Bayraminiz Mübarek

October 15, 2007

This last weekend was great. I got to meet many new people, practice my language a bunch, and eat tons of food. I went down to one of my friend’s villages, which is about 20 min south of my town because they are a bit more religious and his family was having a huge celebration for the end of Ramadan.

Ramadan is the Muslim holy month when they do not eat during daylight hours. As with every aspect of life here I wanted to learn and understand more about the people I’m serving so I asked anyone I could what the significance of Ramadan is and why they fast during this month. What I learned however was not why they fast but just another example of the leftover Soviet mentality. There are many things people do here not because they make sense but because they’ve been told to or learned it that way. Many people here are much different than most people in the US in the sense that they don’t question authority. They just do what they are told and go on about life, and Ramadan seems to be an example of that. Each person I asked why they fast had a different answer and all of them revolved around because it is our custom, or because this is what Muslim people do, nothing about the significance of why the fast happens, when it happens, or for how long. I don’t write this in an attempt disrespect the people here only as an observation of things I’ve seen and experienced.

With the lack of understanding of why the holiday happens aside, we had a wonderful time and got a four-day weekend out of it. I got to my friends house around 12:30 and he had already had lunch 3 times at 3 different houses. My arrival created a reason to have another lunch and that theme carried on for the rest of the day. Throughout the day we went to six different houses and had six meals that were all the same in both content and size. It didn’t matter how many times you said, “no, no I just ate and I cant eat anymore” you were still served massive amounts of food. What else we learned was that if you didn’t serve yourself or you didn’t serve yourself the “proper amount” whoever was sitting next to you would take your plate and fill it with twice as much as anyone else was eating.

All of the meals were the same. We would get to the house go in sit down and have tea with really great sweet cakes, sweet biscuits, or any other type of sweet pastry. Then the meal would follow. This consisted of Plov, which is rice baked with massive amounts of butter then nuts, dried fruit and more butter are poured over it. This is also the national meal of Azerbaijan. Then we had either cabbage or grape leaf dolma. This is one of my favorites. It is a rice and meat mixture that is wrapped and cooked in either grape leaves or cabbage. Then a sour yogurt is poured over the top of it. Then there were the whole chickens or a once whole chickens depending on where in the line of guests you fell. Then there was the lamb stew stuff that was lamb cooked with potatoes and some sauce that I poured over the plov in an attempt to counter the massive amounts of butter. And finally there was the staple Azeri salad of cucumber and tomatoes. That’s literally all the salad is, cut cucumbers and cut tomatoes and it’s at every lunch and dinner here, but they are the best tomatoes I’ve ever eaten since everyone has a kitchen garden here and these are picked ripe off the vine right as the meal begins. After the main meal is over we would sit and eat either bad watermelon, which is now out of season or great pomegranate, which has just come into season. Then the table would be cleared and more tea and sweets would be brought out. After the tea was done we would say our goodbyes, wash, receive our eggs and move to the next house on the list and start the entire thing over again.

As we would walk we would see everyone else from town walking to their next meal and we would play the egg game. The eggs we were given as we left were hardboiled and dyed a tint of red by placing onionskins in the water as they were boiled. As you walked to the next house you would challenge other people for their eggs. One person would hold their egg in their closed hand with one tip facing up while the other person would hit their egg on top of it. The person’s egg that cracked lost and the other person would get their egg. The objective was to get as many eggs as you could. We on the other hand couldn’t understand the need for any more food and didn’t want to walk around with our hands and pockets full of eggs so for some mysterious reason we always hit the egg in a way to make ours break. I think the kids really thought we sucked and sometimes would try to have mercy on us and let us keep our broken egg, but we insisted that they won the egg fair and square and that they needed to take the egg.

I had the opportunity of watching the end Ramadan while I was in Egypt. Five years later I’m in another Muslim country but this time I had a much better experience as I felt that I was able to participate rather than just watch from the outside.