{"id":2048,"date":"2012-08-11T22:56:35","date_gmt":"2012-08-12T04:56:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/?p=2048"},"modified":"2014-12-29T20:36:14","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T02:36:14","slug":"lots-of-eating-going-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/?p=2048","title":{"rendered":"Lots of eating going on"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Our housekeeper Saleem<\/p><\/div>\n

Since I arrived, it’s been Ramadan here in Pakistan. There’s a lot more to it, but in a nutshell, Muslims can only eat or drink before sunrise and after sunset. Their evening meal is a big deal, as you can imagine and is called iftar<\/em>. So Thursday night I went to an\u00a0iftar <\/em>at one of the big hotels in town, hosted by one of the U.S. agencies here. I met some of the folks from the Pakistani government who I will be working with.<\/p>\n

Friday night, the Consular section hosted an\u00a0iftar <\/em>at the home of one of the section chiefs. It was primarily a party to “hail and farewell” the myriad of folks coming and going. Our whole management staff is turning over with old bosses leaving and new ones arriving. It was a lot of fun, and all of the food was cooked on the premises – when we arrived there was a huge metal disk over a fire filled with fattening, yummy goodies cooking in oil. It was a fun party because it was both officers and the local staff, so I had a chance to get to know some of the local employees better. We also had two welcome lunches this week for the new folks.<\/p>\n

This week was definitely fun and busy, with lots of good food. Tuesday night, we went to Paul and Derek’s house for a lovely dinner. I’ve been friends with Derek on Facebook but had never met him in person, so it was fun to get to meet him. Both really nice guys.<\/p>\n

Last night, we went to a party hosted by John’s boss Doug. There were about a dozen of us there – most all from the GSO section where John works. They are a really fun group of folks, always joking and laughing. After dinner we sat on the upstairs balcony and enjoyed the cooler weather.<\/p>\n

I finally met our housekeeper Saleem, who also works for Doug. He cooked last night’s meal for us, including kabobs and chicken over a coal fire. He’s a very sweet man and his cooking was good, too!<\/p>\n

Yesterday afternoon, our friend Richard came over to visit – we sat out on the terrace and yakked for a few hours. Richard is working down in Karachi at the Consulate there, and had come up to Islamabad to meet his counterparts here. (Richard spent a couple of weeks with us in Tel Aviv.) Always good to visit with him. His life in Karachi is very different from ours: they have to live on a compound and can’t get off the compound unless they have tight security with them. He was pretty amazed at the amount of freedom we have here.<\/p>\n

John’s been out on the terrace this morning roasting coffee, and he spotted a new bird in the fig tree, some sort of a barbet that’s really cute.<\/p>\n

Here are a few photos from the party last night.<\/p>\n

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John and Rick<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Monica, Rick, Doug, Val and John<\/p><\/div>\n

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John doing a card trick for Robert<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since I arrived, it’s been Ramadan here in Pakistan. There’s a lot more to it, but in a nutshell, Muslims can only eat or drink before sunrise and after sunset. Their evening meal is a big deal, as you can imagine and is called iftar. So Thursday night I went to an\u00a0iftar at one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2048"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2048"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3537,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2048\/revisions\/3537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.criplomats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}