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. Since Yemen is a staunchly Islamic society the women dress in black like negative ghosts and do not communicate at all. Trying to photograph them is probably the most dangerous action a foreigner can take in Yemen. The weapons the men carry are not just for show, but they generally keep their gunplay away from foreigners and are the perfect hosts.