The hunt for waffles has been on for around a year now. I tried Cozmo, C-Town and Safeway to no avail so far and I am growing very distressed. I would like to share this little incident that I lived yesterday whilst trying to find out if the people at mighty Cozmo had the goods.

I went down to the grocery department and, yes, I enjoyed the nice spacious areas between the lines and what not. A lot of foreign people as usual, but that’s to be expected. I headed to the frozen foods and took a stroll by the cold containers: pizza, kobbeh, burgers, half-fried chips, strawberries, peas, puff pastry, all sorts of very cold things but no waffles.

After, what, 15 minutes of carefully checking if the frozen foods section can satisfy me, I decided to head to the bakery to ask the employee who works over there whether or not waffles exist in this Cozmo. I got there and there was an African couple talking and ordering some bread so I waited.

I waited. The couple were done but I still waited although the man clearly saw I wanted to ask/order something but he did not even look at me. At this point I realized I may be just a tad too short for his eyesight level (he’s exactly as short as I am, no excuse) so I stood on my tippy toes and asked another man standing behind him ” Excuse me, do you sell waffles here?” - The other man told me to ask the first guy, the one who did not see me.

So then I got really bored of standing there and being ignored and I jumped in and asked Mr.superbaker. If I wasn’t mistaken at reading his face and body language, he did not like it that I talked to him in the presence of that couple (who were talking to each other at that moment). But at any rate, he asked me what waffles were and I explained. He was really, really upset that I was talking to him! I am not sure why, I can be pleasant when I talk to strangers.

“La2, mafi” - without even looking at me and sort of shaking his head to say “Off you go!”.

Now I realize it is hard to understand why I am very upset at this Cozmo’s employee, you weren’t there to see how different he treated the African couple. Is it because I asked him in Arabic that I received this second-class treatment? Should I have asked him in one other language, after changing into some comfortable I’m-an-angry-teenager pants and looking “foreign”?

This sort of mentality that insists on treating Arabs and the Arab culture as inferior to anything Western/foreign, no matter what, will keep on holding us back- and to see this behaviour coming from one of your own is what’s most painful about it.