Yakel Akel (my Arabic for “To Eat Food”)

When I return home, I’ll think about this place and miss the food. In the past three months I’ve stuffed my face full of dates, coffee from cardamom, unusual fruit juices, olives, honey, pastries with pistachios, creamy dairy products, hummus and its look-alikes, and all that delicious Arabic bread that nearly yanks your teeth out when you bite it. I’ve even done the near-impossible: polished off an entire gallon of buttermilk by myself in less than two weeks! Yeah. I know. I still can’t believe it, either. It’s just so surprisingly delicious if you dump in raspberry juice.

I’ll miss all those foods, but even more than that, I’ll miss the memories that have nothing to do with typical Middle Eastern foods and everything to do with my experience here. King Faisal Hospital’s social scene almost always involves food, as any good social scene should. The only difference is that unlike most social scenes I’m used to, this one comes with a strong, authentic international taste that I can’t find in most places I’ve called home. My new friends here come from all over the world, and we all share our favorite dishes with each other. Foods that I’ve only eaten in restaurants seem so natural for them to cook, probably because their mothers taught them how to cook it when they were little and they’ve been making it ever since. The lack of exotic pretense erases all the food’s elegance, and replaces it with an extra helping of "cool." The fact that people really eat like that every day adds to the overall experience of living somewhere far, far away. The assortment of layers, flavors and spices in both food and cultures adds to the fun of my adventure.

When I’m the only American in a room eating something distinctly un-American, I sometimes get a little tingly thinking how surreal my life feels. Even little things, like drinking English Breakfast tea with an English woman makes me smile. Admittedly, my ingrained inhibitions can’t always stomach all the international flair, like eating jazzed up beef liver for breakfast or something overly chewy from a mysterious place in a cow’s GI tract, but cooking for myself long enough stamped out all the picky eating habits I enjoyed as a kid. I’ve done a good job of eating everything I see, even if I have a sneaky suspicion that I won’t like it. Those times I don’t mind being wrong, and lucky for me. It would suck if I missed out on a delicious glass or ten of buttermilk mixed with raspberry juice!