Marhabah! Marhabah! Welcome!!! Lunch is Ready!!!

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Marhabah!  Marhabah!  Ahalan w' sahlan!  Welcome to the Nedjd!!!  You are being hugged by your friends as you debark.  The skies are blue, the temperature is a modest 92 degrees, and it will probably get up to 106 today, not too hot.  Out in the rugged hill country of south Saudi Arabia, there are green valleys and ancient ruins to explore.  This is Nejran, the kingdom just north of Yemen. In the old days Yemen was called Sa' bah, which the Bible in English called "Sheba."  This is the ancient land dominated by the people of the Sa' bah.  Welcome!  Welcome!  We have spread a feast to share with you!!  :)

MUSIC: When chosing the music for the banquet, I wanted it to be authentic, so I chose the oud, which is an ancient stringed instrument similar to a lute, with deep tones and melodic phrasing.  The oud in this piece is, in my opinion, fairly weak.  However, that may be due to a less than perfect sound system.  Winnie (Dryad) had suggested belly dancers, so I decided to look for a video that had both authentic music and a dancing style reasonably similar to what one would find in Nejran.  Most of the belly dancing we see in America is called "cabaret" style dancing.  And I do very much enjoy a wonderful cabaret-style show.  However, a dancer in Nejran would not rely much on the shimmy, or even the hip bump.  In the older traditional belidi (belly dance) style, a woman should be like a reed in the water, or grasses in the wind.  And so I went through quite a few videos, and finally I discovered Jillina's style, which clearly reflects these ancient traditions.  Jillina doesn't use a cane or stick in this number.  Actually in Nejran she would probably start dancing with a veil over her stick.  But in the final analysis, the choice of dance is personal.  Most traditional belly dance has been done by women for each other.  To me, belidi is the ultimate expression of femininity--a womanly and very personal artistic expression.  If you enjoy Jillina, you might also like the dance style of Isidora Bushkovski.  I wish I could have brought her along also, but since I could invite only one beledi group, I asked Jillina and her oud player to jet up from Monte Carlo to entertain at our lunch in Nejran.

HORS D'OUVERS: As you arrive in Nejran, you will notice a terrain of rugged hills and mountains with green and fertile valleys. We are out in the open land. The wonderful smells of our lunch reach you on cool breezes scented by smoke from campfires. You are brought along to an area where table cloths are spread on the ground picnic style, and tented pavilions offer shady places to sit and look out at the landscape. A large mobile facility is available for your conveninece, if you would like to "freshen up." They also have a big majlis (sitting room) in there, and a bunch of men are making themselves comfortable inside and watching American football games. As you find an inviting spot to sit on the pillows and fabrics in the shade, you notice cut glass dishes piled with large medjool dates. There are also a variety of tea pots, some with colorful enamel designs, and some of delicate china with pink English roses and gold leaf borders. Some pots offer heavily gingered tea (zinzibil), while others offer a robust English breakfast blend. You pour the tea into little glass cups that are the size of large shot glasses. The tea is hot and very sweet. Someone tells you that strong, sweet tea is "the whiskey of Saudi Arabia." There are also trays of roasted and salted watermellon seeds (foos foos), pastel colored Jordan almonds, and chocolates from Switerland. It's time to relax and enjoy conversation. Have some tea, have some foos foos and some dates. Life is good!

MORE HORS D'OUVERS: Soon, one of the host staff persons arrives bearing a heavy tray of cut fruit. There are slices of every kind of mellon, and this fragrant pile of fruit is added to the hors d'ouvers setting. "How nice!" you may be thinking. "Cool, sweet fruit to balance the hot tea and the salty seeds." Then, "Oh, look!" you think, "Here comes another tray of fruit!" and indeed, another tray appears, this one loaded with grapes and more melons. And before you have time to think, another tray arrives, loaded with more grapes, mellons, bananas, strawberries, oranges--and then another platter of fruit arrives. It's beginning to look as if someone decided to store all the fruit in the entire region right here on this table cloth, just to keep it safe--because even though there are quite a few of us here, there is absolutely NO WAY we will even make a dent in this supply of fruit. "Interesting," you think. And you reach for your favorite fruit to much on. After a while, you take a step back and view the area as a whole. "This is not so much a picnic "table" prepared for guests," you muse, "rather, it more clearly resembles an airport runway absolutely jammed with food." Well, we just hope that you feel welcomed!! :)

THE MAIN COURSE:  You've been sitting and talking for quite awhile, and now the main course starts to arrive.  Two sheep have been roasted in our honor.  They have been rubbed in minced garlic, and stuffed with cooked rice before roasting.  Now, they sit high on mounds of rice from their cooking, as well as other rice that has been cooked with onions, tomatoes and broth.  The scents of cumin, tumeric, cinnamon and garlic fill the air with the steam from the huge platters of rice and meat.  Chilled vegetables in yogurt sauces are served on the side.  Piles of round bread are available to use to scoop the meat and rice.  Hab Har (hot sauce--the name means literally "love the heat!") is available.  Some of the hot sauces are like salsa, and some are just HOT.  There are also chutneys and yogurt sauces. 

The highlight of the meal is, of course, the sheep's eyes.  The eyeballs are reserved for the most honored guest!  Is that person YOU?  Everyone looks to Samme, who has been very polite this entire time.  What will Samme say?  He politely declines the honor of eating the sheep's eyes.  But this is all, of course, good manners.  It wouldn't be polite to just say, "Yeah!  Of course I'm the most important person!  Gimme those eyeballs!"  So, the focus turns to Winnie.  Perhaps SHE should eat those eyeballs, since she is a definite instigator of the banquet.  Winnie surprises us all by politely declining as well.  Well, on second thought, perhaps we should have expected her to show great restraint and good manners as well.  Hmm.  Who should eat these prized sheep's eyeballs?  We wouldn't want them to get cold.  Some of our local friends from Nejran who joined us for the banquet take up the task of discovering who should be honored.  The local people have, of course, joined us for this special banquet, which they understood ahead of time would be a rarely seen 'mixed-gender' feast, with both men and women eating at the same table.  They even understood when we offered the sheep's eyes to Winnie.  After all, people from other places have other ways.  However, the local people who attended the banquet are all men.  They banter along in Arabic for awhile, politely declining the sheep's eyes and urging each other to eat them.  Finally, an elderly Uncle, who everyone knows is a man of great generosity and piety, is persuaded to eat them.  He is so happy to be so honored, and everyone happily has another cup of tea.

COFFEE:  After awhile, when everyone is so full that they have left a little food on their plate that they can't eat, the staff comes out and takes away the platters of rice and meat, along with the side dishes of vegetables and sauces.  In their place, they bring foot high dallahs, the famous Arabian coffee pots.  The coffee is thick and seasoned with cardamon, and served in tiny china cups.  The servants hold the dallah high above the table and long, curved streams of fragrant coffee arch expertly past the heads of the guests and into their cups.  The hot, bitter coffee is the perfect end to this basically healthy, but unreasonably large meal.  After our coffee, we stretch our legs by taking a scenic and leisurly walk through the rose garden, which puts us in the perfect mood to continue our afternoon stroll in England, at Winnie's blog on Stratford on Avon.