June 6: Miscellaneous

1) Ramadan hours for restaurants get strange. Our local Avocado, which sells burgers and various kinds of juices and shakes, is open at first from 3PM-8PM. Iftar is usually around 7:45PM, so Avocado closes shortly after Iftar. It then closes for three hours, until it opens again from 11PM to 2AM, presumably after the employees eat Iftar and pray Taraweeh. Fortunately, most businesses on their storefronts have signs that explain their Ramadan hours.

2) We have a cafe right across the street called Al Shareef Cafe. Every other night, after around 10 or 11PM, we can hear occasional cheers from the men in the cafe from a soccer game. Even across our apartment, we can hear the cheers as if we were in the cafe.

3) There have been lots of fireworks set off since Ramadan started not too far from our apartments. Almost every night we hear fireworks going off. The fireworks are the small kind meant for private use on the streets, the kind that they sell in the United States coming up to July 4th. Even going downtown to Wasat al-Balad or Rainbow Street, you can hear fireworks being set off just out of sight.

4) Whenever I ride in a taxi, all that is playing nowadays from the radio is either the Qur'an or commentary on the Qur'an. One cab driver explained that during Taraweeh, the radio is a live broadcast of an imam at Mecca reciting the Qur'an, and every cab, driven by a young or old cab driver, tunes in. And when it's not Taraweeh, the cabs are playing recitations of the Qur'an, or listening to people on the radio provide commentary. Even when I was in Mecca Mall this week, the "background music" in many stores was the Qur'an. It's an interesting combination of traditional religious practices and blatantly modern settings.

The inside of Mecca Mall