Over the next three hundred years coffee houses opened all over the world, but the sole source of coffee for Europeans during those days was the tiny town of Mokha, north Yemen . The most dramatic part of the Yemen today, especially in and around the capital of Sana'a, is the buildings. Many houses are over 400 years old, and most are built in the style of 1,000 years ago. Five or six floor, brown mud and brick houses grow out of the brown land, like huge square vegetables. Each one belongs to a large family with eight or ten children.
Decoration is limited to white paint around the randomly placed, randomly sized windows.
Of different shapes, sometimes of stained glass, sometimes with no glass, windows always start two or three metres above ground. Combined with one metre thick walls and a small front door, these houses are cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and most important, they are very easy to defend. Local people are as colourful as their homes. The men dress to kill. Large, curved, silver daggers are the Yemen equivalent of the western necktie, while Kalashnikov machine guns are carried with the same frequency as cellphones in Tokyo, only with deadlier communicative purpose.