Good morning, sabaho, bonjour... Looking out of my window
“Sharing is caring,” are three words I hear a lot, especially in
the world of children. Is it because some have so much? Or is it to counter the
mounting greediness and consumerism we see today? Whatever…
But sharing is the name of the game at Mich Café – sharing what I
see, feel, read about, experience, where I venture or travel and what interests
me.
It was fun taking random pictures with my gifted Nokia N8 and
posting them on my Twitter timeline or Facebook page. Unfortunately, it fell in
a swimming pool, forcing me to revert to my antiquated mobile. So, I’ll be
posting these random pictures and my thoughts on what makes me happy every day
here in Dubai.
This takes me back to the first
post at Mich Café on July 16, 2010. I wrote then: “Looking out of the
window is the way I start my morning. And over the years, I have been lucky to
live in flats with great views that set a happy tone for the rest of the day.”
A kiss to start the day from the tireless lovebirds
Happiness is waking up in the morning. Waking up to the sun -- the
“best friend” I came looking for in Dubai. Awakening to look out onto a
beautiful garden, teeming with a palm tree starting to bear fruit in time for
the Holy Month of Ramadan due to start on July 21; blackberry trees you can
nibble on in March and April each year, colorful bougainvilleas and fragrant frangipani,
fil and gardenia; four aviaries housing tireless lovebirds; and
two dogs.
It’s difficult to walk out of the door without a smile on my face. What
better way to start the day!
With so much going on in our region of late and so much to follow and keep up with, I’ve found it hard to concentrate and come up with something to share here, at Mich Café. Somehow, personal anecdotes seem meaningless on the scale of events.
It’s usually while walking a friend’s dog in the evenings (see Habibi of Dubai, 5 October 2010), with no contact with the online world that I get most of my ideas. Or as my sister, Asma, said when she failed to find a new post these past few days, “Have a look at your photo albums and you’ll think of something!”
But still these walks at dusk failed to inspire me and that’s maybe because there is so much going on in nature.
Spring is in the air, even in Dubai where you hardly feel the change of seasons. One day it’s cool and the next it’s 39 degrees Centigrade and summer sets in for the next 10 months.
This year we’ve had a short winter and only two spells of rain. Winter here means that I wear a T-shirt instead of a tank top and a light jacket in the morning and evening.
Not that I am complaining. In fact, it is during January and February that I cannot run because it is cool. I’m now waiting for March and the warmer and hot weather to take that up again (see Why I run, 13 August 2010).
Spring, the season of rebirth, renewal and rejuvenation, is in the air because there are more birds around and the plants and flowers are blooming comfortably before being scorched (apart from my gardenias! See Gardenias, roses and LTC, 8 February).
Blackberries in the garden
Also it’s when I can pick blackberries from the many trees in the garden. Blackberries, and watermelons, are among my favorite fruits, but unfortunately they are expensive to buy (see A love affair… with watermelons, 23 July 2010). It is one of spring’s privileges to have some directly off the trees in the garden for about a month each year.
As usual, I digress… The whole point of writing this post is that while contemplating nature at its best these past few weeks, I came across a tree or bush that I find extremely delicate and beautiful. It looks like lace dotted with flowers.
I’ve passed it several times and watched red buds bloom into little balls of fluff scattered among tiny white flowers and invade the sidewalk. It is so delicate and fragile, yet wild and clumsy.
With all my love for gardening, I can never recognize plants or flowers, apart from the obvious, or remember names. I took some pictures and wonder if anyone of my readers knows what this plant is? Please share if you do (more pictures of the plant here).
In the case of the prickly pear or cactus fruit, maybe the first thing that comes to mind is "huh???"
Personally, I wouldn't have thought of this much forgotten exotic fruit had it not been for my daily walk around Jumeira.
Since starting this blog, whatever I come across or whatever I do or think of has in it the seeds of a post. And so it is that while walking a friend's Labrador every evening, I catch sight of something and start writing about it in my head. Most of these sightings and thoughts quickly evaporate but some linger for a while.
I keep making it a point to take a route on my dog walks that takes me past an atypical garden. The majority of villas here in Dubai have extended front gardens and lawns that are typically well maintained and skillfully groomed. The garden that caught my eye does not have a green lawn or well-watered grass or changing seasonal flowers, but a variety of cactus plants growing wildly, in a kind of designed way. I watched the fruits grow and ripen as the days went by, which made me realize that I haven't had cactus fruit or sobbayr in ages.
The beauty of sobbayr is that it makes the grades of a fruit, a vegetable, and a flower with purported medical benefits -- something rare in the botanical kingdom.
It isn't something I would buy in the supermarket, take home, handle with care and gobble alone. Somehow, I have always associated sobbayr with street vendors in pre-war Beirut – specifically between Maarad and Burj.
My recollection is of the street vendors then keeping their sobbayr stock in a cold-water container -- topped by a huge block of ice -- loaded on top of their wooden cart. They would be wearing heavy-duty rubber gloves and holding a sharp knife. On demand, they would pick one sobbayra at a time, place it on a wooden board, cut off the top and the base, peel the sides, push the fruit up with their forefinger and forward with their thumb for you to grab and devour. Skins of the sobbayr you would have eaten would be kept in a pile on the wooden cart until you had had your fill. That’s when the skins were counted and you were asked to pay for the number you had consumed.
A quick recap then -- if you want to go through the exercise at home: wear heavy-duty gloves, soak then wash the cactus pears. Use a sharp knife to slice off the fruits’ top and base by about one centimeter on each end, cut length-wise along the pear's top-base center-line just through the skin. Then, with the knife, use that slit to lever the skin and peel it off the rest of the pear. Et voila!
The cactus pear is sweet and juicy with crunchy seeds inside that you just swallow. It usually breaks after the first bite and you're left with juices running down your chin and your hands ready to be licked. But it is succulent.
Whereas I thought sobbayr was a fruit typical of our Mediterranean and Gulf regions, it turns out that it has been the staple of the Mexican and Central American diet for thousands of years. They even eat the pad of the cactus, which they call the nopa. Apparently it tastes like green beans with the texture of okra.
And no, I haven't adopted these cactus plants! I see their owner lovingly taking care of her sobbayr oasis, but when I decided to take pictures and write about it, I stopped seeing her. Although I rang the bell of her villa several times, it must have always been when she was out.
Join me for a walk around this cactus garden, and if you haven't tried the fruit, please do... This week's Haiku is dedicated to sobbayr:
