Christmas Eve I had dinner with some colleagues from ICARDA. The food was wonderful, and plentiful, with the best part being the rice and meat wrapped in something similar to spinach leaves. After dinner, I joined some friends at the dorms where I was staying previously and we had a bit of a Christmas party. Justin, my German friend, was really excited about the holiday and bought some decorations including a miniature tree. He also bought small gifts for each of us, and a bottle of wine. We played Christmas music on the computer, and the festivities involved opening presents, eating cookies, drinking wine, juggling fruit, and dancing. Around 11:30, Justin and I headed out to find a church. He wanted to attend a midnight mass. I figured seeing a foreign church sermon would be interesting, so shortly after midnight we found ourselves in a simple old catholic church standing at the back, listening to a sermon in Arabic.
Getting home so late, I slept late Christmas day, and spent a couple hours on the phone with my family back home while they opened presents and spent half the time guessing who's was who because someone had forgotten to label them or had gotten lazy (as usual). That made it feel like Christmas for me, despite the beautiful weather outside, just to rub that in. Christmas with palm trees and sunshine; something weird about that.
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