A Taste of Ramadan

We’re now almost a week into Ramadan. Restaurants are closed, but traffic is lighter, the gym is empty (since no one can drink during daytime workouts), and no one is smoking – all in all, it’s a nice experience.

While I’m certainly on the outside looking in on Ramadan traditions, I got my own little taste of Ramadan yesterday. The day began normally, with class until noon. After class, I got an unexpected email from Feryal Hijazi, my Arabic professor at Harvard. She told me that she would be stopping by Qasid later and would love to see me if I were around. I was of course happy to wait, but this plan kept me at school several hours longer than I had planned that morning. Thus, I had brought no lunch with me and, after a trip to the gym, I was starving. The only place open and selling food was a dessert shop across the street from our building; lunch thus consisted of a half-kilogram of baklava, surreptitiously shared with another student in an empty classroom back at Qasid.

Later that evening, we had plans to break the fast with our teacher from Qasid at a restaurant by the University of Jordan. I hopped into a taxi with a few other kids and headed for Bab al-Yemen, a dirt-cheap and delicious place just north of the university. Many kids in my class are fasting, as is my devout teacher, so our wait for our food was particularly tantalizing for them. Waiters piled food on the table as the sun set, and when the minarets sounded the evening call to prayer, the hungry folk dove into their meals at every table in the restaurant.

The evening wasn’t all that different from a typical meal out, I guess. I personally am not fasting; I decided long ago that my twin loves of sleep and food would be destroyed by waking up before sunrise each day to eat in preparation for a long day without any food. So this wasn’t really an iftar, or breaking of the fast, for me. It was just another meal in the evening. But it was the first time I had interacted with my teacher outside of the classroom, and we all got to know each other a little bit better. It was my first trip to a Jordanian restaurant with a fluent Arabic speaker, which made me feel considerably more welcome and less awkward. As we walked back to the bus, our teacher stopped by a mosque to pray. While she only invited the women in our group to join her inside, I spent a few quiet minutes in the middle of the courtyard – a very peaceful little break in the middle of a long day.

As for the meeting with my Feryal, she invited me and another Harvard student to her house for iftar on Tuesday night. Feryal taught us the Arabic unit on Ramadan last fall, complete with vocabulary words for all of the different treats and sweets that accompany Ramadan celebrations. She promised to make them all for us to try – though, after yesterday’s lunch, I will be fine without any baklava for quite some time. 

Published!

Now for a bit of self-congratulatory news...

Last December, I wrote a review of Christopher Davidson's Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond as a final project for a class at Harvard. A little while later, I submitted it to the Middle East Policy Council, which publishes the Middle East Policy Journal. They liked it and agreed to print it in their next issue (and also sent me an unexpected $100 check).

The print version has been out for some time, I believe, but the Summer issue of the journal was just posted on a brand new MEPC website. The review was written in December, so a little bit of the content has become dated by August. But I am now officially a published author!

Those of you with any interest in the region can read the review here. Everyone else can feel free to ignore, for the moment, the fact that book reviews are at the bottom of the publishing world's totem pole!

HGC Venues

Glee Club has decided on several venues in Amman that they would like to use for their performances next year, so they asked me to check them out in person while I am here. Zaid Al-Rifai made some calls and arranged tours of three venues - the Royal Cultural Center, the Hussein Cultural Center, and the King Hussein Club. His driver and I traveled around town last Wednesday to check things out. 

Our first stop was the Royal Cultural Center. I met with the managing director who, I soon found out, did not speak great English. So we switched to Arabic, which was a bit scary, but it turns out that the meeting went a lot more smoothly in that language. I got a tour of the entire facility, including recording studios, conference rooms, the dance studios, and other places, even though I was really only interested in the Main Hall and rehearsal rooms. But since I was in no real rush, I was happy to see the entire place. 

The Main Hall at the RCC is a theater, not a concert hall. It wasnt designed with acoustics in mind - the entire hall is carpeted, so there's no reverb, and the flyspace above the stage will likely eat up lots of sound. And, while there are lots of dressing rooms backstage, there was also no real backstage warmup room large enough for the entire group. We'll probably just hang out next door, in an exhibition hall with a piano. There were also a few problems with communication - I wasnt sure how to ask about "choral risers" or "orchestral shells," so I'm not sure if that equipment will be available. 

Overall, though, I'm sure it will be a fine place for a concert. The hospitality was incredible - I felt very welcome, and I'm sure HGC will get the same treatment next year. It's also one of the most prestigious venues in the city. Finally, the managing director offered the use of the facilities for free, which is a pretty incredible offer. Hard to argue with that. 

We headed next to the Hussein Cultural Center, which seemed more of a community arts facility than the RCC. The director spoke excellent English, so I was out of the woods. We toured the HCC, which I personally liked a lot more than the RCC. The HCC director also gave me two free tickets to the Amman Symphony Orchestra's performance at the HCC that evening. A Jordanian woman played a Chopin piano concerto, and a Lebanese/Armenian tenor sang a selection of arias and art songs. I had performed many of the songs myself during my eight years of voice lessons. The concert gave me a chance to listen to the acoustics of the space. The Main Hall was once again a theater, without much acoustical treatment, rather than a concert hall. There was no reverb at all - even loud blasts from the orchestra disappeared quickly into the carpet. They used microphones during there performance, so we might see if there is a way to create some reverb through amplification or something. 

Finally, we swung by the King Hussein Club (pictured), a swanky club downtown. This will be the site of an Alumni event organized by Mr. Al-Rifai, rather than a big concert. HGC's 12-person sub group, HGC Lite, will sing during the event, but it wont be a formal concert. 

Aside from these venues, I need to get up to Irbid in the north of the country, where we are expecting to have a joint concert with Yarmouk University. I'd also like to get to the King's Academy, an elite prep school in Amman, where Lite may have another performance. Overall, though, it was a very productive afternoon and a great introduction to the performing arts in Amman. 

Rifai and I, Part II

Another day, another meeting with former Jordanian Prime Minister Zaid al-Rifai.

Like last time, we met to discuss planning for the Harvard Glee Club's tour to the Middle East in 2011-2012. Much was the same - I met the same driver, rode in the same swanky car to his home, where we sat on the same beautiful patio and drank the same tea. But I noticed a few changes - the exterior furniture had been newly upgraded, for example. I also noticed he was reading a copy of Robert Lacey's book on Saudi Arabia, Inside the Kingdom, so I got to sound smart for a few brief minutes while we chatted about that.

The content of the meeting was not particularly unusual. We spoke about possible venues for the Glee Club concerts, and he volunteered to put me in touch with people at said venues to arrange to see them myself in person. I'll be making those trips in the next few weeks, I assume.

Towards the end of the meeting, I followed Mr. al-Rifai into an interior room for a few minutes while he looked for a book. The room was filled with amazing mementos. On the wall and the shelves, he had pictures and souvenirs from visits with foreign dignitaries from across the world. I saw signed photos from Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush, an engraved clock from Richard Nixon, and photos with Sultan Qaboos of Oman and Hafez al-Asad of Syria. Across the room, I saw a five-shelf case filled with medals and other honors from two separate terms as Prime Minister. I was only in the room for thirty seconds, but was amazed with what I saw. I would have loved the time to examine everything more fully. This guy has been a central figure in the history of the Middle East for decades, and so heaven only knows what kinds of other mementos are lining his walls.

Al-Rifai's grandson will be a freshman at Harvard this fall, and so Mr. al-Rifai mentioned that he would be in Cambridge in late August to see him off. We promised to try to get together then if our schedules meet up. I would invite him over to show him my extensive collection of medals and presidential memorabilia, but I'm afraid it will all be packed for my impending move on September 1st.

Meeting the PM

The Harvard Glee Club, in which I sing, arranged a series of exciting meetings for me today. HGC is traveling to the Middle East in winter 2011-2012, and one of their stops is Jordan. HGC leadership decided that, as long as I am in Jordan, I should do some of the legwork with regard to meeting alumni, scouting out venues, etc. So I threw on a suit and spent a little over an hour with Zaid Al-Rifai, the former Prime Minister of Jordan, and then had dinner with a US diplomat based in Amman.

The Al-Rifai meeting was quite an experience. I was told that he would be sending a car. What he didn't say is that the driver would be in a military uniform. The driver showed up at Qasid while I was still in class, and said he was looking for Marshall. Qasid administration pointed out the other Marshall, who was understandably terrified when a Jordanian soldier unexpectedly approached him and asked him to "please come with me." Luckily this was all cleared up, and I followed the driver to a very nice late-model Mercedes. Doors were opened for me, traffic cops saluted as we drove past. All in all, a very nice way to spend an afternoon.

The meeting itself was at Al-Rifai's home; we sat out in his marble courtyard, next to a beautiful fountain. I introduced myself, and after a short discussion of my experience in Amman, we dove into Glee Club details. Rifai is a Harvard alum, as is his son, the current Prime Minister. The man has considerable influence, unsurprisingly, and given his connections to Harvard, he is very eager to see the Glee Club travel to Jordan. He promised some very generous help with various aspects of the tour, which I reported back to HGC leadership. I may soon be dispatched to Egypt and the UAE to meet with our contacts there, though I sadly can't expect a similarly posh reception.

In the evening, I met with a Public Diplomacy officer stationed at the embassy here for advice on the logistics of bringing the groups here. He was full of information - venues, seating capacities, publicity issues, possible local groups to include in a joint concert, and the like. He also suggested a few of the restaurants I had to make sure not to miss while here for the summer. We also discussed his path in the US government and my interest in the field after graduation, though I didnt want to turn a Glee Club meeting into an informational job interview and so tried to keep that discussion short. He is beginning classes tomorrow at Qasid, so I may bump into him more often.

So two decently successful meetings in a single day - the luggage space I devoted to a suit and dress shoes is already worth it! The future likely holds a few more meetings as well... too bad I only brought one tie. While I wont be in the Glee Club when the actual tour comes around, I'll see if I can mooch off of leadership enough to get myself a free seat to tag along...