started to describe her.

But then she kept going.

Is she married? 
Do you have any unmarried sisters? 

Since I do, in fact, have an unmarried sister, I started to describe her too.

Does she look like you?

A curious thing to say to a girl who is 96% shrouded in layers of black. 

But this woman was not interested in me, but a girl who resembled the 4% of me that was showing. As if to say- almost, but not quite. I don't wear a ring, but she assumed I was a claimed woman. Maybe my eyes "look married." Or maybe she wanted a girl whose hands looked only kind of like mine.

Although I recognized this as an opportunity for adventure and ridiculous conversation, I shut her down with a simple no because she spoke perfect English (YAWN). I know not every encounter has to be an Arabic lesson, but I need to focus on finding situations where I can practice saying the important things:

How much are the apples?

My ____ is broken and I don't know how to fix it.

Do you have this in black?