Happy New Year!

Like Christmas, Saudies also don't celebrate the New Year, or birthdays.  This is particularly tragic for one of my students who's birthday happens to be New Year's Eve.  She told me excitedly on Wed. that it was her birthday and when I asked her if she had any plans, she told me no, that it was haram or forbidden to celebrate birthdays.  She looked so sad that I decided then and there that I would make her a cake.  I know what you are all thinking, me baking?  I must have burned the house down.  Don't worry, it was from a box, and there was no tragic cooking accident.  Ok, so there might have been a minor  cooking accident, but it wasn't tragic.  I was very carefully following the recipe on the back of the box, which told me to heat the oven to 180.  I remember thinking at the time that 180 seemed kind of low, but I figured I shouldn't try to deviate from the instructions since I only had one chance to make this a good cake.  I set my watch for 25 minutes later and waited.   When I went back to check it, it was still a liquidy mess.   That's when what you've all been thinking this whole time finally dawned on me.  The temperature they gave on the box was in Celsius, and the oven temperature was in Fahrenheit.  I turned up the heat, let it bake for another 20 minutes or so, and all was well. Except that when I got ready to leave for work, I left it on the table.

Luckily, I realized in time to buy some Twinkies at the corner store before I got to class.  When I arrived, she and I were the only two in class so far.  I told her about how I had baked a cake for her, and how I had forgotten it, so I bought a bunch of mini-cakes for everyone instead.  She looked confused.  Why teacher?  For you!  I said.  For your birthday.  She started laughing.  Oh, I forgot is was my birthday.  I told everyone, including you it was my birthday and tried to get them to have a party for me or something, but my husband, my friends, everyone, told me haram so I forgot all about it.  She laughed again and thanked me.  We ate the cakes at the end of class, and even though they were kind of stale, I think we all appreciated having a little something to celebrate.

I went straight from class to the New Zealand Embassy for a New Year's Eve party.  Since I didn't have time to go home and change, I had been wearing my fancy party dress all day, and no one knew any better.  It's times like these when abayas really come in handy.  The party was a masquerade ball, and so I decided to wear my crazy leopard print dress since it matched the gold and black mask I had bought at the shop a few doors down from my work.  I happened to see the party shop on my way to lunch one day and remembered I would need a mask for the party, so I stopped in.  It was a good thing I did too.  They were closing up the shop or moving it to another location or something, and since they were packing everything in boxes, they let me have the mask for super cheap just to save the effort of packing it.

So mask in hand, and pre-dressed, I made my way to the embassy in a taxi.  He was a very confident guy, and when I told him to take the south gate because that was the one I used the last time that was closer to the New Zealand Embassy, he told me the south gate had been closed since 3pm in anticipation of New Year's Parties at the embassies, and because there was increased security now because of ISIS.  He certainly knew his stuff.  Since he knew all that, I assumed he knew where the New Zealand embassy was.  He assumed that I knew where the New Zealand embassy was since I had a ticket to a party there.  Neither of us bothered to check in with the other about this, until after about the 10th roundabout inside the diplomatic quarter, he turned to me to ask where it was.   Luckily, there was an information panel that listed all the embassies, so we found that, and then were able to find the embassy.

Me & the ice-sculpture

It was crowded, maybe 300 people, and at least 3/4 of them had masks on.  It was sort of fun, but also sort of hard to see through the peepholes in the mask, and even harder to dance without it falling off and bouncing everywhere.  Most people gave up on their masks fairly early in the evening.  There was lots of food, and an ice-sculpture that said 2014 that was appropriately melting, though not really fast enough to be gone by midnight.  Someone had gone through the trouble of putting up Christmas lights that spelled out something Happy New Year.  After much debating, about what it might say; what, new, wally, whisper, we're here, a very smooshed 2014... we finaly consulted an embassy staff member who told us they had worked very hard on trying to get it to say "wish u a" Happy New Year, but that it all sort of ran together and the only part you could really read was Happy New Year.

People Watching

 There was lots of dancing, but the DJ was really hit or miss, so most of the time I sat out and enjoyed some quality people watching.   Since it's allowed to sell beverages at the embassies, there was some very entertaining people watching going on. I realized when I kept looking at the clock to see how long before midnight, not because I was excited for it to be midnight, but because I was excited to be going home, that I must be getting very old.  I used to work 12 hour days a lot and it never seemed to phase me.  Now, I just feel tired all the time.  Not even the promise of the next cliff-hanger episode of Breaking Bad appeals to me more than sleep lately.  And the music is really too loud for me.  I'm not sure exactly when it happened, but Saudi has turned me into an old woman.

The ice-sculpture meets an untimely death in the pool.

Which isn't to say I can't still have fun.  The guy who got me the ticket to the party is best friends with the deputy ambassador to New Zealand, so we were invited to the after party.  As tired as I was, the prospect of watching a bunch of diplomats jump into the pool was too promising to pass on.  I had been cold all night, temperatures dipping into the frigid 60s, and since the pool was not heated, this was pretty much equivalent to the polar dip for those of us acclimated to Saudi weather.  About a dozen guys (and me the only girl) stuck around for the after party.  They had all initially agreed to do it, but in the end, only 4 guys jumped in.  They might have changed their minds after the catering staff dumped the ice sculpture into the pool as the quickest and easiest method of getting rid of it.  The guys in the pool invented a new pool game.  Ice-burg tag.  The basic premise being to push the pieces of floating ice away from you and towards anyone else who is in the pool.  As fun as it was, I still had to work the next day, so when the Italian finance officer declared that it was now 2015 in Italy, I decided it was time to be heading home.

So, 2015.  It definitely doesn't feel like I've been here 8 months.  Sometimes it feels like 8 years, other times 8 weeks.   Who knows what's in store for me this year.  I could be heading home in a month or two.  I could make it all the way to the year mark.  I could stay till August.  But I'm making this resolution right now.  I will not be spending New Year's Eve in the Kingdom next year.  Inshalla.

Kushari

It's always an adventure with my friend at Aramco.  This weekend he invited me to experience the culinary excellence of his Coptic Christian Egyptian friend, who was going to make kushari, a classic Egyptian food. Atef, the Egyptian,  has been working in Saudi Arabia for the past 9 years, and his wife and two kids still live in Egypt. He goes home to spend summers and two weeks in the winter with them, a grand total of 45 days a year.  This year to squeeze in a little more time, Atef's family are coming to Saudi Arabia next week to spend 7 weeks with him before his annual leave starts and they all head back to Egypt together.   His daughter is 14, and his son is 11 or 12.  I think it will be quite a change for his family.  Despite the limitations on what they could do here, he was excited to have them visit, and even thought they weren't excited about having to wear abayas, they were looking forward to coming, too.

He cooked, and my job was to watch and learn.  First, we fried some onions.  These were going to be used to crumble over the top like the french fried onions people sprinkle over green bean casserole.  While we waited and watched for the onion slivers to turn golden brown, he started telling me his opinions of how the middle east is changing, and has changed over the years.  "You know Jennie, that when Aramco first started, Americans were treated poorly here, just like every other foreigner.  Then, the Gulf war happened, and they saw that they didn't have the military to defend themselves if they ever needed to.  So they realized how valuable it was to have the Americans as allies.  Now you see Americans are still paid the highest salaries at Aramco, even more than British or Canadians or Australians."  I asked him if he thought things were changing, or just repeating themselves, he said, "yes and no".

When the onions were done we drained them and set them on some paper towels to dry.  Next we cut up tomatoes and onions and added them to the tomato paste.  While we waited for the sauce to simmer, he told me about how he had never planned to be a teacher in Saudi Arabia for long.  But somehow the money makes it hard to leave.  He doesn't know where the 9 years have gone, but he knows that if he wants his children to continue to go to the best schools, then he has to stay.  I have heard a lot of people say this, that when they arrived, they never intended to stay.  They stay because it is easy work and good pay, and that makes it hard to leave.  No one seems passionate about the work they are doing, or about Saudi (unless it is to passionately hate it).  Living here starts innocently enough as a means to an end, a way to make good money quickly, but somehow it isn't quite enough, so you say, one more year.  And one year becomes three, and soon, it has been 9 years.   I wonder If I will end up like this...

Finally, we started the last step; boiling the pasta, rice, and lentils.  I was thinking that rice, lentils and pasta together was kind of overkill on carbohydrates, but then I remembered that rice-o-roni was pasta and rice together, so I guess it isn't that strange. I was a little more surprised that he put in several different kinds of pasta together.   He explained that the dish was the equivalent of our goulash. It began as a sort of poor man's street food.  It has rice, pasta, and lentils because it was all the most filling leftovers thrown together, with sauce to make it appealing.  So now, even when you make it as a meal from scratch, they still add different kinds of pasta, for the sake of tradition.  We had elbow macaroni and spaghetti in ours, along with the rice and both chickpeas and lentils.  It was a mess of different but similar elements, and it reminded me of the way the middle east was all one kind of thing, but at the same time very different pieces thrown together.

Kushari

While we waited for everything to finish, we washed some greens that aren't spinach, but look like it.  They have a strange sort of mild radish-ey kind of flavor.  I forgot the name.  We chopped some and added them to the lentils and chickpeas.  The rest were set on the table raw to just grab and chew at random.  They were meant to be a sort of palate cleanser, I guess.  We also cut up some chili peppers to add to a few cups of the sauce that we set aside for the spicy version.  At first, I was all for spicy.  But I saw how much salt, pepper, garlic salt, and chili powder he had added to the non-spicy version, so now I wasn't so sure.  He promised I could have a mix of both sauces and it wouldn't be too spicy.  He was right.  The kushari was delicious, and just a spoonful of the extra spicy sauce was enough to give it a good kick without making it unbearable.

The order you pile it on the plate:
macaroni, rice, lentils, sauce, then onions.

Just in time, our other guests arrived.  My friend's wife and another couple had been out windsurfing while we cooked.  After we ate, they talked about the windsurfing classes and their life on the Aramco compound.  I listened to their stories with relish. It was so different from being shut up in the apartment I lived in with no chance to go out except on scheduled shopping trips.  Atef had left the table long before and turned on the television to sit alone on the couch.  I wondered if what appealed to me about their stories; the interaction with lots of people, the adventurous outdoor activities, the sense of freedom to go anywhere and do anything, the way they had managed to replicate the suburbs so exactly halfway across the world;  were the same things Atef had found less entertaining than his own escape: television.  Or maybe he was just tired from all the cooking and chatting we had done earlier.  I have to admit, I was pretty tired myself.  Kushari is delicious, but it is also hard work.  I know Atef thinks he has taught me well, and that I can now make Kushari on my own, but I don't think so.  It's not that he isn't a good teacher, it's just that I've never been good at cooking.  Besides, I just don't think it would taste as good without his conversation.

All that's left.