Day 42 of isolation in the apartment. But yesterday I was chatting with a friend on the phone and invited me to stop by his family's majlis today to pick up some food for iftar so that have some traditional Qatari iftar food. Every Ramadan my friend's father makes extra food for iftar that he gives away to people. Since quickly going to a majlis didn't seem too risky to me I decided to head out to pick up the food. It would be a pleasant change from the lockdown food I have been eating for the last seven weeks, especially meat. The only animal protein that I've been eating is the occasional can of tuna.
When I arrived at the majlis there were dozens of containers waiting for people to pick them up. When my friend said his father makes extra food for people he wasn't kidding -- there was probably enough food to feed over 100 people. And the family does this every day of Ramadan. After chatting a bit with my friend and his father (from a safe distance) I picked up my food, thanked them kindly for the meal, and headed home for iftar.
Here is the food. It was indeed a lot of traditional food. From left to right is some harees, desserts, curried chicken on rice, some samosas (that's not its name in Arabic but I can't remember what it is) and some thareed. You don't know what harees and thareed are? That's okay, I have a blog post from 2013 that explains it.
It was nice to have something different for dinner, the thareed especially was quite nice. It was a lot of food though, it will last me at least four meals.
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Today is also the Qatari holiday of Garangao, which is in the middle of Ramadan (more information here). Sadly with the restrictions in place kids will not really be able to celebrate it. I think some places are offering 'virtual garangao' but I'm not really sure how that would work.
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Coronavirus update: Things are unfortunately holding steady. Over 900 cases today, but no deaths thankfully. Over a hundred are recovering every day but there's over 16,000 in quarantine now. I'm not sure when the curve will peak.
Stay safe everyone.
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