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.