Ramadan in the Holy Land

The ninth month of the Muslim calendar is Ramadan.  Like many of our months, there are 30 days. What is different about their calendar is that it is a lunar calendar - and thus 11 days earlier than ours every year (so you would really be older in calendar years!) and the ninth month is a month of fasting.

There are many different types of fasting, so I'll explain.  During Ramadan (which this year was from Aug. 10th to Sept 8th) observant Muslims can not put anything in their mouths from sunrise to sunset.  Nothing.  No food, no drinks, no water, no cigarettes, no gum....no tooth brushes (blah).  Nothing.  The purpose is to learn and understand patience and spirituality.

Wow! A month of fasting! Think how much weight they would lose! Not really.  You start your morning early with a large breakfast, then have absolutely nothing (no water.....think about it... we are in a desert!) and then exactly at sunset you can eat! So you pig out in a meal that is called an iftar dinner.  It usually starts with  a fresh date (the fruit, you're pretty grumpy at this point so a romantic date wouldn't go too well), the date is super sweet after hours of nothing.  Your meal has soup, followed by hummus and salads, followed by lots and lots of rice and sides and meats, and you top it all off with rot-your-teeth-off super-sweet desserts.  Baklava is just one of many small desserts set out to enjoy.  After dinner you smoke nargila (a flavored tobacco smoked out of a large water pipe in social settings) and then quickly go home to your family (if you didn't have this meal at home).  The next morning, you wake up super early for your breakfast, but you are still stuffed from the night before - so you can't eat much and begin another day of fasting.  Repeat this 30 times and you have the month of Ramadan.  Every night you pig out like it is Thanksgiving - you definitely don't lose weight.

Though it sounds as if it could be a pleasant spiritual experience, to us it seemed like a difficult time to plan social events, a month of late dinners (when Ramadan falls in summer), and a month of grumpy counterparts.  (I would say colleagues but honestly most of our Muslim colleagues didn't fast and our colleagues who did fast did so for only a day or so).  One friend did fast every day and I very awkwardly apologized when I offered her my strawberry guava.

It was an interesting month.  And maybe you heard of the tense time in which Eid (the end of Ramadan) and Rosh Hashana (the Jewish New Year) all aligned in one weekend? It wasn't tense here - we just had a lot of time off of work!

"Cat Pee White Flower Tree"

“Something smells like cat pee.”  This is how our conversation started a few months ago.  We don’t have a cat.  Our neighbors don’t have a cat.  And despite the thousands of stray cats in Tel Aviv, we are more than 4 stories up so it couldn’t have been them.

After a short investigation (us smelling everything in the apartment and on the patio) we discovered the rancid smell was coming from a flower.  Yes, a flower.  When we moved into the place there outside gardens had lots of flowers, vines and small trees that had just been planted.  Because of our love of vegetable gardening we uprooted one of the small trees, transferred it to a big pot and moved it inside in March.  In June the rancid flowers appeared.

As biology was NOT my favorite subject, in July I called my favorite cousin-in-law who loves stinky flowers, Mitch.  Holding the video camera close to the tree to show Mitch the flowers we noticed small green balls!  A lime tree!!!  We were so excited. Throughout July and most of August about 10 limes appeared…but they were all tiny and hard and 8 of the 10 fell off the tree.

Then…when Jonathan was visiting we were excited to show him our odd little lime tree.  We put more soil in the pot and carefully watered it to make sure it would be healthy. – only to discover our limes were turning red!  No joke.

Internet searches surprisingly returned few-to-no results for “cat pee white flower tree.”  It wasn’t until mid-August that we made the greatest discovery yet of our little cat-pee tree:  the fruit is DELICIOUS!!! One day, while pinching the red limes which we now thought were mini-pomegranates, the soft fruit fell off the tree.  I picked it up from the ground, blew off the dust (my house is clean but this is right by the door), and popped the little guy in my mouth!  Not really – I washed it in the sink and then cut it in half.  The inside was white and there were a few round seeds.  The taste was like a strawberry, the texture like a pear, and the size like a grape.  “What an odd little fruit!”

After enjoying 6 of 9 fruits which appeared on the tree in the past 2 weeks, I finally brought one into work to ask the locals what it was. “Ma ze?”  Passion fruit.  A berry.  Cherry.  They were all wrong.

On my last attempt to “ask the locals,” one replied “Strawberry” (which is clearly is not; look at it!) and the other replied “Guava” (which is much larger and not red).  So instead of googling “cat pee white flower tree” I googled “Strawberry Guava.”  And wouldn’t you know it…it is a strawberry guava tree!  (There are also pineapple guava trees.)

The bad news about strawberry guava trees is that they grow like weeds.  The good thing about strawberry guava trees is that they grow like weeds – and taste DELICIOUS!!!  Hopefully I’ll be more successful in growing them next time!  This fruit rivals raspberries as my favorite!  While I can’t make a raspberry pizza or raspberry cheesecake with strawberry guavas, they supposedly taste great in drinks, by themselves or in ice cream – and I just happen to have become an expert at making Julia Child’s frozen custard.  Frozen strawberry-guava custard…Mmmm.