Jordan – CP2

This is Part 1 of an immense blogging-entries-catsup-effort. My laptop is broken, and I have been having to work from another computer.

On July 5th, Hamad and I met at Sahara Greek & Lebanese Café for dinner and conversation. I was doubly excited to get to talk to him and also to eat this food (Sahara has long been one of my favorite restaurants in town, and Hamad had told me the day before he thought the food was good and authentic). As we waited for our food (Gyros & Schwarma, and a Kebab plate) we picked at hummus and pita and talked about food. We talked about the different foods his family would prepare everyday and for special occasions, and he insisted that I come to taste them first-hand one day. I can only hope I will one day. We talked more about food and food preparation and we talked about our favorite dishes to prepare. He describes the cold (yes, cold!), windy winter in the desert dunes outside of Abu Dhabi, and how he and his friends would dig a hole in the chilly ground big enough for an oil drum. Into this drum go a smoldering fire and an entire goat, skin removed and spices added. In the morning, after slowly cooking all night, the meat falls off the bones — barbeque á la Emirates —and it is the best thing we have never tried. It was then, when it was my turn to relate an American dish, just what a dearth of truly American cuisine there is. Sure, we have our hotdogs and hamburgers, but I struggled to think of a food that I liked to prepare that didn't originate somewhere else. I make great sushi, a mean vichyssoise and perfect guacamole, but nothing that stands out as truly American, unless you count as American the incorporation of so many different cultural palettes into our own gastronomy. I tried to relate this to Hamad, and by the time we had finished talking, they were turning off the lights in the restaurant.
So we relocated to Black Dog Café, at Lake Ella. The weather was remarkably well-behaved this evening, so we took our teas to the porch and continued to share our home cultures. He showed me pictures of his family and their home in Abu Dhabi. He assured me his family was middle class — not rich — in the Emirates, and I was amazed at what that means. He described the house his family lives in as twice the length of Black Dog and the American Legion Hall (one shared building), twice as wide, and two stories. He says this house was built by the government and looks the same as all the ones around it ("In English we call that "cookie-cutter."") . He says this is part of a campaign to reclaim some of the desert and to get people to move out of Abu Dhabi (he lives perhaps 20 minutes by car from the city). People can buy these mansions at a very low cost, and pay back the government over 20, 30, or even 50-year interest free loans. In addition, the government makes it very easy for people living here to expand their homes. Hamad is the eldest of his parent's ten children (5 sons, 5 daughters), and to prepare for the two eldest brothers to marry and start families in the next few years, his father has built them an addition. This new freestanding building was constructed using a government loan for about 5 million Emirati dirham, to be paid back slowly, with a very attractive interest rate. I was as shocked by this as Hamad was by the "tax on everything" when he came to the United States. But it makes sense: with only 8.2 million people and a ton of oil, their government can afford to have expanded social services. My government, on the other hand, may soon be flat broke. We really had a great time talking about and comparing cultures, but the time passed so quickly and soon we were being kicked out of Black Dog as they closed as well. We agreed to meet again soon and continue our conversation that had already taken 5 hours today.