The wait is over

The ladies served up large dishes of each item and gave them to all the Americans.  Everyone else had a platter between two of them, except for the ladies.  They sat at one end and just ate out of the cooking dishes with their forks.

It turned out the men grabbed the naan bread, loaded it with rice and meat and they ate over the plastic.  They also ate any salad or okra soup that was near to them.

 We found some empty dishes and we took off the dolma, rice, etc we wanted, and we slowly slid our large portions to the middle for everyone to share.  I even passed some dishes back to the ladies.  They had served so much of some items that they didn't have any left.

I'm telling you.  You cannot out-do this culture in giving and hosting!

Here's a dish (above, brown) that I've had a couple of times, but I've never told you about.  I like it.  It's made with a kind of vermicelli noodle and yellow raisins.  It sounds gross, but it has a sweet sauce of sugar and something syruppy stirred in, and it makes it like a dessert.  Today's wasn't particularly flavorable, but I'm not picky (except for those bean things). 

In fact, if you look two pictures up, you can see my bowl with Keira's left-over lemon and one bean.  I accidentally got a bean off the dolma plate, so there it sat...untouched.

Oooh.  I forgot to tell you about the contents of the orange jug.  It's fresh, squeezed pomegranate juice.  It takes about 4 pomegranates (and a lot of time)  for 1 cup of juice.  I really enjoyed it!  I'd never had it hand-squeezed before.  I wouldn't let any of my kids start a cup unless they knew they could finish it.  It's like liquid gold.  I let them sip mine to make sure they liked it first :)

I forgot to mention this cute boy on the right (although the one on the left is pretty cute, too).  While Doug and another friend of ours were engaged in conversation for the 4-5 hours we were there, Caleb just sat.

Just sat.

He was asked a few questions (like whether he had facebook or not), but for the most part, he just sat.

The girls got to cook, move around, talk about hair, look at facebook, talk about the artists they like to listen to, look at pictures, watch the women take turns using their prayer rugs to pray, take pictures, etc., but I'm pretty sure Caleb just sat patiently.

Proud Momma moment.