Allie got married!

My lovely ex-housemate Allison recently got married to the equally lovely (but not my ex-housemate, despite the amount of time he spent at our place) Anis.  Allison is from America - Michigan, to be precise - and Anis is from here - Jerusalem born and raised.  They met at our school, when he was working in the business office and she was teaching English; he pursued her through the devious method of helping her sort out a bank account (not easy in an environment that is frequently hostile to non-Hebrew speakers) and became pretty indispensible not long after that.  Not just to Allie either - when I moved to Jerusalem and into our apartment in Nachlaot, it was Anis who transported me and my suitcase from the school to my new home and since then he's been just as generous with his time and talents.  As for Allie, she was my first friend in Israel and has been an absolute star throughout.  The fact that we worked in adjoining classrooms so saw each other all the time not just at home, as well as living in an apartment with no couch and bathroom with a wooden shutter rather than an actual door somehow didn't prevent us from actually liking each other.  After 3 years of watching Gilmore Girls, bitching about work, eating eggs on Saturday mornings, talking about boys and wondering when Anis would get round to asking you to marry him - Allie, this blog is dedicated to you.

Allie and Anis were already pretty firmly together by the time I moved in with her and started stealing all the food she brought home with her after the weekly family dinner at Anis' house.  For the first two years Allie and I lived together a standard question to me from our friends was, "When is Anis going to ask Allison to marry him?"  (As if I would either know or tell them.)  Finally, sometime last autumn, the ring was found, a proposal was made and accepted, plans were drawn up and a few weeks ago they got married in a series of celebrations that, frankly, will make any wedding I go to in the future seem tame, poorly-attended and potentially slightly boring.  And I wasn't even at all the events.

I used to go to weddings when we lived in the Gulf (every time one of my dad's secretaries or their relatives got married, basically), but they were Bahraini Muslim weddings, with strictly segregated reception rooms and zero alcohol.  Obviously, Christian Arab weddings here are enormously different.  They come with their own wide range of traditions and rites and hours and hours and hours of loud Arab music, plus they go on for what seems like weeks.  Allie was forever heading off with Anis to the wedding of some cousin or second cousin or third cousin twice removed's hairdresser's friend, and I was always stunned at a) how long she went away for and b) the things she would talk about when she came home - the food, the dresses, the hours and hours of loud music and dancing.  Having been forewarned, therefore, about what a serious Arab wedding could entail when the date for the wedding rolled around I shelved all other social activities and wrote off the whole of the following week as recovery time.

First up, the zyani.  This is the custom here of Arabs from the north and it is a special ceremony in which the groom's beard is shaved in preparation for the big day.  At least, that happens at some point during the night; for the most part it's a gigantic party involving masses of food and drink, as well as pretty continuous dancing.  The bride and groom greet everybody, the eating begins and throughout the night there's a round-robin of eating, drinking and dancing so that at no point in the evening is the dance-floor ever empty.  Late on in the proceedings the groom is carried in on someone's shoulders to the front of the hall where a dais has been put out with all the necessary bits and bobs for shaving a man.  At Anis' zyani, as he was carried through the crowds he was throwing hand towels out of a basket which turned out to be a good idea because the minute the shaving cream came out it was a total mess up there and if you were 10 feet or closer from the dais you were liable to get showered with the stuff.  It's worth mentioning at this point that Anis, very unusually and somewhat controversially, completely refused to shave his beard off (he's very attached to it), so he wasn't actually shaved, merely smothered in shaving cream several times over.  Apparently when it's done properly they use an old-fashioned (and extremely sharp) hand razor to shave the groom, which is a little bit alarming given that by the time they get round to the shaving part most people are fairly sloshed on whisky and arak.  Would you trust your drunk best man and slightly-wasted uncle to shave you using something that sharp without leaving you bleeding?

Apart from the shaving cream and the clapping and the ululating, and the vast amounts of delicious food and alcohol flowing (though I was driving so didn't get to drink the really good arak), the other thing that happens at zyanis and wedding parties is the dancing.  And my goodness, do Arabs love to dance.  In the main, this requires enormous upper body strength as you mostly hold your arms up in the air, clap, move your wrists/hands and if you're a woman look graceful and elegant.  Allie's nailed it, all those years of practice at other people's weddings.  However, Arabs from this particular part of the world also specialise in a form of dancing called dabke which in my opinion is incredibly beautiful and intricate and amazing to watch, although the first time I watched it (not going to lie) it looked to my untrained eye a little bit like Riverdance done to loud Arab music.  The dancers line up to form a human chain and move in a large circle round the dance-floor, doing the same basic steps, though the people who grew up in dabke groups have way more flair and grace than everyone else.  The guy in the lead waves a cloth of some kind so it was convenient at the zyani that they had all those hand-towels lying around.

Allie had told us that the zyani was actually going to be a better party than the wedding reception, so despite the fact that it was on a school night we hired a car and schlepped up north to the wedding hall in Mi'ilya, stuffed our faces, danced till our feet bled and had an absolutely brilliant time.  All of Allie's family had made the trek from the States and they also looked like they were having a blast, despite the traces of culture shock I recognised on their faces.  Allie looked beautiful and I've never seen Anis look so happy; I guess as much as a bride looks forward to her wedding day, an Arab man looks forward to his zyani and Anis looked like he was having the time of his life.  We staggered out at 1 a.m. for the trip back to Jerusalem and braced ourselves for Allie's hen party that evening - or bachelorette party as the many Americans who outnumbered me insist on calling it.  Tamar and I had organised it (because we love her so) but I'm not going to write about that here; suffice to say that it wasn't my idea to make Allie do a shot every time she got a question wrong in the little 'Mr & Mrs' quiz we'd prepared for her (and Anis had in fact begged me not to do that).  We don't call her Quarter-Beer Barlow for nothing.

The beautiful bride

Airborne dancing - not sure how secure Allie felt...

The actual wedding ceremony came two days after the hen party and was more familiar to me.  Allie and Anis were married in the Lutheran Church on the Mount of Olives, in a very short and simple ceremony with no singing - I do miss all the hymns, they never sing at weddings here - but a decent enough amount of ululating from the women in Anis' family once the actual service was over, another local tradition.  We all then headed to the reception for yet more vast amounts of delicious food, copious quantities of alcohol and non-stop dancing.  This time round there was less dabke and more regular Arab dancing, although there were a couple of guys leaping around with napkins in their hands (no hand towels available).  As at the zyani, at various intervals someone would grab Anis and haul him onto their shoulders then move around the dance-floor, occasionally transferring him to someone else's shoulders (very impressive yet slightly worrying for those standing nearby); at slightly less frequent intervals Allie would be put on a chair and likewise raised up to the heavens; every now and again a group of men would assembly on one knee around Allie clapping and cheering.  Actually, very sweetly, she had invited all her old tutor group from the Anglican School and they decided that this last bit was tremendous fun and hunted her around the dance-floor waiting for the right moment to get down on one knee for her.  We were all pretty impressed by the sword the happy couple used to cut the cake, though I'm still not sure if that's traditional or just showing off.  I partied hard until the hotel forced the music and thus the dancing to stop, then staggered home and went into hibernation for the week.

So.  Allie got married.  It was a brilliant, brilliant weekend, and not just because we'd all been waiting for it for so long but because Allie and Anis are so lovely and so right for each other.  As regular readers know, I like to end my blog with a little summary (can't stop being a teacher), so here's what I've taken away from my first proper Christian Arab wedding:

1. Dabke is awesome and not as difficult to do as I initially thought, though it requires a lot of concentration and confidence.  I have plenty of the latter after several shots of arak, but not so much of the former.

2. What are British people thinking having only four courses at receptions?  The meal should start EARLY and go on for HOURS AND HOURS so that you eat at least six courses, plus interim snacking on hummus and pita, washed down by whisky/arak/beer.

3. Should I ever get married, I want there to be a sword available for cutting the wedding cake.  I may not choose to use it, but I think the option should be there.

4. I need to work on my upper arm strength if I'm going be able to keep up at future events like this one.  

More Arab weddings, please.

PS.

Love you, Allie xx