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.
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.
Al Ahmadi Buffet, Crown Plaza
The Crown (Crowne?) Plaza has a new chef, hired especially to give the buffet offerings that extra something special. You can see it right away; the food displayed has STYLE! Or at least until the fourth or fifth diner has dished in!
My favorite part is the salads, but somehow I thought I was taking a photo of the shrimp and acocado, and I missed it . . .
And I got so busy with the salads that I totally missed photos of the main dishes, and the special pasta and schwerma guys, and the special Kuwaiti dessert stand, and the whole stand devoted to fabulous breads . . .
I love it that they give you tiny little dessert portions, so you don’t feel so guilty about taking a couple – or three. Actually, I see people who fill their plates with desserts. And Adventure Man says we can just start with dessert and work our way back to the salads. I like that idea.
Big Red
Adventure Man and I have an agreement. We leave each other’s lives alone. Like I don’t try to tell him how he should work (I do try to tell him how to drive, or how not to drive, he hates it and I can’t help it; I don’t want to die!) and he doesn’t tell me how to run the house (but he does make “helpful suggestions”, he can’t help it.) We cut each other a lot of slack – it’s the only way you can stay married for a long time.
He monitors my blog closely. I don’t mind, he is like my personal security agency, making sure I don’t tell you too much about myself. I know he is protecting us and I honor that. It also helps me to think about what I am writing as I write – he has never asked me to change anything, but the awareness that he is watching helps me remember to be careful.
But I draw the line at him telling me what to blog. Here is what I say:
GET YOUR OWN BLOG, ADVENTURE MAN!
Yesterday he brought me some Big Red, with a complaint and with a compliment. Many of us in our family are addicted to Big Red, a cinnamon chewing gum. I like it because I drink coffee, and coffee can make your breath bad. Adventure Man just likes it because he likes it.
“This Big Red is not the same!” he complained. “It tastes wrong!”
I tasted it and I thought it tasted normal, but I have been buying Big Red here for a while and maybe my “normal” has gotten skewed.
“And look!” he said, triumphantly “Big Red is supposed to be RED!”
And he was right – this Big Red is WHITE?? How can that be??
But here is the compliment – look what is printed on each individual gum wrapper. (You have to read it from left to right!)
Pretty cool, huh? And this blog entry is for you, Adventure Man.
99.7 Buck Naked and Yemeni Star
I’m back in the project room, no TV and for some reason my radio isn’t bringing in BBC so I am listening to 99.7, with which I have a love/hate relationship.
I could swear I have heard the same exact sound track a year ago. I’m pretty sure music has moved on, and occasionally I will hear something dating within the last three months, but a lot of the music seems pretty old to me.
There is one thing that really bugs me. There is a song in which there is a line that includes the words “buck naked banging on the bathroom floor.” The censors have evidently decided that “buck” is a BAD word because while you are listening to the song, what you hear is something like “there we were _______ naked banging on the bathroom floor.” When I hear it, it cracks me up, but at the same time, how annoying!
(Buck naked is another way of saying bare naked: bare-na·ked (bârnkd, -nkd)
adv. & adj. Chiefly Northern U.S. With no clothes on.
Regional Note: The chiefly Northern U.S. expression bare-naked illustrates the linguistic process of redundancy, not always acceptable in Standard English but productive in regional dialect speech. A redundant expression combines two words that mean the same thing, thereby intensifying the effect. The expression buck-naked, used chiefly in the South Atlantic and Gulf states, is not as clear as bare-naked with respect to its origin; buck is possibly an alteration of butt, “buttocks.” If so, bum-naked, heard in various parts of the country, and bare-ass(ed), attested especially in the Northeastern U.S., represent the same idea.
From The Free Dictionary)
My husband listens to 99.7 (I think it calls itself Radio Kuwait) during drive time in the morning, and said that the other day they talked with the meteorologist at the Kuwait airport, who gave the weather forecast but then went into a long thing about which stars are visible, and how back in the not-so-distant past the desert Kuwaitis would watch for this star to appear, because they knew it preceded the cooling temperatures. They called it the “Yemeni star.” I think my husband told me why, but I can’t remember.
How totally cool. You keep your ears open, and even on 99.7 you can learn something.
Swarming Fish
We were dining overlooking the water, when I happened to look down. I gasped!
“Look! Look at the fish!”
It was the most amazing live show, ever. The fish would make the most amazing patterns as they swarmed, making twirling circles, sometimes fanning out, sometimes closer to the surface than other times. Sometimes the rush of their movement created a wave, a wave of sparkling silver bodies. It felt like a gift from God. We sat and watched, mezmerized.
Kingdom of Heaven and IMDB
Adventure Man and I finished Rome, The Final Season, and weren’t ready to start anything else . . .you know how it is when you finish a really good series?
So today, we sat down to watch a movie I saw on a plane, Kingdom of Heaven, which Adventure Man had never seen. And the truth is the movie was a lot like the movie I saw on the plane, but was so much longer, and so much more full of detail. And – oh what fun – in one of the earliest scenes, I said to Adventure Man “Look! There’s Vorenus!”
“Noooooo.” he denied I had seen Vorenus in the entourage of Orlando Bloom’s Baron father.
Not long afterwards he had to do the ceremonial apology. (It’s a family tradition.)
First he looks over at me to see if I am going to say anything. It’s pretty clear that it really IS Vorenus.
Then, seeing I am not going to lord it over him, he concedes. “Well done, Intlxpatr. You are right. And I was wrong. That is very sharp of you to spot Vorenus.”
(The tradition is that you have to say “You are right, and I was wrong.” But he gave it extra grace by cloaking it with additional flattery.)
(No, he doesn’t really call me Intlxpatr, but I really do call him Adventure Man.)
So now we are watching the back-story, the history behind the movie, and it is fascinating. Earlier Adventureman looked up all the mistakes in the film on IMDb.
You don’t know what IMDb is? It stands for Internet Movie Database, and you can look up all kinds of things about movies or TV series, or your favorite actors and actresses. There is also a list of mistakes, anachronisms or lack of continuity, and we thing this is a lot of fun.
So you put in your title name Kingdom of Heaven and you go to the film page.
Over on the left hand side are all kinds of things you can choose from, including a section called Fun Stuff, under which you find goofs.
Here is a partial list of goofs Adventure Man found at IMDb:
Crew or equipment visible: In some scenes involving horses, modern orange cones can be seen on the ground directing the riders on the path past the camera to follow.
Factual errors: When the Muslims are praying near Jerusalem they are praying towards the setting sun, west, not towards Mecca which is to the south south east.
Continuity: During the battle for Jerusalem, the crescent moon and the star nearby, change positions during a short period of time. First, the crescent is horizontal, with the star a short distance above it. In the next scene, the crescent is on an angle, and the star is where the unlit part of the moon would obscure it.
Factual errors: A few times during the movie, the Muslims are shown praying while the prayer call is being delivered. The prayer call precedes the prayer.
Anachronisms: During the movie, flags from Castilla y Leon kingdom are shown several times. At that time Castilla and Leon were separate kingdoms. They became one in 1230.
Continuity: The size of the hole in the sand made by the sword when Nasir is down after the fight for the horse changes going from large and uneven to even
Revealing mistakes: When the messenger of Saladin is stabbed in throat by Guy de Lusignan. The blood that is squirted outward sprays from the left side of the neck where he was not stabbed.
Incorrectly regarded as goofs: Guy stabs Saladin’s messenger in the throat with a small dagger. When the messenger falls, Guy is holding a bloody sword, rather than his dagger. This is corrected in the Director’s cut, where Guy proceeds to behead the messenger with his sword.
Continuity: At 2:08:09 surrender of Jerusalem, the scar to left and below Bloom’s eye disappears.
Anachronisms: In the Director’s Cut, Sibylla tells her son, soon to be Baldwin V, in his geography lesson, that the King of England is Richard, the son of King Henry. Richard I did not succeed his father until 1189, three years after the death of Baldwin V.
Factual errors: Sibylla claims that she was married to Guy de Lusignan when she was 15 years old. In fact, she was 20 or 21 when she married him in 1180. She had been about 17 when she married her first husband, William of Montferrat, in 1176.
Anachronisms: The so-called ‘Templar’ who attacks Balian before the battle of Hattin (in 1187) wears a white surcoat bearing a black cross: the arms of the Order of St Mary of the Germans (aka the Teutonic Knights). This order was not founded until 1190 at the very earliest.
Miscellaneous: When Balian is building the timber water channel he places the lower level duct on top of the higher one. This should be the opposite way round as in its current state any water running down would run under the lower duct and consequently be lost.
You can read the rest of them (if you care) HERE.
What is cool about buying this movie is that you can watch it again and spot the goofs for yourself, and you can watch all the extra things about making the movie and about the history behind the movie.
We both liked this movie.
The other movies we watched were Ghostbusters 1 & 2. It always makes us laugh.
No Sunrise
No sunrise photo this morning. By the grace of God, I seem to be back on Kuwait time in record time – it can take me up to two weeks.
I also noticed while I was in the US, I never felt fully on Florida time or Seattle time . . . maybe on some weird level my body was maintaining a Kuwaiti clock? I have taken a short afternoon nap most late afternoons, but I can do that sometimes even without jet lag. I’m feeling GOOOOOOOOODD!
If it weren’t for Rome, Season 2/Final Season, which I bought just before I left Seattle, I would probably be going to bed too early, but it is so gorgeous, and so engaging that we stay up watching one more episode than we intend every night. I know many of you have already seen it, and I don’t know how! How do you get these things before they even come out on DVD?
I couldn’t imagine how season 2 could be anywhere near so gripping as season one, but luckily, I was wrong. We are loving season 2, and I know I will be very sorry when this season ends.
Hydroplanes in Dubai?
This article is excerpted from the Seattle Times on July 29th. Hydroplane racing is big in Seattle, and when I saw this article, I thought how perfect the Gulf, with it’s smooth, glassy surface, would be for these incredibly exciting races.
In Seattle, people take their own boats to the hydroplane races and tie up at specially designated sites. It’s like one big huge boat party, people dancing, kids floating around in inner-tubes and floats, good food, all in addition to the excitement of the races. Having hydroplane races in Dubai would be amazing.
(Photo from Tacoma News Tribune Sports.
Several people in the pits said Saturday that representatives of Dubai are looking into holding a race.
“They’re very interested in having us bring our boats over there,” said Erick Ellstrom, crew chief of the Miss Ellstrom Elam Plus. “They love hydroplanes over there.”
Apparently, a delegation from Dubai was scheduled to be in attendance at Seafair next week to take in a race firsthand. Ellstrom said that apparently won’t happen, but that the Dubai group might attend the race in San Diego next month.
It might sound like a fanciful notion, but Dubai has gained an increasing reputation as a sporting destination, which was detailed recently in a lengthy story on ESPN.com. That story quoted one Dubai official as saying the goal is “to use sport as a platform to attract global exposure” for Dubai.
While logistics might seem like a nightmare, veterans pointed out that it might not be much different than the days when a race was held in Honolulu, when the boats were transported by ship.
Apparently, part of the connection between Dubai and hydros is the business association with Boeing, which has taken on an increasing interest in the sport.
Read more at The Seattle times: Next Stop on the circuit . . . Dubai?
Jardins de Soleil
Sequim is the largest lavender producing area in the United States. We stopped at the Jardins de Soleil to pick a few bunches of lavender and to visit their gift shop. Step out of the car and you are enveloped in the most delicious fragrance.
Everywhere you look is a photo. Here are just a few:
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