The Furniture Man

After a nice long (and well-deserved, not only due to the long working week, but also due to not getting to bed until the early morning after getting my Wii online for the first time and becoming immediately hooked on World of Goo) lie-in, we popped over to Road 9 to pick up some stuff for the flat and to see about getting something to put our DVDs in and something to put our keys on when we come in the door. There are a couple of furniture shops where some pretty good carpenters will knock you up anything you like but it was a carpenter called Mahmood who caught our attention as we walked by, largely because the stuff he had on display was pretty much what we were after.

Mahmood's English was very basic (despite initially seeming otherwise through his interesting tactic of repeating every word we said; a kind of verbal nodding if you will), and my Arabic even more so, but we managed to communicate what we wanted using lots of diagrams, measuring and pointing. One thing he did understand though was the language of money. He started off at a rather optimistic 2000LE, but some expert haggling from the missus (with the help of some inspired doodling) got us a pretty good price of 1250LE in the end.