Celebrating Chinese New Year in Saudi Arabia!

On Sunday, which is a weekday here, the ladies celebrated Chinese New Year, the Year of the Horse.  As with everything here, planning a party takes several more steps.  And then in the end, you need to be flexible, because you are not going to find everything that you want.  You make do.  And this became quite the group effort.  I had wanted to have red plates, gold napkins, red forks, chopsticks and Chinese New Year decorations, normally not a big goal.  I went to the mall and 2 grocery stores-no red plates or forks.  I did find gold napkins.  It is not trivial getting to the mall/grocery.  You can take the morning bus and spend the whole morning there, or take a cab, or bum a ride with an Exxon wife if you find out they are going shopping.  A friend and I went to a stationary/party/craft store.  Although they had two decorations displayed, they did not have any for sale.  My friend said that she had 14 sets of chopsticks and New Year decorations from when she lived in China.  Another friend, whose husband has a company car, went to a store and found red plates and then to another store and found the cutest red and gold glasses and a golden stuffed dragon.  A third friend, whose husband has a company car,  found circular and rectangular doilies that could be used as placemats.  (As you can probably tell, I have "car envy".  Our company doesn't provide drivers or cars.  :)  I am hesitant to take cabs by myself, just in case the cab driver is not there when I am finished and I am the lone woman amid the men waiting outside the mall.  Not a good thing here.)  Also, I find myself becoming a pack rat and saving everything, "in case I might need it".  For example, the raffia used to hang a decoration on the front door was from a flower arrangement that a friend gave me when I hosted a  birthday party a few months ago.    I am usually a tosser. 

 

This is the year of the Horse, so we had to have a Horse centerpiece.  It just so happens, I bought a statue of a horse in Athens.  One online site that I looked at said that you should have a Tray of Togetherness which included tangerines and 7 other things.  Well, there was no way I would be finding this stuff here.  I thought that I would get by with the tangerines to help hold up the horse in the tray.  Of course, there were no tangerines at the market.  So, I settled for oranges.  It was a Tray of Simplified Togetherness.

I read that you should put the "Fu" symbol on your front door upside down.  That brings good luck when people enter.

 

 

I asked everyone to wear red.  One of the ladies suggested that we all wear red flowers in our hair.  She told me the location on the compound where I could find pretty red flowers.  That morning, I went out early to snip 14 of them.  I had no hairpins, so I borrowed 14 of them.  As each person came in the door, our "multilingual" greeter met each person and put a pretty red flower in their hair.  These were the leftovers:

Then, we sat down for our feast.  Everyone brought the most wonderful dishes.  We had Hundred Corner Shrimp Balls, Spicy Sweet Potato noodles, Sweet and sour chicken, Lion's Head Balls with a sauce, Szechuan noodle salad, fried rice, sushi made to look like little pandas, Kung Pao chicken, BBQ chicken wings, Spicy Shrimp, Prawn spring rolls.  And for desserts Almond cookies, chocolate covered lychees and homemade fortune cookies!!  The lady who made the fortune cookies also came up with the funny fortunes. 

Since they are not legible here, here are a few that are most appropriate for Saudi Arabia:

 

Keep calm and pretend you like it being 125 #&*!ing degrees

You can always find happiness at work on Friday-(Thursday KSA)

When everything's coming your way, it's likely you're in the wrong lane.

Keep calm and keep telling yourself shopping at Panda is just like home.

Keep calm and stop trying to guess what part of the goat this is.

Keep calm and ignore that car passing you on the sidewalk.

Keep calm and put on your @#$!in abaya

 

 

 

Again for the food, you have to be flexible here.  After 3 grocery stores, I could not find water chestnuts for the Hundred Corner Shrimp Balls.  So, I used shredded cabbage.  I could not find panko bread crumbs, but my friend who almost runs a grocery store from her place had exactly the 3 cups that I needed that she had brought from the US.  The lady making the Lion's Head Meatballs got the cornstarch from me.  I got the lychees for another lady.   The lady who did the Panda sushi has a special mold for it and uses the seaweed wrapper to make it look like a panda.  Here is a picture of them (but not with the lady who made them).  I asked her to hold them up so that I could take a good picture.

 

 

Here is a picture of the food spread:

 

I can not believe this, but I did not get a picture of the desserts!  They were so good!  I have decided that I need to appoint a person to be the photographer because I get too busy and I forget to take pictures.  I didn't get a picture of the ladies getting done up with the flowers in their hair, the decorations, the desserts, the ladies reading their Chinese horoscopes.  One lady had printed out the index of the Chinese Zodiac with the corresponding birth years.  We determined who was which animal and then read the corresponding horoscopes.  Very insightful!  :)  

Here are some group pictures:

It was a very fun and delicious celebration!!

Happy New Year everyone!!

Follow up to "Issue of Taking Pictures:

This is a follow up to my last blog, "The issue of taking pictures". 

I have a friend who moved from here to outside of Bahrain.  When she visited a mall in Bahrain, she looked at the advertising posters in the stores and told me that the faces are not blurred, as they are here.  She said that they look like normal advertising posters, as at home.  Since Islam is the state religion in Bahrain,  this seems to provide more evidence that the blurring of faces on advertising posters is not a Muslim practice, but a Saudi cultural one.

Yesterday, I asked a lady from Jordan if I could ask her a question about "privacy" in the Middle East.  I am sure that she thought, "Oh, no!  Not another one of these questions.".  But she smiled sweetly and said, "Of course, I will try to answer."   I explained about my curiosity about the blurring of the models faces or mannequins not having heads in the mall here.  I asked if this is the way it is in Jordan.  She laughed and said that the models faces in advertising posters are NOT blurred in Jordan, that they look just like they do in the West. 

Then, I asked whether you can take pictures in public in Jordan, where strangers might be in your photo.  For example, one of my friends took a picture of the produce area of a grocery and one of the workers came up and asked him to delete it because there was a Saudi woman in that area picking out vegetables. My friends and I took a picture at an open air market making sure not to have any Saudi people in it.  But you could see that it made people uncomfortable. 

 

 

The lady from Jordan said that would not happen in Jordan, unless you went up to the person and were taking a close picture of them.  The lady from Jordan is Muslim.  She said that this is not a Muslim practice but a Saudi cultural one.  As everyone says, Saudi culture is very private.  They live behind high walls.  Most Saudi women are completely covered, except their eyes. 

I ran across a blog about life in Saudi Arabia called American Bedu: http://americanbedu.com/.  The writer is a former CIA intelligence officer with a focus on Southeast Asia and the Middle East.  She met her Saudi husband in Pakistan and they moved to Riyadh where they raised two kids.  So, I believe her opinion has some credibility.  Here is what she said about privacy in Saudi Arabia.

"One will always hear references of the closed and conservative culture of Saudi Arabia. And the culture is the most closed and conservative when it comes to protecting privacy. This can be protecting the privacy of an individual, a couple and/or a family. Saudis value privacy and even the most innocuous or happy moments that one may typically wish to shout out in a western world will not happen in Saudi Arabia. For example, it is customary to keep engagements private. A couple may be engaged for a year before other members of the extended family will realize an agreement to marry was in place. It is customary to keep silent about illness. If a family member has a disease or is ill, a family may choose to keep this information private. The family may eventually acknowledge a family member is ill but will not advise the true cause or diagnosis of the illness. A Saudi family may have a child who is learning disabled or handicapped in some way. Outsiders may never be aware of the existence of this child. This child may be sheltered from view. A Saudi couple who has been living apart ostensibly under the guise that the spouse lives in one city due to the job and she in another city for the children’s school may actually have been divorced for many years but it is not openly acknowledged. These are just some of the examples of which I am aware of how some Saudis will choose to guard their privacy."

So...after "not extensive" research, I conclude that this is not a Muslim trait or a Middle Eastern trait, extreme privacy must be a cultural trait of Saudi Arabia.  Therefore, my next question is whether this is a Bedouin trait because I think it would be interesting to know the "why" of this.  Did extreme privacy help with survival at one time in Saudi Arabia?