Ramadan Kareem!!

Today is the first day of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. This means that all Muslims refrain from eating or drinking anything from sunrise to sunset. Today, in Qatar, those time are approximately 3:58am to 5:41pm. They also avoid smoking, sex, gossip, and negative thoughts during these times. Most get up around 3:30am to eat something, then they nap or just chill in the late afternoon, and then after sunset they visit with family and friends until the wee hours of the morning.

This pretty much changes everything about life in Doha for the next month: traffic patterns change because work hours do. Student programming is practically non-existent because they're exhausted and race home for dinner right after class. There are a lot of charity events to attend because Ramadan is the month to pay special attention to the poor. Meanwhile, the non-Muslims eat covertly in a closed office because all of the restaurants are closed during the day. We dress even more conservatively than usual. All of the bars and the liquor store are closed, and we make up for it by having house parties every weekend from now until Eid (the festival at the end of Ramadan).

That's pretty much Ramadan in a nutshell. Because work slows so much, I'll make more of an effort this month to blog about the things I've learned in the past couple months.


Also, Happy New Year to all of my Jewish friends!! Someone please post an explanation of Rosh Hashanah so I can stop feeling bad about focusing on Ramadan in my post. Unfortunately there's not much learning about Jewish holidays to be done here in Qatar.