Ramadan Decorations

In the days before the start of Ramadan, the villages begin decorating with bits of foil glued over a string or stars cut from paper and glued onto a string.  The beginning of festive nights.

A Girl and Her Dogs

 

Christmas is chaotic anywhere anytime. My daughter and I decided that a walk in the desert would help to clear our heads. A couple of the dogs agreed.

A Blessed Eid

Tonight it was announced that Ramadan officially ended today and the four day Eid el Fitr (known in our family as "The Cookie Feast) will begin tomorrow morning. After fasting from food, water, and cigarettes from dawn to dusk for 30 days, families will spend four days on a sugar high eating lovely powdered sugar covered shortbread, sometimes filled with dates, nuts, honey, or turkish delight. There are about four other traditional cookies for the Eid, but the kahk is my favourite. Virtually everything will be closed with the exception of the odd gas station or 24 hour pharmacy. This young girl from the farms near me looks like she's more than ready for some cookies.

The traditional greeting is "Eid Mubarak" or blessed eid. I figure that we've had more than enough Mubaraks, so I used the English. It will be understood too.

Family Portrait Sham el Nessim

Sham el Nessim is Egypt's special spring holiday, a pharoanic version of Easter, when families go out into the nearest green area to enjoy smoked fish, lettuce, onions, bread and boiled eggs as a picnic. Even the farmers go out and have lunch in their fields with their families.

Best Holiday Wishes

Tomorrow begins a new year and we wish everyone all the best in the coming year. My post today is a silly photo of the farm staff and visiting friends in Santa hats and the preparations for a couple days of camping and sandboarding in the desert near Fayoum.

Homecoming

It's Christmas and all over the world people are trying to get home to their families. My daughter was on her way home to Egypt for the holidays and got stuck for two days in New York when Frankfurt airport was closed. We finally got her back from the airport today and the dogs who had grown up with her were ecstatic to see her.

Christmas Trees

I was driving in Maadi when I came to a screeching halt in front of this florist shop with a display of real Christmas trees. Most green Christmas trees here are cypress trees as pines don't grow in the Middle East much. I asked the shopkeeper the prices and was told that a 2 metre tree would cost about LE 1500 (around $300) while a smaller 1.5 metre tree would cost LE 750 or about $150. But they don't smell real.

Christmas Shopping at the Fair Trade Shop

We have a lot of choices of places to shop for handicrafts here but my preference is for the shops that make sure that the artisans get their fair profit. This is a shop in Zamalek near 26th of July that carries fabrics, clothing, jewelry, baskets, rugs, pottery, embroidery...just to name a few.

Deck The Walls

Christmas celebrations around the farm are usually very low-key involving visits to friends for dinners, small exchanges of gifts and so on. With my children in the US and my busiest working season being around Christmas, I don't generally bother with decorations. But this year I have some Canadian and British friends spending Christmas with me and they are very much into decorations. Paddi brought a bunch of Santa hats for some of the village kids, which were a big hit, and they've begun decorating the farm with the help of my village neighbours who find the whole exercise a bit odd but quite entertaining.

Tis Almost The Season

That's right, it's mid-November and time for all good residents of Cairo and Giza to prepare for the Christmas Bazaar Barrage. We have at least half a dozen Christmas bazaars (or is it bizarres?) here to help everyone out with their Christmas shopping. And we need them! Egypt celebrates Christmas twice, on Dec 25 and on Jan 7, to accommodate all flavours of Christianity and because no Egyptian can pass up a good party. Artisans, small businesses, and charities sell items at these bazaars and a portion of the sales go to various charities. And for all of you in snowy climates, sorry about the sunglasses and tans, but what can we say?

Empty Food Stalls

By the third day of the Feast, salad vegetables had gotten to be a bit scarce around the house, so we ventured in to the Maadi souq. This is pretty much what we found for the most part....empty stalls. Usually you'd have trouble pushing your way down the alley. We found some tomatoes and cucumbers and called it a day.

The Doorman

The hotels work out strange and dramatic outfits for their staff. Nothing to do with reality, actually.

On Palm Sunday

On the way home from a meeting in Giza on Sunday we passed through Faisal Street to pick up dog food supplies for the pack of hounds here. I haven't been paying attention to the calendar lately and was surprised to see people walking along carrying palm branches. I explained the tradition of Palm Sunday to Mohamed who isn't really up on his biblical traditions and Christian holidays. We have both the Coptic and the Western Easter falling on the same day this year (not a common phenomenon at all) with Shem el Nessim coming on Monday. Shem el Nessim was a pharaonic celebration of the spring equinox that predates Easter by about 3 thousand years and the traditions are very similar.

Christmas Decorations in Maadi

Christmas is celebrated in Egypt not once, but twice, once on December 25 and again for the Copts and Eastern Orthodox on January 7, so we have an even longer Christmas season. While out shopping for presents for my annual Egyptian/Canadian/Finnish/Lebanese Christmas gathering with friends on December 24 we spotted a group watching one of the store clerks adjusting a present in a Christmas display.

Fusion Sham el Nessim

All over Egypt yesterday families were heading out for the nearest green space, sometimes just the median of a boulevard in the city, to picnic on boiled eggs, preserved fish, lettuce, fresh onions and bread. This tradition goes back to pharaonic times with one of Egypt's loveliest holidays, Sham el Nessim, or smelling the breeze. It usually occurs a day after the Coptic Easter, which is generally a week or so after the western Easter. Some people claim it as part of the Coptic Easter but its origins go farther back than any of the other Johnny-Come-Lately religions. Here on the farm, a group of friends gathered with children who were more than happy to chase wildly over 3 acres with a pack of dogs while adults feasted on homemade sushi followed by ice cream.

Helping the Easter Bunny

Do we celebrate Easter in Egypt? Why of course we do. And not just once but three times, as there is nothing that Egyptians like more than a celebration. Sunday was the Western Easter, I'm not sure of the date of the Eastern Orthodox and Coptic Easter, and Shem el Nessim is coming up soon. Shem el Nessim is the pharaonic version complete with boiled eggs, onions and fish. This photo was taken at my multicultural Easter that a group of Finnish/Lebanese/Egyptian/Canadian/British friends celebrate together with foods and customs of all of our countries. A lovely afternoon.

Easter 2008, Round One

Happy Easter, everyone...or at least Happy western Easter. We celebrate both the European Easter and the Eastern Orthodox/Coptic Easter, which will come in about a month. So today was the first Easter of the year. I spent it at an early Easter brunch with my Lebanese/Finnish/Egyptian/Canadian adopted/extended family in Maadi. We had a lovely lunch and then an air-conditioned (it was over 100F/38C today) Easter Egg hunt after which the adults had a great time assembling Kinder toys from inside the chocolate eggs. After that I headed back to the countryside to join another Easter lunch/dinner in a garden at a neighbouring farm with an outdoor Easter Egg hunt that had children working in teams to solve puzzles that would lead to the location of a buried treasure. The adult team leaders, including myself, had to be able to explain the directions of the game in English, Arabic, and Danish...though other languages were helpful and we resorted to a mom to help out with the Danish.

I don't think that I will be hungry for a while.

Ornaments from Egypt

We have very talented glass blowers in Egypt who make glassware out of recycled glass, perfume bottles and also lovely handblown glass Christmas ornaments. I saw these on display as I was walking down Road 9 in Maadi.

Christmas picnic

Christmas Day in Cairo was sunny and fairly warm. A light jacket wasn't out of place but the sunshine felt great. One of my neighbours in this rather equestrian oriented neighbourhood decided that a ride to one of the hills in the desert near us and a picnic would be a fun way to spend a Christmas afternoon. We rode out to a point where my neighbour's jeep brought some rugs, lunch for us and a snack for the horses. Hope that your Christmas is as nice as mine.

Where to Go On The Holiday

Not all the visitors to the Giza pyramids are foreigners. During the Great Feast (Eid el Adha) Egyptians have about 4 days of holidays and some of them decided to visit the pyramids on Friday. The guards seemed to have been concerned about crowds and were restricting the number of visitors on the plateau, so we had a lovely time visiting on horseback. Ordinarily, there would have been about eight to ten times the number.