Rachel’s Reflections

Yes, that’s right.  You read the title correctly.

The pool has challenges every month.  This month’s is swim the distance from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia (we just call it Saudi) during the month of April.  The distance is 20,000 meters, which is 400 laps.

I signed up today.  Already  I have done 1500 meters.  And that’s just in one day.  I put a ticker on this blog so everyone can keep track of my progress (and help keep me motivated).  Look at the bottom of the sidebar to see the ticker.  Only 18500 meters to go!

We’ve actually had a thunderstorm here!  That is majorly exciting.  I thought Bahrain never had storms, ever.  I am in my second year here on this island, and this is the first storm we’ve had.  Sure we have dust storms, but here I’m specifically speaking of storms with some kind of water falling out of the sky.

Last year it rained some.  This year, it’s only rained once before that I know of, unless it’s rained during the night sometimes.  That’s possible, but I don’t get up in the middle of the night to check.  The one time before last night that it rained was the 8th of February and it rained for only an hour, but as I got caught outside in it, I got wet.

Last night I started hearing noises that sounded like thunder.  Since it NEVER thunders here–at least so far it hadn’t–I thought it couldn’t possibly be thunder.  Fireworks, perhaps?  But then when I went to the bedroom for something and happened to be standing quite close to the window, I heard it again.  It was definitely thunder.  So I opened my balcony doors and listened.  The wind was noisy–not unusual–but I thought it sounded like maybe rain too.  It was too dark to tell, though.

The gloomy day along with a view of the fountain that is hardly ever on. When I peeked outside I noticed it and decided to get a picture even though it's not a nice day for photography.

I don’t know if it rained last night (I think it did), but I do know that it rained today!  Today dawned overcast and very gloomy.  Gloomy is unusual here in Bahrain.  We have sunny much more often.  I’d thought I left gloomy back home in Illinois when I last lived there.  But here gloomy was.  And it thundered off and on.  And then around 3:00 p.m. (don’t remember exact time) it started pouring down rain!  I watched it come down.  I couldn’t go out because the wind was blowing it in on our balcony.  In just a couple of minutes we had an inch of water on our balcony.

Almost as quickly as it began the rain stopped.  Since then it’s been gloomy again, although the weather feed I get from the Muharraq airport says it’s “Mostly Cloudy.”  It looks “All Cloudy” to me, so I don’t know what’s going on in Muharraq, but from here it looks the same.  In fact, for most of the day I’ve been barely able to see Muharraq, and if you look at a map, you’ll notice it’s quite close.  (Muharraq is the north-east island that’s “almost touching” the main island.)  That should tell you how poor visibility is.

The mud on my balcony after the rain

Part of the low visibility is due to the dust we have in the air.  Dust is nearly omnipresent and yesterday the sky was hazy with dust.  Sometimes it gets so bad it looks like yellow fog and that combined with wind makes a dust storm.  Even without wind dust still gets everywhere.  Washing your car regularly is a necessity here!  So part of the gloominess of the sky today was due to dust haze.  And when it rained we got rain mixed with dust–which makes mud.

First, I’m sorry I haven’t posted since early January.  I even had some posts planned, but they just didn’t get written.  I got busy at work and then studying for my EXW and then I got sick–for three weeks.  I call it the Bahraini Crud because that virus has swept through the island and everyone I know has had it and was sick for three or four weeks.  And it’s not the flu, either, the doctor assures me.  Besides we military get vaccinated against the flu.

But now I’m well and able to do more than stagger to work in the morning and then stagger home at night and go straight to bed.  But posts will probably be sporadic as I still need to study EXW.  I really need to get my pin.  (EXW=expeditionary warfare specialist: it’s a military qualification I’m required to get.  The pin is proof I got it and something I get to wear on my uniform.)

As you can see I updated my theme.  Not sure about the picture; I may change it.  Right now it’s showing a view of the Bahrain financial harbor (bunch of office building skyscrapers) as seen from my apartment’s balcony.

I’ve decided on a focus for my blog.  Ever since I started it in November 2007 I’ve been writing about whatever whenever.  Mostly I’ve just been trying to figure out what I’m doing with a blog and getting used to the idea of what it is and how it works.  But now I’ve decided that I need to have more of a focus.  And while obscure holidays was a lot of fun to do over the Christmas holidays, it’s not something I think would make very good subject matter for a blog over the long run, particularly since I was/would be pretty much paraphrasing from and even copying and pasting from Wikipedia.

So I thought about what I could say that maybe not very many other people were saying, and I came up with the obvious–Bahrain.  So I decided I would focus my blog on Bahrain.  And that’s why I changed the subtitle of my blog–to make it more obvious that this blog will be about Bahrain.

I don’t know how good I’ll be at this.  I’ve been having problems getting pictures off my camera, so I don’t know if I’ll have many photos.  And I may be too busy to do much more than report on what the newspaper is reporting.  By the way, anyone can read it any time they like–it’s online at Gulf Daily News.  (And it’s in English.)  There are other newspapers, too, but that’s the only one I read.

So here’s my first bit about Bahrain:  The weather is absolutely lovely today.  I sat outside for a while and read.  It’s sunny, around 70F/21C, and when sitting in the sun, feels good with short sleeves.  It’s warm but not hot yet.  Perfect weather.

Today is the Twelfth Day of Christmas.  It is also Twelfth Night, the night before Epiphany.  According to Wikipedia:

Twelfth Night or Epiphany Eve is a festival in some branches of Christianity marking the coming of the Epiphany, concluding the Twelve Days of Christmas, and is defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as “the evening of the fifth of January, preceding Twelfth Day, the eve of the Epiphany, formerly the last day of the Christmas festivities and observed as a time of merrymaking”.^[1]

The celebration of Epiphany, the adoration of the Magi, is marked in some cultures by the exchange of gifts, and Twelfth Night, as the eve or vigil of Epiphany, takes on a similar significance to Christmas Eve.

Some people still celebrate these holidays.  There’s a person in my husband’s command whose family always exchanged gifts on January 6.

Wikipedia also says that “Twelfth Night marked the end of a winter festival that started on All Hallows Eve — now more commonly known as Halloween.”  I think things have pretty much come full circle.  It seems that more and more the Christmas season is earlier and earlier, at least judged by when Christmas decorations appear in the stores.  Doesn’t it sometimes seem to you like we’re expected to celebrate Christmas immediately after Halloween these days?

What about celebrating a day when everything is turned upside down, with everyone’s roles reversed?  Medieval people and ancient Europeans did just that.  I’ve already mentioned The Feast of Innocents on December 28–which commemorated when Herod killed the children of Bethlehem–where children’s and adults’ roles were reversed.

It seems they celebrated a similar holiday on January 5 called the Feast of Fools.  (Although Wikipedia says that “in the Middle Ages, particularly in France, the Feast of Fools was staged on or about the Feast of the Circumcision, January 1.)  The person “ruling” the feast and the festivities was called the Lord of Misrule.  Wikipedia has this to say:

The Lord of Misrule symbolizes the world turning upside down. On this day the King and all those who were high would become the peasants and vice versa. At the beginning of the twelfth night festival a cake which contained a bean was eaten. The person who found the bean would run the feast. Midnight signaled the end of his rule and the world would return to normal. The common theme was that the normal order of things was reversed. This Lord of Misrule tradition can be traced back^{[citation needed]} to pre-Christian European festivals such as the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia.^{[neutrality disputed]}

Apparently this celebration could get quite wild and profane,leading to the Church banning it in 1431.  Considering this quote from Wikipedia: “The ceremonies often mocked the performance of the highest offices of the church, while other persons, dressed in different kinds of masks and disguises, engaged in songs and dances and practiced all manner of revelry within the church building” and how Carnival is celebrated today, I can just imagine.

Anybody want to revive the tradition?  Your boss could work for you for a change.

Please do click on the links above, at the very least the Twelfth Night, Feast of Fools, and Lord of Misrule links.  There’s a lot of interesting information there–more than I can put in one blog post.

And last but not least, here is the final installment of the “Twelve Days of Christmas” song I’ve been doing each day.  This song itself is a Twelfth Night tradition: it originated as a song sung as a game played at Twelfth night parties.  The leader would sing a verse and everyone else would copy.  He’d add a line each line, and everyone else had to remember what he’d sung or have to pay a penalty, such as “offering up a kiss or a sweet.^[1]“ That, at least, is the most common and accepted explanation of its origins.  Click on the song title above to go to the Wikipedia article and learn more.

So here it is, the last and final verse of this most famous Twelfth Night song on Twelfth Night:

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Twelve lords a-leaping
(Eleven ladies dancing
Ten pipers piping
Nine drummers drumming
Eight maids a-milking
Seven swans a-swimming
Six geese a-laying
Five golden rings**
Four calling birds*
Three French hens
Two turtledoves
And a partridge in a pear tree.)
* Note: Wikipedia says “calling birds” is a corruption of “colly birds” which are black birds.

** Wikipedia also assures me that golden rings does not refer to “jewelry but to ring-necked birds such as the ring-necked pheasant.”

Have a very merry Twelfth Night, Everyone.

Today is the Eleventh Day of Christmas.  It is also my cousin Katie’s birthday.  Happy birthday, Katie!

This is also my 100th blog post. Congratulations to me! Jeremy says, “But there are only 77 comments.  Y’all need to work harder!”  I did 100 posts in 58 weeks.  Hmm…maybe I need to work harder too.  I would like to post at least twice if not at least three times each week this year.  I did reach a huge milestone: I posted to my blog every day in December.  I’d never actually done a whole month before.  .So that’s awesome.  How long until post 200?

On the Eleventh Day of Christmas my true love gave to me

Eleven ladies dancing
(Ten pipers piping
Nine drummers drumming
Eight maids a-milking
Seven swans a-swimming
Six geese a-laying
Five golden rings**
Four calling birds*
Three French hens
Two turtledoves
And a partridge in a pear tree.)

* Note: Wikipedia says “calling birds” is a corruption of “colly birds” which are black birds.

** Wikipedia also assures me that golden rings does not refer to “jewelry but to ring-necked birds such as the ring-necked pheasant.”

Today is the Tenth Day of Christmas.  Today is my last day of “vacation.”  I go back to work tomorrow.  Today Jeremy and I went to our friends from church’s house.  They have two small boys.  Mark is seven and Daniel is three.  It was a lot of fun playing with the children.

Here’s today’s verse from the song:

On the Tenth Day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Ten pipers piping
(Nine drummers drumming
Eight maids a-milking
Seven swans a-swimming
Six geese a-laying
Five golden rings**
Four calling birds*
Three French hens
Two turtledoves
And a partridge in a pear tree.)

* Note: Wikipedia says “calling birds” is a corruption of “colly birds” which are black birds.

** Wikipedia also assures me that golden rings does not refer to “jewelry but to ring-necked birds such as the ring-necked pheasant.”

Today is the Ninth Day of Christmas.  I remember as a kid January 2nd was often the day we returned to school after Christmas break.  At least if it was at the beginning of the week–maybe not on a Friday–I can’t remember that exactly.  Did any kids go back to school today?

I never liked January 2nd for this reason.  But I don’t have to go back to work until Jan 4, Sunday.  (Our workweek is Sunday to Thursday.)  And I still feel like celebrating, so I’m going to continue this “Days of Christmas” theme until the end (Jan 6).

So here goes the latest installment:

On the Ninth Day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Nine drummers drumming
(Eight maids a-milking
Seven swans a-swimming
Six geese a-laying
Five golden rings**
Four calling birds*
Three French hens
Two turtledoves
And a partridge in a pear tree.)

* Note: Wikipedia says “calling birds” is a corruption of “colly birds” which are black birds.

** Wikipedia also assures me that golden rings does not refer to “jewelry but to ring-necked birds such as the ring-necked pheasant.”