The summer heat, then winter’s cooler weather and posting at Mich Café on Fridays have kept me away from the sea for much too long. Lounging around the garden pool is just not the same (some pictures here).
So I took a real day off on Friday (April 1) and headed to my favorite free beach in Jumeirah, armed with a book and my little digital camera, for a few hours of swimming and relaxation.
It’s the ideal season for the beach in Dubai. The Arabian Gulf waters are clean, crystal clear and still freezing. The pleasant breeze and reading Junichiro Tanizaki’s Naomi helped make it a beautiful day. Except that I didn’t realize the sun was that hot. I am now as red as a lobster!
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:
The Xmas Dolls: 2007, 2006, 2008 and 2009 (in blue)
The "silly season" is nearly upon us with more and more people bringing up the "C" word. Yes, there are only some 100 days left to Christmas, i.e. the season to wallow in gifts, emotions, gourmet meals, fruitcakes, puddings, pies, cheeses, drink -- well, practically everything.
But the spiritual side of December 25 is eroding little by little every year, swamped by gadgets, smart and mobile phones, iPods, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, apples, digital cameras and totally useless toys that are conked out before the turkey is carved and could have fed a family elsewhere for a month.
The shopping frenzy resumes with the Boxing Day sales, which end up taking us nearer our credit card limits. You can probably guess that I don't like Xmas much as I hardly ever afforded its trimmings.
The St. Louis Cathedral in Carthage (Wikipedia)
Until a few years back, Christmas meant Midnight Mass. I used to attend it with my late father at the beautiful 1890 Roman St. Louis Cathedral in Carthage, Tunisia. If I were visiting my sister, Asma, when in Mougins, in the South of France, we would walk around the village and attend Midnight Mass at the 17th century chapel, Notre-Dame de Vie. In London, there was a little church behind my flat, off Cheyne Place in Chelsea, where Xmas carols invariably reverberated on the Kings Road. But there too, the number of people attending Midnight Mass dwindled as the years went by.
Worshipers at St. Mary's in Dubai
But I was pleasantly surprised to see the number of people out for Midnight Mass on my first Christmas Eve here in Dubai. I went with friends to St. Mary's in Oud Metha Street, Bur Dubai. It took us an hour and half to get close by and park. By the time we did that, it was so packed that churchgoers were spilling over unto the street. But loudspeakers allowed them to hear the mass outdoors. The atmosphere was electrifying. St Mary's Catholic Church was founded in 1966 and inaugurated in 1967 by the late Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum (then Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai). It can now accommodate more than 1700 worshipers. There's also a second church in Jebel Ali, St. Francis of Assisi, which was inaugurated in 2001.
I have been fortunate to always spend Christmas with loved ones -- if not family, then very close friends. Which brings me to the Xmas gifts and the whole point of this story!!
The present I look forward to receiving at Christmastime is a very special one from Asma. The tradition began in 2006, the year of my first Christmas in Dubai. She sent me a doll -- a rag doll sporting a funky dress. She has been repeating this every year since. They are special edition dolls that a drugstore in Cannes, where she now lives, put out every Christmas. So I have four ladies who take pride of place on my bed. and I can't wait to see what the 2010 edition will look like.
And so it is that while walking a friend's dog around Jumeira recently I spotted a little playhouse outside a villa. I thought it would provide a great setting to take pictures of my dolls. When I finally saw a car trying to park at the villa’s driveway, I hurried and rang the bell to ask permission to take photos. To my great surprise, Suki -- a lady I met about two years ago -- answered. We had lost contact and were both ecstatic to see each other again.
Music by Fairuz singing Jingle Bells (via Jarjoura.net on YouTube)
So I took the dolls out early last Friday morning to introduce them to you. They looked so small once they were off my bed!
Each one means a lot to me and is treated with the love it was forwarded with. Yalla Asma: I'm waiting for this year's Christmas present! So this week's Haiku is dedicated to you:
Bunch of love Every Christmastime A doll and a bunch of love I will get from you...
