Wednesday, July 4, 2012

The 4th of July


Believe it or not, today was not a national holiday here in Jordan. However, a group of us did gather for a bit of a celebration this evening. It's been interesting to see that when Jordanians think of American food, they always think of hamburgers and pizza. Those might not be the most common foods eaten in America, but that is the association that they have. No one even thinks about roast and mashed potatoes or enchiladas or anything else like that. So we decided to be as American as possible and have pizza and root beer floats in honor of our nation's birthday. Finding fresh ingredients for the pizza wasn't very difficult except for finding the yeast. There are so many bakeries where you can buy fresh, good bread for hardly anything that buying the bread is one of the daily chores in a family here. Therefore yeast was hard to find. Eventually we found some in the cupboard in the boy's apartment. Now that's what I call a fully furnished apartment. Everything is included from the furniture down to the utensils and in this case, the yeast. The real struggle for this American meal came in finding root beer. In this case, even the third time wasn't a charm. After visiting C-Town, Miles, and Safeway supermarkets, we were finally able to track down some good old A&W root beer at Cozmo. It wasn't an easy process because when we asked where the pop (or soda to some of you folks) was, they showed us the Pepsi and the Coke. When we asked for the root beer, they told us that they didn't sell beer or alcohol because it was haram (forbidden). Eventually we were able to get the idea across that all we wanted was a certain type of pop by the name of root beer. Dinner was a success. I mean, it's hard to beat fresh, homemade pizza with fresh seasonings, sauce made from fresh ingredients, and fresh toppings. Then we topped that off with some root beer floats. The only thing missing were the fireworks. No one had a wedding party going on, so we didn't even have that in the background. Guess you can't have everything...

=)

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