One thing that we have been amazed to see is the number of times we have seen people standing on the ledge OUTSIDE their window to clean the outside of their windows. I can count at least 6 times we've seen this in the last 11 months. We once had our language instructor pull the curtain on our classroom, because we could focus on nothing but the man in the building across the street, standing on the ledge outside his 5TH FLOOR WINDOW with squeegee and window cleaner in hand.
Our friends know that we could never be accused of being "clean freaks", and that we deeply admire those with a house full of kids AND a neat house. But we don't think we could ever risk our lives for clean windows, and it gives us pause to wonder about the mindset of the culture here. We have observed the "inshallah" mentality, meaning "if God wills"...I will live...or I will die, so what I do doesn't really matter.
