My weekend

On Thursday night I attended a birthday party for my HR colleague Sharon's two daughters. Sharon has a knack for making everyone feel at ease, and is kind to people regardless of their social and economic stations. I appreciate that characteristic in a country where the class system is very pronounced, and people are only nice if you are the right color and from the right country. (I happen to be a lovely shade of white and carry the right passport, which makes me immensely popular. I hate it, and am not interested in being friends with people who can't treat everyone with respect.) There were probably over 100 people crammed into her little villa and the surrounding yard, and everyone had a good time. I only planned to stay for an hour, and ended up staying for three. The kids were quite enamored with me, and Sharon told me it was because they had never seen a "Westerner" before. I am glad that my presence was so educational. During the course of the evening Doris from the IT department gave me a lengthy speech about why I should move to Bahrain permanently. When I told the her that I was pretty sure neither my parents nor my boyfriend would be overly fond of that idea, she told me that they should just move here too. Mom? Dad? Garrett?

Latif, who retired from the finance department in August, took Sharon and I to lunch at a traditional Bahraini cafe. And when I say traditional, I mean hole-in-the-wall, maybe someone should call the health department (if Bahrain has one), I-would-never-in-a-million-years-stop-and-eat-here sort of establishment. It was basically a row of rickety tables in the middle of an alley, with sheets tied above as canopies from the sun. There were two cracked, crookedly mounted sinks in the alley for hand washing (as silverware was optional), and Sharon and I were quite out of place considering that we were neither male nor Muslim. But the food was excellent, and it was a good thing we had Latif with us, since there were no menus and little spoken English. Before I came to Bahrain, I had some rules about what sort of meat I would eat: boneless, skinless, headless, and fatless (and breat meat is preferred thank you very much). Those rules don't really have a place in my life now. Latif ordered two types of fish, which included bones, skins, and head. I ordered a chicken stew, which included bones and skin (and no breast in sight). Latif kept putting bits of fish on my plate, trying to give me the best parts so that I fully appreciated the local catch (called hammam). I was trying to pick apart my chicken with one hand so that I could swoosh the flies away with the other. And so it went.

Last night I was invited to dinner by another coworker named Kaji. Kaji's wife Parvi made a huge feast, and I think she must have cooked all day. Parvi is very pregnant, and is not eating sugar or flour until the baby comes, so she couldn't even eat most of what she made, and I felt bad that she had gone to so much trouble (and thus felt obligated to eat everything put in front of me, resulting in my being quite ill by the end of the evening and still full when I woke up this morning). I love Indian food, and thoroughly enjoyed trying some new southern Indian dishes (it turns out that all of my favorite masalas, kormas, and paneers are from the north). Kaji instructed his son Adhavan to call me "auntie," which I found quite endearing. And the conversation was interesting. During the course of the evening, we discussed arranged marriages, cremation, Bill Clinton, housewifery, and the number of official languages in India (15!!--I had no idea).

I am very grateful for the immense kindness and hospitality that has been shown to me, and know that my time here would be very miserable indeed without the people who have adopted me into their lives. I only hope that one day I can be for others what these people have been for me.