The Holidays in Yemen

So I haven't updated in a while, but honestly not much happened between the last post and my short vacation to Cairo at the end of December. The school term ended on December 16th and most of the teachers left for the holidays (which is why I had time to blog so much!). Since the majority of my compensation comes in the form of complimentary Arabic lessons, I wasn't too keen on the idea of not having Arabic class again until January 2nd. I brought this up and managed to get a one-hour class every other day to fill in the time before the start of the next academic session.

Christmas turned out to be a much greater success than Thanksgiving. We Americans didn't really get our act together for Thanksgiving and it ended up coming and going without any form of celebration. Christmas Eve, however, fell on a Friday, which gave us the whole weekend to prepare. I spent the morning making omelettes and blasting Handel's Messiah in the kitchen to put myself in the mood. All the while I had a Charlie Brown Christmas loading on my laptop.

I and one of my American friends at the school decided to cook our favorite dishes and invite a bunch of our expat friends to come over and bring sides of their own. I went down to a local restaurant and picked up a roasted chicken to give us some form of a main course, and my side of choice was roasted cheddar mashed potatoes. It was the first time I had attempted to make mashed potatoes of any kind, and like any time cooking in Yemen I had to make a few substitutions (labnah for sour cream), but the end result was pretty tasty if maybe a little chunkier than I would have liked.

Fifteen people ended up coming and we had quite a feast on our hands. We spread a plastic table cloth across the floor of the mafraj and all sat on the floor. We even had sparkling grape juice, a couple bottles of whine, and a bottle of port for dessert. Everyone was in good spirits and it really did feel like a holiday celebration, if maybe not an explicitly Christmas celebration since most of our guests either weren't religious or weren't Christian. To cap off the night my family video chatted me from my grandparent's house in Indiana. They passed the laptop around the house and I got to say hi to everyone. I almost felt like I was there with them. Unfortunately, real Christmas was on a Saturday, which is the start of the workweek here. Hopefully it was the last time in my life I will have worked on Christmas day.

After Christmas I whiled away the days until it was time to leave for Cairo. The main upscale street in Sana'a in Sharia Hadda, which is where you will find many of the expensive hotels, western-style cafes, and nice restaurants. One of these cafes, Coffee Trader,had Christmas decorations out, complete with lights and a tree. They even sold iced sugar cookies. This stands out to me as one of the few times in Yemen, next to the Christmas Eve dinner, that I felt like I was in the Christmas spirit.

Soon enough though it was time to leave for Egypt. I was going there for vacation from the 28th to January 1st, and it would be my first time back since studying abroad there in 2009. I would also me meeting my girlfriend's family for the first time. (More on this to follow)