McGuire's of Arabia: Week of vacation

This past week we had off of school to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Even though we are not Muslim, we have plenty of reasons to celebrate as well. First, during Ramadan a lot of people are fasting during the day so even if you are not fasting you are not allowed to eat or drink in public. This includes being in your car because people can still see you which Jamie found out when a Saudi man gave him a nasty look for taking a drink of juice. Secondly, stores go back to their normal hours. The people here tend to be night people to start with, but during Ramadan not much is opened until about 9pm. During the week, this is way too close to my bedtime to be doing shopping. So you learn to live without unless absolutely necessary. Lastly, the fasting is over which means my students will be coming back to school with more energy than the first three weeks. Not a lot of our students were fasting everyday, but they would often choose a few days a week to not eat. I think is would difficult when you are expected to go to school and focus on learning even though you have no "fuel in the tank". Although Ramadan has its annoyances, it is inspiring to think of all the people who are fasting at one time for something that they believe in.

We were actually pretty productive with our time off. Jamie and Babu (our school's head custodian) took a day and painted our kitchen, dining room, laundry room, and downstairs bathroom. It looks beautiful! We also reorganized the bedrooms upstairs to start getting ready for the arrival of our little boy. We can now see how much room we have and compare it to the big items we need to get for him. We took two days and went to Bahrain and Khobar to get out of Jubail for a bit. Bahrain is always good for some yummy food and a movie. We saw The Expendables and even ate bacon for breakfast! The most interesting food we had was at a place called Pastarito. We ordered a pizza that was 1/2 pizza and 1/2 calzone (look below for a picture). It was a weird concept, but tasty. Jamie was also a great trooper as we went bargain hunting and comparison shopping. I was on the hunt for a maternity swimsuit, but found out that they are "out of season". What??!! It is still over 100 F on a daily basis which is actually too hot to swim unless you have a cooled pool (which do exist!) so I'm not quite sure what they were thinking.

Here are some pictures to go with our week. Enjoy!
Tara