The Blog and the Shower

Some people have asked me to post some pictures of the food here:

Featured in this photo is a mug of mint lemonade (actually, it’s delicious!), chicken fitte (mainly chicken, chickpeas, bread, and tahina, I think) and the requisite plate of mint and pickled vegetables that most restaurants serve with your meal.

My program has been guiding us through the bureaucratic maze necessary to apply for Syrian residency, including an AIDS and tuberculosis test. For the TB test, apparently the traditional prick-on-the-arm formula wasn’t available, so we all had chest x-rays. We went to a small clinic where a woman led us one by one into a side room and instructed each of us to embrace a white plastic square on a frame. I stood with my chin on the top of the plastic square, my arms wrapped around it, and my back to the woman, who retreated briefly, waited a few seconds, and then instructed me to return to the waiting room. Apparently that was the x-ray. They gave us the photographs of our lungs in large brown paper envelopes, and we carried them ourselves to the governmental agency that concerns itself with TB. I couldn’t resist taking mine out to admire, and in the process—clumsy that I am—I dropped it on the floor. The woman hadn’t made me remove my jewelry before taking the x-ray, so the outline of a fine chain and pendant stood out sharply over the blurry collarbone and rib cage in the picture. A man at the ministry took the x-ray, held it up to the light that was filtering through the trees outside the ground-floor window, and pronounced us all free of TB. I don’t mean to complain, though. My experiences with American bureaucracy—which you’ll remember, if you know me—are enough to make many a government paper-pusher blush.

Last night some friends who had recently completed a month-long English course (their very first) at the University of Damascus Language Center invited me and a few other friends to join their class at a dinner celebrating its end. I sat next to their teacher, a small, bright-eyed woman who seemed shy at first but became increasingly enthusiastic as I asked her about her recent studies in English literature. Although I’m not sure how good her spoken English was since she seemed perfectly happy to speak in Arabic the whole time, it was clear that she read English very well, having studied everything from Chaucer and Shakespeare to T.S. Elliot. She told me that she had specialized in the Romantic literature, and that she simply loved Romantic works. “Especially Wordsworth,” she said, glowing. “Wordsworth’s poems are magnificent.” I felt acutely embarrassed to admit that while I may have read something by Wordsworth in high school, I couldn’t remember what exactly it might have been. In fact, I had very little experience with most of the books she mentioned reading, although I was competently able to recall having read Hamlet as a senior. “Oh, my friends and I used to memorize lines from Hamlet,” she said, “and when we wanted to tease each other, we would say things like, ‘villain, damned villain!’” I asked her what she liked about Romantic literature and she said that she loved the way they dealt with the past and childhood and time. “I think it reminds me of Fairuz (one of the most famous Arab singers),” she said, “and they way her songs talk about these things.”

This weekend my friend Suneela and I decided to take something of a last-minute trip outside of Damascus, so after a Friday of torturous preparations we set out in the late afternoon for the coastal city of Latakia. We arrived late, around 11:30 pm, but were met at the hotel by one of its very congenial owners, the friend of a friend who had visited the city several times. Switching between Arabic and excellent English honed on many a traveler and guest, Mohammad the hotel owner was soon showing us his extensive collection of Tin-Tin comics, joking that his hotel was the meeting place for the Tin-Tin enthusiasts’ society (well, I think he was joking), and luring me (Suneela refused to come) to climb out onto the roof tiles in order to view a painting of Tin-Tin he’d done on the side of the building. He mentioned that we should all go on a walk later on, as the night air was lovely and a breeze offset the stifling humidity, but when we returned to the lobby a little later we stumbled instead upon a pleasant surprise–the German-Algerian friend who’d recommended the hotel in the first place, together with her visiting sister. Unable to locate Mohammad, Suneela and I ate dinner at a nearby café and then set out for a brief walk down the corniche, admiring both the reigning calm and the occasional Syrian passerby wearing shorts—a sight rarely seen or heard of in Damascus!

As it turned out, our short stroll would encompass nearly all of Latakia that we saw. After rising the next morning we ate

The array of food at breakfast

breakfast at a nearby restaurant where the portion of the meal that came automatically with anything ordered turned out to be just as generous as the food we’d asked for, encompassing separate dishes of pickles, peppers, tahina, za’atar, cucumbers, olives, tomatoes and more. While Suneela indulged in a morning argileh (hookah), Mohammad, our mutual German-Algerian friends, and an Australian guest at the hotel joined us. Suneela called a Syrian friend of a friend who lived a little ways outside the city, who invited us to eat lunch with him. At this point, I knew that I probably wouldn’t arrive back in Damascus in time to write my essay for class on Sunday, since lunch in Syria is the most important meal of the day, beginning around three or four o’clock in the afternoon before lasting several hours, at least when guests are being entertained. Not long afterwards, we received another phone call from the acquaintance, called Abu Ali, saying that he was in his car and nearing Latakia to pick us up, because he planned to take us first to meet his family before going out to eat. After arriving in Latakia, he invited the rest of our party to come along for the day, and all agreed except for our Australian acquaintance, who excused herself for lack of any knowledge of Arabic.

When we finally piled into Abu Ali’s car to travel to his home in the countryside near the town of Jebla, it was decided that as the smallest one of the group, I should sit on my friends’ laps for the duration of the half-hour drive. As we pulled away, I hunkered down to accommodate the roof of the car and tried to distributed myself evenly across the two German-Algerian girls—“Her butt is made of pure bones!” one complained—and thought of all the car rides I’d taken in foreign countries associated with violence on the evening news where the biggest danger actually turned out to be cars without seatbelts: crossing Paraguay on a two-lane highway where the favored method of passing trucks was to pull up a few feet behind them and swerve out into the other lane to check for oncoming traffic; traversing a highway in southern Lebanon with the car’s brights on the whole way for lack of a single streetlamp; and now this, certainly the least scary of them all.

We arrived at the house, a large, newish building constructed out of the same pale stone that seems to have been used in 99% of the buildings in Amman, Jordan. His daughters emerged from the house to meet us, wearing small sundresses and matching spike heels far nicer than anything I’d even brought to Syria. It soon became clear that we were in quite a different part of the country than I was used to, at least superficially: during our later drives around the countryside and into the town of Jebla, I saw many girls dressed similarly and very few in more conservative clothing. Abu Ali’s family offered us fruit and tea before we piled back into the car (two cars this time, so I gained an actual seat) and drove further into the mountains to a site called Wadi al-Qala’a, in which the road dipped under a rock outcropping. A trick of water ran over the edge to the valley below, but they told us that in the spring it became a full-blown waterfall that cars could drive behind. We sat at a nearby restaurant and ate of those long lunches involving several appetizers and salads, then various grilled meats, and finally fruit for desert. I asked our host if the village of Hafiz al-Asad, Syria’s late and long-standing president, was nearby. He assented and told us that he’d like to show it to us, if we came back to Latakia and had time for a longer excursion. With evident pride and in what seemed clearly intended as a comment on the upstanding values of the former later, he promised us that the people of Syria’s western mountains were of the highest quality, folks who would take us into their homes for a night upon meetings us and provide us with anything we needed. This would have been in

Wadi al-Qala'a

accordance with Abu Ali’s example, although our lunch didn’t seem substantially different from the welcome other Syrians have given us except in that he had the means to make his especially sumptuous. Nonetheless, his interest in showing us the best of his area was impressive, given the tenuous chain of acquaintances that connected us. The only one of our party who didn’t seem to feel entirely welcome was Mohammad, for reasons I didn’t really understand: it had been clear earlier in the day that Abu Ali was reluctant to bring him along but felt he couldn’t refuse, and Mohammad appeared slightly tense throughout the visit, joking with us in English more than he engaged with our hosts and disappearing for a sight-seeing walk before lunch.

It was early evening when we finally managed to convince our hosts that yes, we really did have to go back to Damascus, and no, we could not spend the night at their house or stay for another round of tea or coffee. They obligingly delivered us to the bus station in Jebla, and during the four-hour ride back I read until it was too dark to distinguish the letters, then watched Syria’s verdant coastal landscape fade into the dryer terrain and sparser scrub of the land surrounding Damascus.

This is the inside of an old Damascene house that’s been converted into a hotel–not one where i stayed, but I was looking around.  I wanted to put this up because it gives an idea of what a traditional Damascene-style house is: built in a square around a courtyard open to the sky with
a fountain in the middle and some sort of foliage growing.  A large number of my classmates are renting rooms in this kind of house–a much more modest sort, of course–in the old city.  As far as I understand it, houses aren’t built in this style any more, and many have been demolished over the last century to make room for apartment buildings (someone correct me if I’m wrong on this), but a relatively recent phenomenon is the conversion of some of the larger houses, like this one, into hotels for tourists and restaurants frequented by both Syrians and foreigners alike.