Thursday, Friday

I believe that Amy and I have both previously described how kind, warm, and welcoming our landlords, the Sidani family, have been to us. We have been invited frequently to stop by for coffee sometime, but as gringos, we find it hard to know how to accept such an invite. It seems rude and inconvenient to just drop by unannounced. A Lebanese friend of ours assured us that there is no inconvenient time under such circumstances, but still we were gunshy. On Thursday, however, our landlord’s son formally invited us to celebrate the iftaar, or breaking of the daily fast, that evening with them.

The food was great…vegetable soup, roast beef, falafel. Although there were some exceptions like fattouche, the fare was generally not the sort of thing that is served in Lebanese restaurants (which I supppose is like anywhere else). The conversation was good as well. We learned that Mrs. Sidani married Mr. Sidani when she was 13 and had her first child at 14. Mr. Sidani told us some stories from the days of the war, in particular about his 5 years spent with Save The Children. Obviously it was a terrible time, but he had quite a sense of humor about daily task of surreptitiously carrying large amounts of cash around a city during wartime. After dinner we had coffee and Qatayef and smoked argileh and talked more about cabbages and kings. Ramadan Kareem!

I took most of Friday off, which means that I only worked till 4:30pm or so. I’d been burning the midnight oil all week working on a project that experienced a significant degree of what another client of mine calls “scope creep” and I was determined to get out. We hung out with Mike at Torino for happy hour and then met up with Carrie at Scallywags for another great dinner. We ended up meeting up with Richard the owner later at a (what I was told was gay) dance club called Gallery. Actually, I don’t think it was a dance club, but we sure were dancing. It turned into such a late night that I almost wasn’t in the mood for the Halloween party at the US Embassy the next day. Almost. More on that later.

UPDATE 2005-11-03– I forgot to mention that during our post-iftaar conversations, Mrs. Sidani told us that her maiden name is Yammout. We live on Yammout Street. The next street over is Sidani.