Christmas was an interesting non-event. A mass of ex-pats jumped on planes to make it home to big snowstorms in Europe and the US while some of us stayed in town to hold down the fort with an eye to adventure travel in the near future.
I decided to host a small dinner party on Christmas Eve, although nothing about the dinner was particularly Christmas-like (except the cocktail napkins), much to the surprise (and perhaps disappointment) of my guests. I served salmon with a fennel reduction over black linguini which isn't offered in any restaurant here so I think the lack of a Christmas goose, egg nog or decorated sugar cookies was excused. At the table was an American, a German, a Pakistani, an Iranian and me. I wanted to invite some local male colleagues with their wives but after learning that the spouses know as much English as I know Arabic, I couldn't extend the invitation.
One of the interesting things to note when one moves overseas is the choice of "essential" things that "must" go into the luggage. I probably brought too much because I cringed at the idea of having to look for things I already owned and pay a lot more money for lower quality or comparable examples. One of the items that had to come with me were my antique sterling fish fork and knife set. When visiting Hamburg, Germany about a decade ago, a friend taught me how to eat fresh fish properly with these implements; my initial attempts were met with a look of disdain, much like that of an Asian demonstrating their nimbleness with chopsticks to a western rogue. I decided to serve salmon because I wanted to set the table with my widely-traveled fish implements. That's when my inner Mrs. Dalloway kicked in.
Despite only being in my furnished apartment less than two months, I found myself on a mission to set a proper table for this small dinner. Some of the standard-issue kitchen items in the apartment were unacceptable so I had to find proper wine glasses, chargers (since I couldn't find a decent placemat), linen napkins, coasters, candlesticks, dripless candles... this was a small dinner but it's preparation was a huge sourcing exercise, especially in a culture where BIG, ORNATE and COLOR inform the product development; it seemed an impossibility to find unscented, plain white pillar, votive and taper candles..."less is more" is not a sensibility here.
Christmas Day was gorgeous...beautiful sunny weather. I went to a spa with a colleague to indulge in a frankincense facial, a nod to the Three Kings, which was as close as I got to acknowledging the holiday (except for the cards I sent mid-month for the first time in 10 years). We arrived early and enjoyed the overly-designed lobby in the hotel with a coffee. After a brief wait in another gargantuan lobby at the spa, we were each taken to equally huge treatment rooms with Arabian-inspired decor and a bell outside each door. The petite, Thai facialist with flawless, porcelain skin described the treatment I was about to receive in enthusiastic broken English and when I asked her if she used the products to achieve her gorgeous skin, she answered "No. Yoga." Christmas indeed!
Over the next 90 minutes, while I lied on a table and she slathered a wide range of fragrant botanical products containing frankincense and Moroccan rose on my face, I conjured up an award-winning barter...this delicate creature charged with cleansing my pores is an incredible athlete, walking along the water at 5am and practicing yoga for 2 hours thereafter. She needs a proper space to practice Hatha and I need a private teacher. As luck would have it, she lives within walking distance of my apartment so I came home and arranged for all the furniture in a 3rd unused bedroom to be removed and it will soon be my "no excuses" sanctuary for daily practice with a certified pretzel.
Frankincense has a fascinating ancient history - called the pearls of the Arabian desert, milky-white droplets of resin are found under the cut bark of the boswellia sacra tree, which is indigenous to the peninsula. For more than 4000 years, the fragrant white smoke of frankincense has scented Sumerian temples as the perfumed smoke was revered for taking the peoples' prayers to the gods; frankincense was presented on the 12th night to Jesus because it symbolized divinity; the Roman historian Pliny described it a "silver incense;" Alexander the Great was plotting an invasion of Southern Arabia to control the trade at the point of origin and only his death stopped him. The incense I noticed throughout the offices upon arrival is frankincense, burned in censers to purify and protect against evil spirits.
Frankincense was censed in the receiving line of a Bedouin wedding I attended New Year's Day evening...stay tuned for that tale.
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