I’m not sure we ever posted a photo of the Teeny Apartment taken from outside.

Not much to look at, eh?

I was outside the other day, just before dusk, taking photos of three of the “villas” near our place. I’ll do something on those in a few days. About their architectural weirdness.

But back to home sweet home …

No, it doesn’t look like the front door to a house. Except maybe when it’s open, as it is in the photo. When the wooden door is closed, I’d guess most people think it’s some sort of back/side door to the main parts of the building.

Most of the interior of the house is to the left and right of the big wooden door that is open. A square room on each side.

To the left is the living room. To the right, where those windows are — and those are the only windows in the place that face the street/cul de sac — is the bedroom.

The glass door you see at the back of the teeny patio … that opens into the apartment and brings you into the hall — which is about three feet deep. So that door is almost touching the back wall of the whole shootin’ match.

We have some real windows that look onto the patio. To the right and left. Can’t see them in the photo. About waist-high and maybe 5×4 in size. We have had them open for three months, during the winter, and we get a bit of air flow. In another month, we will be shutting those, pulling the curtains and amping up the AC.

Yes, that’s overgrown grass out front. We’re not into mowing much around here. The summer (which begins any minute now) will scorch it into brown nothingness soon enough.

We get some nice shade in the patio area for much of the day thanks to three palm trees just to the right and left of the photo. And the building itself. A couple of stories are above us, and they block the morning sun. The next story is above that green corrugated metal you can barrely glimpse. But the folks who live back there enter from the main doors, on the west side, and we never see them and rarely hear them. Their apartment isn’t directly over any part of ours.

What else can I tell you …

–The green boxes have basil plants in them. Maybe that seems exotic, but basil is native to Iran and India, both of which are nearby. Especially Iran, which is maybe 100 miles from where I’m sitting.

Anyway, it was a month before Leah recognized the basil for what it was, and by then it was going to blooms. Too late to use in cooking, that is.

–Between the plant boxes, both right and (especially) left you can see how someone has stacked a bunch of bricks. Why, I don’t know.

–Oh, and the single half brick just to the left of the door, sitting on the planter … that’s the brick we (shhh!) “hide” the keys under when someone is coming over to the house and needs to get in.

–The wooden door locks, and it’s fairly stout. Of course, you can climb over it, if you have a ladder. (btw, there’s a dart board on the back of the door; came at no extra charge. Now we just need some darts. Or “arrows,” as the Syrian realtor put it.) The window door locks, too, but it feels as if someone could cave it in by leaning a shoulder into it.

Even by Abu Dhabi standards, this apartment doesn’t look like much from the outside. It is the only door in a fairly big building that opens on the north side of the block. And when the wooden door is closed, and it’s night … cab drivers have no idea what I’m thinking when I ask them to “stop here, please” when we get next to the door. Because there isn’t a “porch light” or anything fancy like that. (Used to be, and you can see some wreckage of the fixture to the right of the door.)

The one aspect of it that looks interesting from the street (which is where I was standing when I took the photo) … is the little patio there behind the wooden door.

On New Year’s Eve, we brought out a couple of rattan chairs for our guests, and I sat on a stepstool near the door and Leah sat on the step up into the glass door, and we ushered in the new year right there in the semi-cool of an Arabian Peninsula night. We kept the door open and looked at the building across the street and watched people going by who were looking in at that door that’s never open.

Now and again I consider how the tiny patio is kinda cool, but upon further review it would be far more useful to have that 6×8-foot chunk of territory inside the apartment, and not outside of it.

So, that’s is. A curious little place. You can’t see in. We can’t see out — unless we stood on a chair and pushed aside the heavy curtains and opened the windows at the upper right and peered out, which we never, ever do.

Just as well, considering that the next eight months are going to be all about sun. Better off with some fairly thick masonry between us and ol’ sol.