Ramadan is Here

We are actually in our 13th day of Ramadan here in the Maghbreg and so far so good.  Ramadan is a holy moth where Muslim's fast from sun up to sun down.  We spent our first Ramadan in Jerusalem and I've come to feel very fondly about it.  I know that a lot of expats are annoyed that restaurants and stores are closed , but you know what?  We are in someone else's country and this is what they do.  Deal with it.  

On a less soap boxy note, I dare you to listen to this song and not have it stuck in your head for weeks.  These guys came to post last year and, if you'll recall, I introduced my first (and last, let's be honest) hip hop concert...in a suit.  I was just beside myself about what to wear but even if I had wanted to dress the part, I have the closet of someone who shops at whole foods and arranges doggy playdates.  So I wore a suit - it was work afterall.    

It's Fig Season

We were rifling through the bulbous green figs together - searching for soft, but not squishy specimans to fill our sack.  The Moroccan woman leaned over to explain, in French, how to pick the best  figs.  I told her that I only spoke a little French and didn't quite understand what she had said.  She switched to Arabic which I understood even less but after a few sentances I realized that she was asking where I was from and Ana men Amreeka (I'm from America) and she has family in America and she'd visited California and Las Vegas and the Mountains and she loved it there and it was very beautiful.

And I understood her.

In Arabic.

I didn't understand all of it, mind you, and my ability to produce a reponse consisted solely of the Arabic equivalent to "That's great. Wonderful. Nice to meet you."  

But I (mostly) understood her!!

Arabic is coming much slower than I'd like...because I'm working much less hard than I'd like if I'm being honest.  BUT it's coming and I have big plans to carve out more Arabic time in the near future.  Including aimless dog walks through the city - once the heat breaks and Ramadan is over of course.  I'm dedicated, but not overly dedicated.  You know?

P.S. If you want to know how to pick the best figs....you should probably google it.  I missed that part in both languages.   

"...Where at Least I Know I'm Free"

Does anyone else think that song is a little overdramatic?  Not that I don't love the pause, key change and obilgatory standing ovation...but...  Ray Charles version of "America the Beautiful" is more my style.  Sorry Lee Greenwood...and every Rodeo I ever attended

Possibly a touch too dramatic 4^th of July songs aside, I did want to share some awesome American-ness.   A few months ago I was visiting a local university in my Public Affairs capacity.  If I remember correctly, on this occasion I was facilitating a presentation about the American Presidential Primaries and we actually had a mock Republican Primary.  An aside: there was only one vote for the completely unheard of John Huntsman and when I asked the student what motivated him to vote for this man he said “In his picture he is riding a four wheeler across the desert.  That’s awesome.”  So there you have it. 

But after the presentation a student approached me and asked “Why can’t women wear the head scarf in America?”  It caught me a bit off guard but I was able to say “People are free to practice their religion in America and women can, in fact, wear the headscarf.”  We talked a little bit about the separation of church and state and the bill of rights and I have to admit, as I walked out of the University campus I got a bit choked up. 

I’m not a sentimental person and I don’t get worked up about a lot of things; but the reality of what the values we hold in America mean in practice really struck a chord with me that day.  And many other days since moving overseas come to think of it.

It’s a big deal and yes, I’m proud to be an American.     

(This post might seem a bit late for the 4th of July, but we just had our consulate 4th of July party so everything has been red, white, and blue for me all week)

Go West!

Disneyland (read "churros"), vacation home with a WATER SLIDE, Dodger's game (of course we had Dodger Dogs), San Diego with the nieces and nephews, California sun and tons of time with family.  That about sums up the last portion our home leave.

God Bless America! 

Home Leave

Kickin' it in the Paris airport

They are called avoidance behaviors and I've got some. For example, instead of thinking about and working on three very stressful things with fairly immediate deadlines...I'm going to write about our R&R. You do what you have to.

 First things first - Buckley was a champ on the plane.  He just sat in his little house under our seat (and sometimes in his little house on our lap) and remained quite the entire trip. We flew to Paris, stayed over night at an Ibis more reminiscent of a prison than a lodging establishment, and then took the 11 hour direct to Paris. The trip home included a 4 hour stint circling the great Salt Lake before an emergency landing (our first) followed by a 6 hour rerouted red eye to New York and a 7 hour leg to Casa on what seemed more like a floating mall than an airline. (The hair pulling! The eyeliner!) And through it all, Buckley just hung out in his little house calm as can be. I've never been prouder.

Seeing family and friends was awesome. More than awesome. I don't know if this is symptomatic of FS life in general or of being in a small post with a small American community, but you kind of get into the "life is work, work is life" zone. It's hard to keep your work life and your home life separate and sometimes you feel like the two are all hogglewashed together. An R&R does exactly what it's supposed to - gives you a minute to come up for air and re-prioritize. Revisit all the great people and things that motivated you to take up this lifestyle in the first place....and provides you opportunities to eat all of the Mexican food and pork products you can get your hands on.

A few months ago Max got it in his head that his high school band should get back together and play a show. And then somehow I got it in my head that we needed to rent a giant bowery, invite several other friends who were in bands and throw a big concert in the park to see all the people we hadn't seen in ages. A few emails, a friend with a DJ business and a sweet audio set up, and a letter to the city council later - we had ourselves a concert. It was just like I dreamed it - good tunes, reminiscing with old friends, families spread out on blankets in the grass, people playing catch with their kids and running around with their dogs. My own American utopia come to pass. And, if I'm being honest, Max's band waled. They were even better than I remember them being in our high school auditorium. And who doesn't love being married to a rock star?

My adorable neice Maycee walked/was dragged
around Buckley, who was just her size.  

And when our time in Utah came to an end, we moved west....

Taking Churros From Children

Don't do it.

So, I'm cleaning up a little at our fantastic, unbelievable, infinity pool to the ends of the earth Southern California vacation house and I see a churro left over from a pit stop earlier that day.


Certainly everyone has already eaten their churro who wants one.   I say to myself as I pop it in my mouth and finish wiping down the kitchen table (which the house rules say we are not to stand on as it may break - we are not really the dance on the kitchen table kind of vacationers, but you never can tell, right?)

Just as I'm wiping the cinnamony goodness from the corners of my mouth my wee nephew, part 8 year old, part ocean liner, walks into the room looking for the last churro that has been lovingly saved for him.  "Do you know where my churro is?" He asks in a panic, eyes round as frisbees.  

I can't remember the last time I felt this ashamed, so I hemmed and hawed until he left the room looking for it elsewhere.  When I didn't see him for a while I thought I'd gotten away with only the intense personal shame of stealing treats from a child instead of the public humiliation I deserved, but then he trudged up the stairs with the most enormous alligator tears I've ever seen running down his round face.

"They saved one churro for me and some idiot walked by and ate it!"

He sobbed at me, looking for answers.  You know why? Because adults have answers.  They help kids find lost things, they sympathize when idiots walk by and eat your churro...they don't eat your churro and then hide it from you.

For some reason I felt like my first step was to confess to his parents and they, of course, laughed, because it's kind of funny and they are nice people.  But I made Max drive me 20 minutes to the nearest town to buy him another one.  It was only after we left the gated community that we realized we didn't know the code to get back in and that we'd left our cell phones back at the house.  In the end we found a solution that didn't include scaling the gate and running up the hill to our vacation home AND the churro was delivered without me having to forever break the trust of my churro loving nephew.

Churro-gate aside, vacations are awesome.  So awesome, in fact, that I'm just getting around to blogging on the next to last day of ours.  Our R&R has been so terrific.  We got to see lots of friends and family, we ate American food that was bad for us but tasted amazing, we went to Disneyland, and Max's high school band got back together for one giant concert in the park where we rocked until the sun went down (and the sprinklers turned on and almost ruined our equipment...)  I'll blog more about getting to know America again, but right now Max's brother's are building a  human train down the waterside with the lights off and it's pitch black.  How could I miss that?