Moving On

So this is likely my last post on this particular journey.  I leave Jordan tonight - heading back to Canada with two stuffed suitcases and a cat - planning to arrive back in Toronto sometime midday on the 16th.

For the last several months I have been reading Herodotus' "The Histories" - written in 500 BC about travels through the part of the world I have been inhabiting for the last 12 + months.  In parallel, I have been reading Ryszard Kapuscinski's final book "Travels with Herodotus", a beautiful meditation on the life of a foreign correspondent - written 2500 years after Herodotus created the template for that profession.  This passage at the end of Kapuscinski's  book particularly struck me the other day:  "We do not know what draws a human being out into the world.  Is it curiousity?  A hunger for experience?  An addiction to wonderment? The man who ceases to be astonished is hollow, possessed of an extinguished heart.  If he believes that everything has already happened, that he has seen it all, then something most precious has died within him - the delight in life."

I think that I became addicted to wonderment living here.  Every single day offered up an amazing moment, something crazy or incomprehensible.  Last weekend, on one of my last adventures into the countryside and down to the dead sea, my travelling companions and I found ourselves lost on a winding country road.  We were stopped often by herds of passing sheep and goats - who get precedence on the roads - and then came across some bedouin ditch diggers who had created a foot wide gap in the road that couldn't be passed.  We three travellers - gringos all - got out of the car to investigate.  We received the immediate invitation for tea from the guys from their billy can by the side of the toad.  They were named Mahmoud, Mahmoud, Ahmad and Ahmad.  They started to fill the hole in again with boulders so we could pass.  They talked to us about farming.  We stood with them in the sunshine, drinking tea and chatting in halting arabic about olive trees and sesame plants and the outlook for rain this winter.  It was a timeless moment.  I'll miss that incredible friendliness and the chance encounters and the endless opportunities for a glass of sweet tea everywhere you go.

I will certainly miss the people I have encountered here - my awesome female friends who are conquering the middle east one day at a time whether in Iraq or Egypt or Jordan.

I will miss my excellent work colleagues and the feeling of making a difference against the odds. Just yesterday I stopped by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs where I worked during my first 6 months here.  Lo and behold I found out that the plans I had been working on through December to June had become applicable law!  They are actually implementing the policy... and they're actually doing it based on the recommendations I provided.  It blew me away.  I had no idea!  I was astonished at the accomplishment of all my ministry and municipal colleagues - I felt a twinge of pride at helping to bring them to that point.

And I will miss the people who I consider neighbours and who have offered me so much assistance during my time here:  my building's caretaker who is a labourer from rural Egypt...  my housekeeper, from Ethiopia, who takes care of my apartment and my laundry.   These are incredible warm, generous people to whom life, by luck of a passport, has dealt a tougher hand than my own.

I am curious to see what will strike me most about returning to Canada... what will shock me? What will seem completely normal?   Hey... maybe there will be one more blog post to report back on that.

Animals

My return date to Canada is mid-December and I have been spending an inordinate amount of time lately trying to sort out how to get my little foundling kitten to Canada with me.   To date this has required airport approvals in both Amman and Montreal, Jordanian rubber stamps from the Ministry of Agriculture, health certificates, pet passports.  I won't even begin to explain the intricate differences between the cat carrying cases accepted by Royal Jordanian vs. Air Canada and the impossibility of securing a Canadian approved case in Amman.   Suffice it to say, this is not a seamless, user-friendly experience.  Getting her to Toronto is my biggest nightmare at this point.

Having a pet here has been a learning experience.  First, it has given me an insight into east-west cultural differences around having an animal in the house.  Many of my female guests shriek or wince when they see my little Habibti.  The men tend to be more stoic.  In some way cats are viewed here as Torontonians view racoons.  Fluffy wild animals that eat scraps.  If I were to walk into a house in the Annex and encounter a pet raccoon, I might too express some surprise.

Except there is a much more reciprocal arrangement with the cats here than with truly wild animals.  Many people like cats - they leave them food and they often adopt them as outdoor creatures hanging out in the yard.  The butchers and restauranteurs leave out leftovers.  One of the cooks at the shwarma stand up the street has adopted a particular ginger Tom Cat.   The cat hangs out on the sidewalk late every afternoon watching out for the cars and mean passers-by who try to kick him ... the guy in the shwarma place eventually has a smoke break and brings a lump of meat for the cat.  This cat is wild in every other way, but likes this one guy.  They have a relationship.  I have witnessed this kind of connection in Damascus and Beirut and Jerusalem - across the middle east.  Consequently the cities are full of cats and kittens - sleeping on rooftops, jumping out of dumpsters, chilling on the sidewalks, hiding out in abandoned buildings.

Cats are not the only animals you see, of course.  There are also donkeys, sheep, goats and camels in grand quantities.  I love the donkeys, in particular, and want to save each and every one of them from the impossibly hard labour they are subjected to.  I have been seeing lots of baby donkeys lately, though I haven't yet investigated the challenges of bringing a donkey to Canada - I am not quite that crazy (yet).

Not surprisingly,  along with seeing a lot of animals you also see a lot of cruelty to animals.  Or indifference to animal suffering.   That, too, is part of the scenery.  It is usual to see overcrowded pet stores - birds are very common - where animals live in filthy conditions.  Or hundreds of little chicks, newly hatched, stuffed into a cardboard box and dyed flourescent pinks, greens, blues;  these little birds are taken home to small children who play with them as toys and invariably kill them in a couple of hours.

A year later, I am still not quite used to it.  As I was wandering down the street in a neighbourhood across town today, in search of a particular store that (purportedly) sold cat carriers, I came across a kitten who was clearly quite ill and very hungry and suffering from some kids teasing it.   I went to the nearest food store - it happened to be a KFC - to get some chicken, got rid of the kids and fed the little creature  This is always a dilemma.  Often I am too preoccupied to stop.  Today this little one got to me.  

So, the second learning experience has been meeting people who are involved in treating animals.  Shortly after I met my cat - who was an injured, half blind kitten living under a parked car in front of my house - I encountered an excellent group here called the Humane Centre for Animal Welfare who are like a humane society.  These are seriously nice people.  They have a neutre/spay program, they rescue abandoned animals.  They also treat the working animals of bedouin tribes and do a lot of outreach and education programs about how the health of their flocks is critical to their own livelihoods.  The centre is out on the edge of town where a lot of bedouin still graze their animals.  So it is not uncommon to arrive with your cat for a booster shot and have camels and donkeys and horses also in line for treatment.   Amazing.

Shortly after feeding the little kitten this afternoon, I found the pet store I was looking for and met the owner.  It turns out that he rescues parrots.  He buys them from bad pet markets where they are often abused - hit, starved - and brings them back to health.  He had a beautiful African Grey parrot who he had found two years ago.  These particular birds can live a long time and have amazing cognitive abilities.  This one had a vocabulary of 50 words - knew how to ask for his dinner, knew the man's name, sang songs.   That moment - standing in the store, talking to this man, meeting the parrot - gave me a little bit of hope.

The Christian Thing

I have been on a lot of hikes lately:  to Pella in the northern Jordan valley which overlooks the river Jordan and its incredibly fertile flood plain where fruit and vegetables never stop growing (the most delicious peaches I have ever eaten are in season 8 months of the year!  Take that Niagara!).   There are remnants of human settlements that date back 5000 - 8000 years, including Byzantine, Roman, Greek and Canaanite ruins, and evidence of nomadic hunters wandering through back to the early stone age - hundreds of thousands of years ago.

I was also in Machaerus, the stunning palace ruin of King Herod, whose kingdom included a strip of land along the east bank of the Jordan River and Dead Sea.  This palace - one of several of Herod's - is perched on a high hill top, protected by precipitous cliffs, overlooking the Dead Sea and the west bank beyond.  Here John the Baptist was held in a dungeon for saying the wrong thing about Herod's son's wife and eventually lost his head as a result.

When you are in these places you cannot help thinking about the sequence of things:  when did the Greek empire fade?  When did the Roman empire start to extend its reach and hold sway over these lands?  And when did Jesus come along and shake things up?   You find yourself in conversations you never imagined having:  Like, for example:  Hmmm,  I wonder if  Jesus ever walked here?  Did he ever take the eastern route from Galillee down to Jerusalem?   It would have made sense.  Walking up the hill from the Sea of Galilee to Umm Qais (Gadara), then heading 20km over to Pella, then Jerash, Amman (known as Philadelphia at the time), Madaba and then a hop over the Jordan river and a day's walk to Jerusalem.  These were all bustling cities about  day's walk from each other with populations who might have been interested in hearing his message.  He was obviously good at PR.

Whether Jesus took that route of not, the Byzantines thought that he did, so there are pilgrimage churches dating from the 2nd - 6th centuries all along the east bank of the Jordan river coming down from the Golan Heights.  In many cases the walls and foundations are still there, as are the elaborate tiled mosaic floors, which have weathered 1800 years of use.  It stops me cold when I think about the passage of time and the people who built these original structures.  They were only a couple of generations removed from Jesus Christ himself, and may even have heard stories from their parents who heard stories from their grandparents, right back to the "year zero" as we know it in the western calendar.

It is interesting for me to be confronted by all these thoughts of Christ as a person.  All of my colleagues here simply assume I am Christian.  Because I have to be something.  It is not an option not to have a religious identity.  There are only 2 types of cemeteries in this country - Muslim or Christian - and you have to be one of them because if you die, you have to be buried.  And that's the law.  And they know I am not Jewish.  And when I am asked what I am - which happens all the time - I say that "I guess I am Christian".  Because I know I am not Muslim - and they know that too.  

But I am not sure if anyone could have a more secular, scientific, rationalist upbringing than my own:  I was born in a post-war planned town full of Cambridge-educated British nuclear scientists fully focused on creating the new modernity.  If ever there was a place where God was dead ... or rendered irrelevant... Deep River would be it.   In Canada, I would never call myself a Christian.  So, of course it is fascinating to now live in the holy land and think more about these questions of faith and belief and religious or ethnic identity.  And about how these physical places have become a metaphor for guiding people all over the planet in their spiritual lives.

Thinking about these questions of belief and place have been further complicated by an interesting culture clash that I witness every day between work and home.

At work, I have a number of colleagues who are Christian.  They are generally Greek or Syrian orthodox and their families have been Christian ever since there was a Christ to believe in.  Their religious identities pre-date the coming of Islam by a good 400 years or so.  If you google their last names you see that at some point in the last few centuries, someone in their broader family or tribe (eg with the same last name) has been a Patriarch or a Bishop in Aleppo or Damascus or Beirut in one of the splinter factions of the Orthodox or Maronite Catholic Church.

This is just my observation - no research or backing for this - but I would say for many of these colleagues their Christianity is less about religious belief or observance, and more about an ethnic identity.  Some young men, in particular - who definitely don't go to church on Sunday mornings and are not remotely devout - cleave to this identity and are fond of tattooing christian imagery on their bodies - the cross, images of Christ, bleeding hearts.  I was on a dive boat with a group of Maronite Christians from Beirut several months ago and the fellows were all tattooed.  One young man had a huge tat that covered his upper thighs and full torso that read something like "onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war."  In English.  One of my young colleagues has a big tat of Jesus on his shoulder.  These are the same guys who are going clubbing every night and are enjoying alcohol to the fullest, in defiance of the majority rules.  It is all a part of their definition of being Christian.

So I contrast this to the situation I find around me in my apartment building.  I happen to live surrounded by neighbours who are evangelical christians - mostly from the United States, but also from Australia and the Netherlands.  Most of them are here studying intensive arabic at a purpose-built language school that was created in order to teach proselytizers how to bring the "word of God" to this part of the world.   One of these neighbours has been here for 14 years.  He is originally from Missouri, I think, but now lives here in Amman and, when I asked him what his job was, he told me that he spends his time in the homes of Iraqi refugee families "helping them clear up their misunderstandings about the bible".  So that is what he does all day.

I find this both deeply disturbing and richly layered with irony.   That someone feels compelled to bring the 'word of God' to a culture where it is the norm to pray 5 times a day, and there is someone singing from a minaret daily like clockwork to remind us all that 'God is Great', is simply absurd to me.   To propose that their brand of evangelical christianity - that is about 5 minutes old in the scheme of human history - is somehow more worthy of attention than the churches that have been here since the beginning of the Christian era is also suspect.  I acknowledge that my reaction is visceral, knee-jerk, but I just don't like the gall, the imposition, the idea that their faith or belief system is somehow more valuable than the those of the people who live here.

Plus - unlike the tattooed guys - this group doesn't go clubbing or go drinking and they are much too earnest and much less fun.  Believe me, there is nothing more achingly dull than an afternoon barbecue with a group of evangelical christians in the holy land!

I am not sure what to make of all these observations.  I am still sorting through them.  I am actually not sure there is a conclusion to be made, except to say that the internal contradictions between historical fact, physical place, and spiritual belief within this very fluid and wide open notion of "being a Christian" is totally fascinating.  All the more so when I imagine that I have trod on the same footpath which that guy called Jesus Christ walked about 2000 years ago.

the election issue

This post is dedicated to my friends and family in Toronto, where the municipal election campaign is coming down to the wire.  Having followed these elections from afar - particularly the mayoral race - with an ever-increasing sense of morbid fascination and dismay, my heart goes out to the residents there who have some difficult choices to make on Monday.  

Not that this is any consolation, but I am also surrounded by wacky electioneering here in Jordan.  About two weeks after I arrived here last December, parliament (which by many accounts was more than somewhat dysfunctional) was dissolved and the appointed cabinet was sent off to rewrite the election law to render better results next time around.  So I guess that happened without any fanfare and suddenly  11 months later, approximately two weeks ago, a parliamentary election campaign opened with a bang.

In the course of two days, the streets of the city were taken over by campaign posters.  And every day more appear. There are handwritten banners across all the streets, taking over the parks and circles.  There are printed posters plastering the sides of buildings, tacked to every possible street sign.   White canvas tents filled with plastic garden chairs have taken over the vacant lots all around town and out into the countryside where candidate meetings seem to be going on every night.  I guess petitioners come and make requests and candidates make promises.  And then maybe some roast lamb on a bed of rice is served on huge trays for all comers.  I am not sure about that last part - but keen to find out.  I am trying to convince my friend Robert to check out a meeting with me one evening, where we will unquestionably stick out of the crowd.

Like in places such as Hungary or Lebanon or New Zealand, the Jordanian parliament has seats reserved for minorities - circassians and chechens - and also for women.  So it is interesting to see some (small!) diversity in the posters.  I have also noticed one candidate who is posing in traditional bedouin garb in some posters - kefiyeh, dishdash - and western jacket and tie in others.   Others are almost uniformly in western business attire.

We will get the full day off work on election day - November 8th, I think - though I am not sure whether that helps or harms voter turnout.  I would think the desire to head out of town for the day off will be strong.  We'll see.   In the meantime, I am enjoying parsing the script on the posters and trying to figure out if there are any actual election issues.

I can't vote here and I also won't be able to exercise my vote in Toronto, so I can only hope that my compatriots make wise choices in exercising their right!  Good luck.  May the worst man not win.

Surprise!

It is a year ago this week that I first came to Jordan on a 'recon' trip to check out the potential assignment here.  That has made me a little nostalgic or reflective.   As I look back through the posts on this blog, I have been thinking about what I have learned.

One thing that really strikes me is that a lot of this blog is devoted to the element of surprise that perpetually lurks around every corner in this part of the world.  In the last 48 hours alone: finding myself in an unanticipated downpour while a full rainbow framed the Roman ruins across the valley; the stairs on the way to work this morning completely collapsed and fallen in as a result of the heavy rainfall -- an amazing thing to see;  this afternoon I was followed home from work at the end of the day by 15 adolescent schoolboys calling and singing all around me at the same time as a senior official was calling me out of the blue to intervene on his behalf on a matter I have nothing to do with.  This is both completely normal and completely bizarre.  Living here, I realize, has restored my capacity for wonder.  I am thankful for that - appropriate for the Thanksgiving season.

But nothing has surprised me lately as much as an event I attended last Friday afternoon.  A horse beauty pageant.

Who knew such things existed?  It was held at the picturesque Royal Stables - outdoors in a lovely wooded valley - and there were actual princesses and upper crust Emiratis and Saudis in attendance.  There was also a fantastically tony panel of posh European judges sitting seriously over score sheets.  Secretly, I suspect that the judges were all younger sisters or second cousins of minor European noble families... Younger brother of a belgian prince, a disgraced cousin of the Thun & Taxis family... that kind of thing...fodder for Hello!  magazine.  Who else becomes a judge at a horse beauty pageant?

In case you are picturing a show jumping or dressage competition in your head, think again.  This was all about the pure beauty of Arabian horses - not performing tricks with humans - just being horses in their naked glory.  There they were, free of bridles or saddles, romping around a big paddock.  It was a little bit like the film "Best in Show" about dog shows, only bigger and less orchestrated.

Of course, I became fascinated by the award categories and the criteria by which the horses were being judged.  There were competitions for "best female head"  and "best male head".    There were age categories - Stallions born 2000 or before... Stallions born between 2001 - 2003...  who were run around the ring on a loose halter with a human alongside.  And there was my favourite category: the "Liberty" class where a horse was let loose and encouraged/goaded into running around for 5 minutes.   For me it was the show-stopper - like the Evening Gown competition in Miss Universe.   I learned by studying the competition booklet, that these horses are judged on the beauty of their: head and neck; body and top line; legs; movement.  No requirement to answer a skill-testing question.

Here's the thing:  as surprising as this event was to me, I came away with a whole new appreciation for horse beauty.  My god, these horses were gorgeous.  I can understand why a person would become obsessed, start a stable, spend her time trying to breed this beauty.  Seeing these creatures run around tapped into some kind of really deep-seated definition of strength and freedom and mythology.  A field full of Pegasuses.

I had sort of hoped I might meet a very handsome, unmarried, (Oxford-educated) Emir or Sheikh.  But that didn't happen this time.  Have to wait for the next Equestrian Foundation event...

Field Trip

It has been a few weeks since I have managed to post anything.  A combination of things have kept me away.  Busy at work finalizing the first draft of a plan for the city of Amman.  An Eid trip out to the amazing eastern desert with its endless tracts of sand covered with black basalt boulders stretching as far as the eye can see toward Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia.  (There are amazing Roman fortresses out in the middle of the desert, built from the black volcanic boulders, that demarcate the edge of their empire.  It is amazing to imagine how they inhabited the landscape 2 millenia ago.  Those Romans were tough.) After that, a weekend at the dead sea to relax.  And then another weekend spent camping in the Dana biosphere reserve with a dear friend who was visiting from Vienna.  In short, life is good.

Despite long hours spent in the office during the work week, working on all the last minute things that go into releasing a government document - fact-checking, proofreading, briefings - I did get out of the office last week to do some field verification.  My favourite part of the job.

This time a colleague and I were verifying the mapping of agricultural lands in the city of Amman.  For reasons too complicated to explain, the mapping of agricultural lands is a tricky business and the lands themselves - which are scarce in this arid land - are constantly under development pressure.  I realized, in fact, that a lot of land I would have dismissed as sand year ago I can now identify as arable.  My eye has been trained to see farmland where I once would have seen desert.

Of course, as always, we came across wonderful and strange sights.  In addition to the endlessly fascinating (to me, anyway) bedouin tents and flocks of goats, camels and sheep camped out at the edge of the city, we saw new things as well.  In the middle of a completely rural landscape, in the heart of fertile olive groves, we stumbled upon a vast, newly built, utterly deserted social housing project that is a the result of a government housing initiative.  Completely isolated from any services, you cannot help wondering how and where the inhabitants will buy groceries, access employment, take their kids to school.  Another stark example of bad public policy at work.

Later, driving through a village at the south end of the city, our driver, Mansour, announced to us that we were passing his family's shop and that right behind it, there was a gold souq - would we like to see it?  Sure, we said - not quite certain what to expect.  Some cheap gold for sale?  So he drove us down a couple of dusty narrow laneways and past the requisite group of guys fixing a car, to pull up beside a Roman ruin, columns and intricate scrollwork intact, giant limestone foundation blocks still in place.  There were chickens scratching around and kids playing in the dirt.  Turns out  this was a Roman gold treasury - hence 'gold souq' - and the village has built up around it, just taking the ruin for granted as a part of the landscape.  My colleague had never heard of the site before - it was entirely new to her.  I went back to the office and double-checked... yes, we had identified this on the major antiquity map.  So that is a step in the right direction.  Now, perhaps, someone will pay attention to the site?

And so it goes.

Time keeps sliding by here.  It is October 2nd and the weather still feels like midsummer - 30 degree days and 20 degree lovely starry nights.  Except for the dust.  Mad dust storms, completely out of season, have been sweeping the city.  One came through this afternoon - something that looks suspiciously like a storm cloud, sudden wind, all at once zero visibility with sand swirling everywhere.  30 minutes later it's gone.  This time, mercifully, I had the foresight to close my windows!

The Holy Month

We are almost through the whole holy month of Ramadan.  Today is probably the day, but for sure sometime this weekend the end will be announced.  Still to be determined.  In any case, the whole city is inching closer by the minute to the big Eid celebration that marks the end to the month-long fast.  My neighbourhood is about to get very loud.

It was my first time spending Ramadan in a predominantly muslim country and, in retrospect, it is amazing to me how little I knew about this major religious festival that 20% of the world's population observes.  It was humbling being a total outsider. Back in the home country, I am surprised by people who know nothing about Christmas traditions.  How can a person live their life without ever knowing about Christmas trees, say?  I was that person here.  I knew nothing about Ramadan, shockingly ignorant. The sum total of my knowledge prior to coming here was that people don't eat during the daylight hours.

Well it is true that people who are observing the fast don't eat from about 4:00am - when a "pre-call" to prayer from the neighbourhood mosque alerts people that they better eat now or wait til later - until after the evening call, around 7:15pm.  They also don't drink any liquids during the day - which was tough this year, when Ramadan coincided with the worst heat wave in recent history.  And no cigarettes or sex during the day.  And so on.  So, kind of a full body - full conscience cleanse each and every day for a month.

Because it is an officially observed, state sanctioned festival there are quite a few legal rules that go along with the observance.  Needless to say all the liquor stores are closed for a full month - absolutely no selling of alcohol.  You cannot eat or drink outdoors.  That means no restaurant patios, no snacking or sipping drinks on your balcony at  home during daylight hours, no quick sip from a water bottle in your back pack if you are walking down a hot dusty street and feeling dehydrated.  In the workplace in city hall, the big drinking water dispensers were all emptied and removed on the first day of Ramadan and the kitchen was shut tight as a drum.   In addition to legal issues around ingesting food or drink in a public office, it is also considered deeply offensive to those who are fasting, so there are strong social pressures to maintain solidarity with your coworkers.

There are a few workarounds, of course.   There are special 'tourist licenses' that some businesses can get so they can continue to serve food and drink during the course of the fasting hours.  (With their shutters very, very closed to outside view).  And at work, the non-fasters could lock themselves in empty offices to have a snack or a drink that they brought in from home.   I have to say, though, that not being able to drink my 6 glasses of water a day at my desk meant I was really dehydrated and limp at the end of a work day.  And not being able to drink my quota of coffee in the mornings had very, very negative side effects for my colleagues in the first weeks.  And I wasn't even fasting.

Now with all of those rules - which I had started to learn about in the weeks and months before the fast began - I had a picture in my mind of a very solemn month.  This is probably because I connect religious fasting with the Christian observance of Lent with its emphasis on penance and reflection on Christ's pain and suffering.   So I had been imagining a month of self- denial and quiet reflection.  Boy was I wrong.

The first indication that I didn't quite get what I was in for, happened on the first night of the festival back in mid-August.  The actual start date - like the end date now - was shrouded in a bit of mystery - would it be Tuesday?  Would it be Wednesday?   It all depended on when the powers that be saw the moon.  The night they did see it - boom - Ramadan was announced with incredibly loud cannon fire from the citadel hill, followed by mass fireworks from rooftops and balconies, and children spontaneously running out into the street chanting 'Ramadan, Ramadan!'   It was joyful.  The coloured, blinking decorative ramadan lights came on in windows all over the city.  The extremely nostalgic, affective Coca-Cola Ramadan ads came on TV - kinda like the old "i'd like to teach the world to sing" Christmas one that they used to do.  People were filled with a charitable, celebratory spirit.  The whole city got loud and stayed loud til 4am.

And so it was every night after that.  At about 10pm, after the evening 'iftar' meal which breaks the fast, the streets filled up.  Music, singing, card games.  The cafe across the street from my house had a live band and bingo game every night on the terrace til about 3am.  People had social obligations at midnight... 1 am.... 2am.  Meanwhile, the more observant were spending a lot of time in the mosque in the evenings for the reading of verses of the koran.  Over the course of the month, all of the verses must be read, and many mosques broadcast the work in progress, which adds to the general noise level.

All of this night time activity means that people are exhausted at work in the day time.  Myself included - it was hard to sleep in all the noise.  And many businesses totally flip their hours - closed during the day, open at night.  Some people stay up all night after iftar to eat their second meal in the wee hours of the morning at 3am/ 3:30am and then catch a few winks before getting to work at 9am or 10am.  Now, at the end of the month, the noise level has died down considerably.  Largely, I think, because people are too exhausted and dehydrated to keep up the merriment.

So at this point  - today?  tomorrow?  - I will find out what the Eid festival is all about.  I am imagining more music, dancing, eating, drinking in public and even more chanting and fireworks.  But who knows.   I will probably be surprised.   Actually, to get a bit of a break, I am heading out to the stark eastern desert tomorrow morning for a couple of days to see Umm Al Jimal, an ancient, abandoned Roman town carved from black basalt rock.  Perhaps there I will encounter the quiet and solemnity I have been imagining?