Eventful stuff

I had an interesting improv-vocabulary lesson this week with a group of students recently after one of them misused the word "spank".  Turns out there's an awful lot of ways to describe physical assault on someone.

Speaking of physical assault, my colleague had her purse snatched this week. She was sitting outside of an Iranian restaurant on the sidewalk in a neighborhood called Al Muteena. Al Muteena is a fairly crowded, busy area where lots of laborers wile away the hours on the strip of park running down the middle of the street.

Well, my colleage was sitting there with her hubby eating food, she in one chair, purse in the other, when some guy blazed by at high speed and snatched the purse and took off down the street. Hubby jumped up and took off after him as well, tripping over the guy's sandals on the way, which had apparently become dislodged from his feet during the heist. She jumped up and said, "HEY!", which alerted the somewhat out-of-shape restaurant manager of the problem, and he took of after the guy as well. With three guys now running at high speed down the street, one of them shoeless, the rest of the crowd didn't want to be left out. 10 or 15 or 20 of them took off after the guy as well. After a lot of mobbing and shouting and chasing, the purse was recovered, but the thief (arabic: Harami) escaped, now out one set of perfectly good sandals. Following the tradition of good hospitality, our Iranian restaurant owner apologized profusely and repeatedly to my colleague for the incident, even though he had nothing to do with it and probably nearly caused himself a heart-attack chasing after the culprit. What a dear.