Today marked the end of Ramadan, which means that a collective sigh of relief seemed to go up all over this side of the world last night when the sun’s last rosy edge dropped below the horizon for the final night of Ramadan. On my way to and from the school, the streets were jam-packed in the morning (so badly that my taxi driver actually drove up partially onto the sidewalk several times, to my slight alarm). But in the afternoon, all was eerily quiet along the main roads – I’ve been told that today is the Eid ul-Fitr, the Festival of Breaking the Fast, and it’s an Islamic tradition to travel great distances to see old friends to have the festival together. Even some of my American teacher friends, none of them Muslim, are joining in with the idea, visiting friends in nearby Ayn Al Basha and Zarqa. The students have the entire week off of school, and Philip and I will most likely spend these last few days of peace and quiet frantically working on final proposals for the vocational training school before we restart the construction work next Sunday.

Nothing like a shiny, brand-new server to make me feel like a kid again.

Nothing like a shiny, brand-new server to make me feel like a kid again.

For me, the last week has mostly been spent at the school, writing proposals for web hosting services that won’t be cheating them like their current one is, and most importantly, working on their new server, an HP Proliant ML350. I need to get all of the school’s user accounts and files migrated between the two systems, all the while with as little downtime as possible. It’s a powerful box, but my options were rather limited in selecting it – unlike in America, which has fairly free shipment of goods in and out of it, everything in Jordan has to be brought in through specialized customs agents. What this means for the IT Admin is that you can’t just go HP or Dell’s website and place an order – you have to find a local business that has a license with the royal administration to import foreign goods, and then get it through them. As you can imagine, this results in prices far beyond their actual worth. For example, I was at the massive City Mall last week, and stopped by a Virgin Music store, which happened to be selling Apple products. I saw my own iPod there; an iPod Touch 16GB. It was selling for JD400, which translates into approximately $565.

Whoops - sorry about that, Winkie.

Whoops - sorry about that, Winkie.

Last night, to celebrate Eid and Winkie’s imminent return, Philip and I made a little vino Chicken Marsala (perhaps a little too much vino, as Philip and I got a little liberal with our pouring and accidentally lit the table next to the stove on fire) and then I went out to a cafe with my friend Silas, a teacher at the school, and his Jordanian friend Haytham. Haytham and I hit it off right away; we talked politics and he even has dabbled in building his own computers before. At last, someone that knows what “cache” means and won’t think I’m talking about money! He confirmed this, shaking his head. “There is no one here that has any idea about how computers actually work; they just sell them and send them India when they break.” He seemed very skeptical of my lofty goals of teaching hardware skills to refugees, but wished me luck. The two of them are planning on going to Egypt in March of next year, and after Haytham and I had been talking tech for awhile as Silas stared into space with glazed eyes, Silas broke in and invited me along. Not only that, but Haytham’s mother had given him a bag of fresh-baked date cookies for Silas, which they shared with me. Moomtez!

In any case, I’m quite pleased that I’ve survived my first Ramadan – and wasn’t even fasting! I still can’t quite believe that my Muslim friends and colleagues do this every year, and in the relatively free country of Jordan, they do it by choice, not by government proclamation. It’s going to get worse over the next half a decade, too – the Muslim lunar calendar adjusts every Gregorian (Western) year, about 2 weeks forward. This means that next year, Ramadan will be from approximately mid-July to mid-August, and then the year after that, all of July. I can’t imagine not eating or drinking during the longest, hottest months of the year. Philip and Wajih have both already agreed they’re just going to take that entire month off of work, and it seems like the smart thing to do!