Ramadan Date Night
It’s the first night of Ramadan, and it is also Thursday, which is date night for Adventure Man and me. We hustle around all week, involved in our lives, grabbing ten minutes here and a phone call there, sitting down to dinner and that’s about it. But Thursday nights, we have the sweet luxury of time together. We go out to dinner somewhere, and we talk on the way there, we talk all through dinner and we talk on the way home. We both love date night.
Date night on the first night of Ramadan is REALLY special. Here is why:
“What’s so special?” you are asking in puzzlement. “That’s just an empty parking lot.?”
“EXACTLY!” I exclaim, triumphantly. “At seven in the evening, there are PARKING SPACES!” In a mall built for thousands of people that has only forty parking spaces! And we get Rock Star Parking!”
And unlike countries where they start putting up Christmas decorations in October, the Ramadan decorations began going up seriously yesterday, the beginning of Ramadan. They are still finishing up tonight.
I love the crescent moon and stars twirling down from these –
And look at these GORGEOUS lanterns!
There is no one around to object to my photo-taking. All the Westerners are eating or shopping while the mall population is so light.
Traffic is so light that we even stop for gas on the way to dinner, and drive right up to a pump with no wait at all. All the good Muslims are at home, or with friends, breaking the fast together, celebrating their triumph over the first day of fasting.
If you lived in Kuwait, you would know what a triumph it is. The weather is cooling, but still very hot – around 111°F/44°C every day this week. It is dry, and on some days there are sandstorms. Even when you are not fasting, you yearn for a cold drink of water.
The women often cook all day. They do the shopping. Many are around food most of the hours of their fast, so that they might provide a feast for their family when the sun sets, and they resist the temptation, just smile and say “It’s a test.” There is a custom that they can taste the food, to make sure it is OK, but they cannot swallow, or the fast is broken.
Ramadan for Non-Muslims
Ramadan started last night; it means that the very thinnest of crescent moons was sighted by official astronomers, and the lunar month of Ramadan might begin. You might think it odd that people wait, with eager anticipation, for a month of daytime fasting, but the Muslims do – they wait for it eagerly.
A friend explained to me that it is a time of purification, when your prayers and supplications are doubly powerful, and when God takes extra consideration of the good that you do and the intentions of your heart. It is also a time when the devil cannot be present, so if you are tempted, it is coming from your own heart, and you battle against the temptations of your own heart. Forgiveness flows in this month, and blessings, too.
We have similar beliefs – think about it. Our holy people fast when asking a particular boon of God. We try to keep ourselves particularly holy at certain times of the year.
In Muslim countries, the state supports Ramadan, so things are a little different. Schools start later. Offices are open fewer hours. The two most dangerous times of the day are the times when schools dismiss and parents are picking up kids, and just before sunset, as everyone rushes to be home for the breaking of the fast, which occurs as the sun goes down. In olden days, there was a cannon that everyone in the town could hear, that signalled the end of the fast. There may still be a cannon today – in Doha there was, and we could hear it, but if there is a cannon in Kuwait, we are too far away, and can’t hear it.
When the fast is broken, traditionally after the evening prayer, you take two or three dates, and water or special milk drink, a meal which helps restore normal blood sugar levels and takes the edge off the fast. Shortly, you will eat a larger meal, full of special dishes eaten only during Ramadan. Families visit one another, and you will see maids carrying covered dishes to sisters houses and friends houses – everyone makes a lot of food, and shares it with one another. When we lived in Tunisia, we would get a food delivery maybe once a week – it is a holy thing to share, especially with the poor and we always wondered if we were being shared with as neighbors, or shared with as poor people! I always tried to watch what they particularly liked when they would visit me, so I could sent plates to their houses during Ramadan.
Just before the sun comes up, there is another meal, Suhoor, and for that meal, people usually eat something that will stick to your ribs, and drink extra water, because you will not eat again until the sun goes down. People who can, usually go back to bed after the Suhoor meal and morning prayers. People who can, sleep a lot during the day, during Ramadan. Especially as Ramadan moves into the hotter months, the fasting, especially from water, becomes a heavier responsibility.
And because it is a Muslim state, and to avoid burdening our brothers and sisters who are fasting, even non-Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, touching someone of the opposite sex in public, even your own husband (not having sex in the daytime is also a part of fasting), smoking is forbidden, and if you are in a car accident and you might be at fault, the person might say “I am fasting, I am fasting” which means they cannot argue with you because they are trying to maintain a purity of soul. Even chewing gum is an offense. And these offenses are punishable by a heavy fine – nearly $400 – or a stay in the local jail.
Because I am not Muslim, there may be other things of which I am not aware, and my local readers are welcome to help fill in here. As for me, I find it not such a burden; I like that there is a whole month with a focus on God. You get used to NOT drinking or eating in public during the day, it’s not that difficult. The traffic just before (sunset) Ftoor can be deadly, but during Ftoor, traffic lightens dramatically (as all the Muslims are breaking their fast) and you can get places very quickly! Stores have special foods, restaurants have special offerings, and the feeling in the air is a lot like Christmas. People are joyful!
Corporate Dancing
Maria, at A Time to Dance writes a lyrical and insightful comparison of Salsa dancing and the subtleties of corporate leadership – and followership. In a very original and poignant article, Maria juxtaposes her subjects with deft elegance.
Accident Management
Thunk!
The sound is unmistakable. I hear it now and then. I look out and a truck has hit a bus, on a busy corner, near a busier turn-off.
I sigh. I dial 777. Thanks be to God, they answer promptly these days and within 30 seconds, there is someone on who can speak English. She asks good questions, she is efficient, and 1 minute later I am off the phone.
34 minutes later the police show up. I am guessing they are kind of busy, it is rush hour time.
Here is my question. In the US, in the EU and in many countries where I have lived, we are required to carry warning triangles, flares, etc. and if you are in an accident, you are required to put the warnings out, like 20 meters back from the accident, to prevent further problems.
I never see that happen. Honestly, I can’t even watch, it’s too heart stopping, because an accident is just an invitation to another accident until the police come and get the accidentees out of the road.
What are the official requirements in Kuwait if you are involved in an accident, other than waiting for the police to arrive?
Second question: at the same intersection we frequently have those traffic stops where the police block traffic to a narrow flow and check papers. I see people all the time talking to police and there is a body-language thing I don’t understand. Arms held straight, raised up, elbows bent and then brought down, straight, both at the same time. It might be supplication, begging for pity, throwing themselves on the mercy of the police because they don’t have papers, but it is not a gesture I know. I never see anyone cry (a favorite ploy of speeding girls in the US) and I am wondering if crying would work here?
Cultures Collide
Maybe “culture clash” is too strong, maybe it’s more like huge continents that kind of bump into each other and send a reverberation through both continents, more a slow grinding than a crash? And maybe, like rough stones tumbling in a barrel, as we rub our rough edges against one another over time, maybe we become smooth, polished gems?
I have a dear friend, one of those friends that when you can grab some time together you never run out of topics, and when they leave, you remember “Oh! I forgot the point of that story was . . . and I never got to it!” or “Oh! she was starting to tell me about the . . .. and then we segued off into something else!” This friend delights my heart; when you see her face, you can see her lively soul in her sparkling eyes.
Those eyes were looking at me in utter puzzlement.
“What do you mean you couldn’t find any celery?” she asked. “Didn’t you go to the grocery store?”
“Yes! I spent hours there! Big mistake, shopping just before Ramadan, me and everyone else in the village.”
“So why didn’t you just buy some celery?” she persisted.
“There wasn’t any celery! It was all gone!” i responded.
“How could it be gone?” she asked, incredulity in her voice, “Don’t they always have celery?”
Something is wrong with this conversation. We look at each other.
“Have you ever been grocery shopping just before Ramadan?” I asked her.
“I never go grocery shopping!” she replied.
(Can you hear those continents grinding?)
I sat down. I looked at her. I believed her; I don’t think this woman is capable of lying, she is innocent and straight-forward.
“You’ve never been grocery shopping?” I asked her, knowing that if she said it, it is true, but trying to figure out how this could even be possible.
“Well, a couple times, like when I was making that pie, but only for a few little things, not like food to feed the family.”
She has staff. They’ve always had staff.
So I explained to her that just before Ramadan, like in western countries just before Christmas, some items just disappear.
“One time, in Tunisia, olive oil disappeared! And eggs! And even tomato sauce, and these are all products made in Tunisia!” I explained. “Here,” I went on, “you know how it is, sometimes even when it is not Ramadan, things will disappear, but when Ramadan is coming, if you know you might need something, you have to plan way in advance. Your Mom probably has taken care of all that. ”
“I don’t think so,” she said, two little tiny worry lines creasing her brow.
“Your Mom doesn’t shop, either?” I asked.
“Not for groceries.” And she’s looking at me like I am from another world.
And I am. This friend is so patient with me, with my little ignorances. When you are a stranger in a strange land, you expect some of the big differences. Like Ramadan, that is a big difference, when the whole country becomes more religious and for a whole month the focus is on God, on fasting during daylight and gathering with family and friends and feasting at night, reading the Qur’an, submitting your sins and begging forgiveness. . .
It’s the little things that catch you up. You kind of assume that everyone lives life a lot like you do, and it can be a real shock to discover that in small, everyday things you take for granted, you do things very differently.
Some of my earliest memories are in the kitchen, cutting dates and prunes to help my Mom make fruit cake. I can remember stirring chocolate pudding as it cooked on the stove, making jello, simple things before I graduated to chopping nuts and onions, etc. And I wrongly assumed this is everyone’s experience.
I know I have shocked my friend, too, sometimes. I asked what I thought was a very simple question once, and watched her face become a mask of horror at the very thought. God bless her for her patience with me!
I bless all my friends today, my Tunisian friends, my Kuwaiti friends, my Saudi friends, my German friends, my French friends, my Qatteri friends – all the friends who have endured my chauvinistic mistakes, assuming all the world thinks as I do. I bless my American friends, because even though we are from the same nation, we, too, are from different areas and different family cultures (tribes!) and we don’t see through the same eyes, our views are colored by the culture through which we observe the world. Today I am thankfully amazed that we manage to get along as well as we do!
Azan Insult
This is from last week’s Arab Times, one of those things I clip because they are interesting and then sometimes I forget. My Kuwait readers will wonder why I am even bothering, maybe this isn’t so interesting, but to me, it is one of those things that illustrate a difference in how we think.
Man Insulted in Azan Row:
Director of an unidentified department of the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs has filed a complaint with the Andalus Police Station accusing a Kuwaiti man of humiliating him and threatening to cause him harm, reports Al-Rai daily.
A knowledgeable sourse said the man works as a muezzin at a mosque in Sulaibikhyat and the suspect accused him of calling the faithful for prayers earlier than the time assigned by the ministry.
The source added residents of the area had sent letters of complaints to the ministry stressing the muezzin should abide by prayer timings issued by the ministry.
A source added the man is a political activist and has a file at State Security.
The source also said the man visited the director and humiliated him in a very negative manner. The man reportedly called the official on the phone and called him a donkey and threatened to cause him harm.
Here’s what I love – in Kuwait, the muezzins are LIVE! In every other Islamic country in which I have lived, it has been recordings, but here, they are LIVE! One woman told me that their muezzin was fired because at the end of the call to prayer, music started playing, and everyone knew he had left a recording.
Each muezzin starts the call to prayer at a slightly different time, so you hear a chorus of individual voices raising their voices to say “God is great” and to call the people to prayer, a sound as beautiful as the church bells of western countries, which fulfill a similar function. You can hear the sound of the call to prayer here:
And in how many countries would exact time be an issue when calling people to prayer? Life is sweet, living in a country where time to pray is an important issue.
And here is what I find intriguing – in the west, when we call someone a donkey, it is a very mild insult. I have heard that here, being called a donkey is like one of the very worst things you can call a person. Please, local friends, can you tell me why donkey would be such a bad insult?
Qatari Cat Plays With Adventure Man
When we got the Qatteri Cat, he was about 8 months old, a gangly adolescent. I had been looking at another cat, but the vet showed me this one and said “he looks like you.” It made me laugh, and I took the cat.
He had been adopted by a family where the man in the house really liked him, but his wife and her mother did NOT like him. The Qateri Cat cringed every time I came near, he would hunker down on the floor, his ears would flatten and he would growl.
The minute Adventure Man walked in the door, the Qatari Cat fell in love. He followed AM around the house, rubbing on his legs, looking at him adoringly. As he calmed down and I would pet him, he would allow me 30 seconds and then he would bite me – hard, hard enough to draw blood.
We ran into his former owners at an art exhibit. “Is he still such a naughty boy?” the M-I-L asked us. “Oh no!” we lied, “He is NEVER naughty.”
Qatari Cat would occasionally get out of the house, and I would have to try to find him. All I had to do was to wait a few hours, and then I would hear his plaintive wailing from behind somebody’s wall, and I would have to go knock on the door and ask if I could get my cat. I learned to take his cat cage with me, after being seriously scratched a couple times because he was tired and scared and his natural instincts came into play. I still have scars to prove it.
Slowly, slowly, he came to trust me. Even when he bit and scratched, I never hit him, never kicked him, I would just pick him up and put him in a bathroom for ten minutes or so – or until I got over being angry with him. His little brain couldn’t remember three minutes later why he was in “Time out”, but sometimes I had to keep him there for his own protection!
He still bites when he is scared. He was born on the street, and those instincts will always be with him. I keep him away from little children and people who would move too fast in his direction. For the most part, he is tamed. He hasn’t bitten me for months, and even then, even as he was biting me, hard, he remembered, and let me go without a fight. He even had the decency to look a little ashamed.
Why am I telling you all this? With Adventure Man, he is a totally different cat. He has NEVER bitten Adventure Man. Adventure Man comes home from work and the QC is waiting in the hallway for him. He slings QC over his shoulder and takes him on a walk around our home, then he slings him down on the carpet and give him a big rub on his tummy. The QC never bites, never scratches, just goes belly up and lets his “dad” rough him up. As soon as AM lets go, he does this amazing flip to get back on his feet and he runs away just a little, looking back and saying “C’mon, aren’t you gonna chase me?” and I hear the two of them roaring off down the hallway.
I think the QC thinks AM is another cat, a really fun cat. And I think he thinks I am his mom. Definitely he thinks I am his feeder, waterer and warm spot. But I will never hold the same place in his adoring little heart that Adventure Man holds:
PS Adventure Man didn’t like the photo I posted last week called DementoCat. He said it made the QC look dead, and it hurt his heart to see it. I am sorry, Advenure Man. 🙂
I Will Never Understand You
When I came online this morning, I got a big shock. Yesterday, I had the highest reader count ever in the history of the blog. I can usually count on Saturdays being a very low day for readership, and Sundays are usually a little better, so I am totally at a loss as to why yesterday would have attracted so many readers.
I posted book reviews. You never read my book reviews! I do it for the few readers out there like me, addicted to really good books, really good authors, and then we talk about books BEHIND YOUR BACK! You never even see the really good book discussions, or us getting together and furtively exchanging our books!
The last time I had so many readers was back in December, when I posted Mom’s Fruit Cake and the Divinity Candy recipes. Overall, that Divinity Candy keeps going and going. Go figure! I had only been blogging 3 months at the time, and oh, what a thrill it was to see that spike for December, but it left me desolate as your attentions shifted elsewhere and I couldn’t figure out how to get you back.
But Go Figure is my constant refrain. You are a fickle audience. I can’t help but be intrigued. I will never know what you are thinking; maybe 1% of my daily visitors comment. The rest of you drop in and snorkel around a little, and then leave, a swirl trailing behind you but no tangible evidence of your visit, other than the little tick in the stats that show you were here.
All I can deduce is that the best bet for blogging is to be content to start small and build slowly. Don’t worry about statistics. (And don’t worry if you ARE worried about statistics, as you can tell from the content of this post, we all are aware of our statistics, that was a purely hypocritical word of advice on my part.)
Honestly, I have come to the conclusion that my very safest bet is to blog for myself, and that is what I do. I blog about what catches my eye, what strikes my funny bone, what grabs my intellect, what inflames my heart, and I blog about the trivialities of my daily life. I love your visits, and I love hearing your point of view, even if it doesn’t agree with my own. I ask only that you watch your language, as my Mother reads this blog, and that while you are passionate, you steer clear of hate language toward any race, gender or nationality. Bureaucracy is fair game.
I am happy you came by, sorry if I was sleeping!
Nemirovsky: Suite Francaise
Within five seconds of starting this book, you are in Paris, flurrying with the Parisians. It’s hot, it’s June, it’s 1940 and the Germans are coming, it is time to get out of town. We are in the middle of preparations to evacuate, with several families, couples and individuals as they make their preparations.
Have you ever been evacuated from a house or hotel due to sudden fire? Have you ever wondered why, in the seconds you had to prepare to leave, you made the choices you did? I groaned as I lived with people carefully packing their linen tablecloths and bird cages; but it’s different when it is not YOU. What I admire so much about Irene Nemirovsky’s book is that you are THERE, you feel so much a part of it. I can tell you what it was like, the desperation as “we” evacuated Paris, and later, as we lived with the enemy using our house for billeting.
The Suite Francaise is two parts, Storm and Dolce. As you reach the end of Dolce, you have a strong feeling that there should be more, and indeed, as you read, seeking satisfaction, the appendices, you discover the book was intended to have four or five sections. The interpreter who put the manuscript together, filling in from Nemirovsky’s notes, has done a masterful job on the two sections that were somewhat complete, but, unfortunately, Nemirovsky, a Catholic, had a Jewish parent, and that was enough to get her arrested, transported to a concentration camp and executed, all within a very short time. The correspondence between her husband had the authorities, in the short time between her arrest and death, is desperate, and chilling.
You can’t help but be heartsick at the loss to this world of such great talent. You can’t help but wonder what this book, as good at it is, might have been as a larger whole?
Nemirovsky, above all, has an acute eye for French thinking, French manners, French mannerisms, and above all, for French class distinctions. The dialogues are SO perfectly believable, as are the depictions of the manner in which people under the worst kind of stress can behave with both inhuman kindness and insensitive cruelty toward one another.
You know how I am always wondering what my cat is thinking. . . I share an excerpt of the book with you. I believe Nemirovsky knows what a cat is thinking!
The cat poked his nose through the fringes of the armchair and studied the scene with a dreamy expression. He was a very young cat who had only ever lived in the city, where the scent of such June nights was far away. Occasionally he had caught a whiff of something warm and intoxicating, but nothing like here, where the smell rose up to his whiskers and took hold of him, making his head spin. Eyes half closed, he could feel waves of powerful, sweet perfume running through him: the pungent smell of the last lilacs, the sap running through the trees, the cool, dark earth, the animals, birds, moles, mice, all the prey, the musky scent of fur, or skin, the smell of blood . . . His mouth gaping with longing, he jumped on to the window sill and walked slowly along the drainpipe. This was where a strong hand had grabbed him the night before and thrown him back . . . but he would not allow himself to be caught tonight.
He eyed the distance from the drainpipe to the ground. It was an easy jump, but he appeared to want to flatter himself by exaggerating the difficulty of the leap. He balanced his hindquarters, looking fierce and confident, swept his long black tail across the drainpipe and, ears pulled back, leapt forward, landing on the freshly tilled earth. He hesitated for a moment, then buried his muzzle in the ground. Now he was in the very black of night, at the heart of it, at the darkest point. He needed to sniff the earth: here, between the roots and the pebbles, were smells untainted by the scent of humans, smells that had yet to waft into the air and vanish. They were warm, secretive, eloquent. Alive. Each and every scent meant there was some small living creature, hiding, happy, edible . . . June bugs, field mice, crickets and that small toad whose voice seemed full of crystallized tears . . . The cat’s long ears – pink triangles tinged with silver, pointed and delicately curly inside like the flower on bindweed – suddenly shot up. He was listening to faint noises in the shadows, so delicate, so mysterious, but, to him alone, so clear: the rustling wisps of straw in nests where birds watch over their young, the flutter of feathers, the sound of pecking on bark, the beating of insect wings, the patter of mice gently scratching the ground, even the faint bursting of seeds opening. Golden eyes flashed by in the darkness. There were sparrows sleeping under the leaves, fat blackbirds, nightingales; the male nightingales were already awake, singing to one another in the forest and along the river banks.
And I imagine that the above all took place in the space of about 15 – 30 seconds!
If Nemirovsky can capture a cat’s thoughts so eloquently, just imagine what she can do with the French!
The second part of the Suite, Dolce, takes place in a small farming village and ties many of the evacuees from Storm loosely with the village and subsequent events. In Dolce, we live with a young married Frenchwoman in the home of her mother-in-law who blames her for enjoying life while her own son, the young woman’s husband, is a prisoner of war in Germany. If that weren’t bad enough, soon a young German officer is sent to live with them.
We have lived among the evacuating Parisians, in Storm, and now, in Dolce, we are living in the provinces, with it’s stultifying conventions. There are whole passages where the restrictions of polite French countryside society make it so suffocating, you almost have trouble breathing. And yet, as they do in every society, the young find ways around the conventions, risk their lives, risk their reputations, and live thinking that no-one sees what they are doing, while the elders bite their lips in horror. Fascinating reading. Nemirovsky’s genius to to make you feel you really are THERE.
Donna Leon: Death in a Strange Country
Recently I discovered, to my disgust, that I have purchased two Donna Leon books I have already read. I bought them from England, and now they have been published in the US under different titles. Aaaarrrgh! I hate it when that happens.
I have a good friend I want to pass these books along to, an amazing woman who has no idea how amazing she is. When she talks about her early years as a private detective, she refers to herself, with a perfectly straight face, as a “Dickless Dick.”
After I read this book, I passed it along to Adventure Man, who loved it. He aloud to me from it late at night, and we both laughed. Here is the the excerpt he liked, he could identify with it:
In their bedroom, he saw that she had placed a long red dress across the bed. He didn’t remember the dress, but he seldom did remember them and he thought it best not to mention it. If it turned out to be a new dress and he remarked on it, he would sound like he thought she was buying too many clothes, and if it was something she had worn before, he would sound like he paid no attention to her and hadn’t bothered to notice it before. He sighed at the eternal inequality of marriage, opened the closed, and decided that the grey suit would be better.
He, of course, is Commissario Guido Brunetti, Donna Leon’s chief investigator, consumately Venetian, very married, and fighting a lonely battle against the louche corruption of the Italian bureaucracy.
And this book is about the death of an American military man in Venice, except that of course, it turns out to be about something much much bigger. Leon has several axes grinding in this one, but the biggest is illegal dumping, and the arrogance of countries who dump their toxic wastes on smaller countries, eyes wide open, knowing full well that horrorific consequences may result – and not caring.
My favorite part is when Commissario Brunetti visits the American base outside of Venice for the first time:
He left the place and went to stand outside, content to get a sense of the post while waiting for his driver to return. He sat on a bench in front of the shops and watched the people walking past.
A few glanced at him as he sat there, dressed in suit and tie and clearly out of place among them. Many of the people who walked past him, men and women alike, wore uniform. Most of the others wore shorts and tennis shoes, and many of the women, too often those who shouldn’t have, wore halter tops. They appeared to be dressed either for war or for the beach. Many of the men were fit and powerful; many of the women were enormously, terrifyingly fat.
Cars drove by slowly, their drivers searching for parking spaces: big cars, Japanese cars, cars with that same AFI number plate. Most had the windows raised, while from the air-conditioned interiors blared rock music in varying degrees of loudness.
They strolled by, amiable and friendly, greeting one another and exchanging pleasant words, thoroughly at home in their little American village here in Italy.
Donna Leon has a sharp eye for detail, doesn’t she? Don’t you feel like you were sitting there on the bench with Commissario Brunetti, seeing through his eyes?
Reading Donna Leon transports you to another world, Venice, and the joy of reading has less to do with solving the crime than being able, for a short time, to stop and drink coffee while tracking down a criminal, eating a meal or two with Brunetti and his family, experiencing the frustrations of the Venetian bureaucracy in all its radiant corruption, walking along the canals so early in the morning that the delivery men haven’t even begun yet making their deliveries . . .
And yet the problems addressed in the Leon books are part of a greater world picture, and Leon has an enormous capability to draw blurry lines with increasing clarity as we watch how international corruption works hand in hand blindly taking profits while dribble by dribble degrading the world for future inhabitants.
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