Ah, the singing finally stopped. Back to the normal noises of people blasting their horns which sound so peaceful in comparison to what was going on before. There is a wedding going on tonight and it is (was) driving me crazy. Yes, I know that it is a cultural event but although I haven’t been to a wedding yet I understand that they are pretty silly. Hopefully I will be invited to one and be able to speak about it first-hand, but for now I can just talk about what I have seen looking out the window.
First, they string lights over the street. See picture to see what I mean. Then at around 3’o clock all the guys get together and they sort of parade around and people throw confetti over them and they sing and do a “dance”. I put “dance” in “quotes” because the dancing is a bunch of guys standing in a line and soft of kicking their feet and holding their arms in the air while people yell and whoop. Then the guys go off somewhere and you think “Thank God that’s over. Now I can get some work done.”
And you are wrong. So wrong. Because then they come back.
They come loudly marching down the street banging drums and stuff. First there is a sort of chant that is done over loudspeaker. They have two loudspeakers in different parts of the city (I am guessing that one is at the groom’s and one is at the bride’s) and they chant at each other for a while. It’s a really cool effect for about five minutes. While this is going on, the men come back and do another “dance”, this one consisting of walking around in a circle and holding your Janbia (a sort of strange curved knife that all the men carry, do a google image search on Yemen and it will probably be the first thing that pops up) over your head. And then the singing starts.
How to describe the singing? Well, when I was a kid my mom had a harmonica. Every now and then I would get my hands on that harmonica and start to make what I thought was beautiful music until my mother would run out and scream at me and then hide the harmonica in a place where she thought that I would never find it. Well, the singing sounded a lot like that harmonica. Plus you have drumming. And this goes on for a few hours.
They did, however, have some sort of a flute thing going on, and I wanted to find out what a Yemenese flute looked like and how it was played so I got dressed and went out to the street. But during the time it took me to cover my arms and ankles and find my shoes and camera they had all moved inside. I wandered around and tried to peek at the party but girls aren’t allowed. A guy came out and sort of shook his stick, yelled at me in Arabic and closed the gate in my face. So much for famous Yemenese hospitality.
I don’t know what the girls do, but the guys sit around and chew Qat. One of my friends said that he didn’t understand what the big deal about a Yemenese party was because the guys just sit around and chew Qat which is pretty much what they do every day anyway. There is also a procession which apparently involves a lot of kissing of the groom and a lot of speeches. In other words, it sounds just as boring as a Samoan wedding. What is with these traditional societies? After thousands of years you would think that these things would evolve into something resembling one of those cool fish that glow underwater and have their own bait in their mouths but instead they resemble more like the two toed sloth who hasn’t bothered changed since the first time it evolved.
Well, anyway, since the wedding seems to be over (I hope) I am going to get some sleep.
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