Ramadan

Ramadan is coming up. I do believe it is going to start in September at some point. Since they follow the lunar calender, the start point moves up 11-13 days every year. While Ramadan is on, there is a fast that exists from sunup to sunset, where you cannot eat nor drink (you cannot even swallow your own spit type idea). Now this is all well and good, but EVERYONE has to follow it. Well at least you cannot eat outdoors or in your car or indoors where you could be seen. Thus some places of business set up special rooms where the windows are blocked out so that foreigners (and actually quite a few Muslims) can eat and drink during the day. No restaurants are open during the day (except for the British Club apparently, which is just packed throughout the day)and this goes on for like a month. During this time nothing really gets done at all by Muslims. Since they cannot eat during the day they have these big feasts during the night and then they have all these prayer times and so on, so their quite tired during the day so they don't really do anything. Which is fine, its their country, sure whatever. But they expect all the ex-pats to take up the slack. Which is kinda funny, because they expect all the ex-pats to fast as well, but to also work. Not exactly the equal for all thinking that we are used to. This is a fairly common thing though, having different sets of rules for different groups, though I think I'll separate that into a different blog. Though I'm kinda wondering what these people are going to do as Ramadan moves into the months of August and July, because it is really stinking hot here and I don't know how they are going to get by without drinking water during the day, there are going to be lots of cases of heatstroke - I don't see how there cannot be.