The Blog and the Shower

I seem to be on a string of bad motor vehicle luck: two days ago I was sitting in the back seat of a microbus when a car hit it from the back, causing a jolt that left me with a slight bruise on the back of my head from hitting it on the rear windsheild, but didn’t hurt any of the other passengers.  I turned around to glare at the driver of the car that had collide with the microbus, but refrained from flipping him or taking other angry measures off since it wouldn’t have improved the situation.  The microbus driver climbed out of the driver’s seat and went to yell at the car driver through his rolled-down window.  The two bickered for a minute, then seemed to run out of steam for arguing and holding up traffic.  “Well, be more careful next time,” the microbus driver told the car’s driver, before getting back into the microbus and driving off.

The other day I was in my first car accident in Syria—a very minor one, however, and quite luckily so.

I had boarded one of the large green busses that I take to the university and was just preparing to sink into a morning reverie for the duration of the trip, when my torso was jerked forward and brought to rest against the back of the seat in front of me. I looked up immediately afterwards to see a spider web of cracks adorning the enormous, flat windshield of the bus. The other passengers and I gazed around in a daze until one came to his senses and pounded on the back door of the bus, demanding to be let out. When the driver opened the door we filed off and stood on the sidewalk, along with the passengers of what I realized were three other vehicles involved in the crash: a microbus in front, then a rather smooshed-looking taxi, then a second microbus, with our large green bus bringing up the rear of the dismal caravan. It was obvious which passengers, now standing on the sidewalk, had been sitting on the last seat of the second microbus, the one that had been hit by the heavy bus: three children had light cuts on their heads from the shattered glass of the rear  microbus windshield, for which I offered some of the never-ending supply of tissues in my pursue upon which several of my classmates have come to rely, and their mother, who appeared unhurt and as she wiped their temples and turned out the hood of her jacket onto the sidewalk with a light tinkling noise to rid herself of the glass particles that had filled it. Another woman also limped uneasily around the sidewalk, but her long jacket made it impossible to see what might be wrong with her leg.

One of the vehicle drivers took it upon himself to wave by the gawking traffic that was quickly turning into a full-on jam, shouting at the cars to keep driving and stop looking until two traffic policemen finally arrived and supervised the exit of the vehicles, all damaged but driveable enough, from the scene.

Damascus’s streets are usually too choked to permit high-speed accidents; a low-velocity incident like ours damages vehicles more than people. Given the chaos of driving here, I’m a little surprised that I haven’t seen more collisions, but I suppose that this very chaos works to prevent accidents as much as it leads to them: drivers in the U.S. are often caught unawares if another car fails to follow the expected rules of the road, and I know the accident I once caused in the U.S. was decidedly a result of my own distraction—something that would hardly be possible even for a moment on the Darwinian Syrian roadways. Drivers here must remain alert to all possible car movements, or not last long on the road.

Our tiny collision was quite an ordinary incident after all, it seemed; no one shouted, or became worked up, argued about insurance or took down the names of the lightly wounded parties. Passengers inquired casually about each others’ safety, then sought out other means of transportation, and the injured children didn’t even cry.

The Sayyida Ruqayya mosque has to be one of the most amazingly decorated mosques I’ve ever seen (although I hear that the Sayyida Zeinab mosque is decorated along similar lines, I’ve never been there).

There are these interior domes that are entirely covered with cut mirrors, and the photo doesn’t even do it justice.

The mosque is dedicated to Sayyida Ruqqaya (obviously), the daughter of the Imam Hussein, whose body lies inside a coffin in the case in the center of this photo (the daughter’s, that is, not the Imam’s).  The story goes (according to a pamphlet from the mosque) that after the Hussein was killed at the battle of Karbala in 680 CD, the surviving members of his family were marched to Damascus.  When Sayyida Ruqiyya saw her father’s head displayed on a pole, she died on the spot at the age of four.

Until several decades ago, all that stood on this site was a small shrine to Sayyida Ruqiyya, but Iranian money built the current mosque and furnished it with its fabulous decor; it remains a site of Shia’, and thus significant Iranian, pilgrimage.  The signs inside are in Arabic and Farsi, and the mosque is gender segregated to a degree that is far from typical in Syria.  The devotional practices at the shrine were  a bit intense for me: on the women’s side, many people were weeping and clutching at the bars enclosing the glass case, while I saw fainting men being carried out from the male section of the mosque.

It doesn’t have the grandeur, historic significance, or deep calm of the Umayyad mosque, but the visual details are stunning.

It’s really bizarre how the conflict between Israel/Palestine/the Arab governments (and yes, it is often at least a three-way conflict) has worked its way into my subconscious.  Or at least, how the Syrian prohibition on giving visas to those who have visited the Occupied Territories has wormed its way in.  It seems that every few months I’m destined to have a very detailed dream in which I end up banned from coming back to Syria for having visited or planning to visit Israel or Palestine (and the weird thing is that in real life, I’ve never actually been there), and each dream seems to bring me further into the Zionist entity.  A few nights ago I had the first dream where I actually made it past the Tel Aviv airport: I dreamt that I wandered around looking at various natural rock formations with my father before panicking as I realized that I had forgotten to switch my passports before entering the country and had gotten the Israeli stamp on the passport on which I had intended to return to Syria. The dream ended as I appealed to Tzipi Livni herself (who in the dream appeared as a buxom college student with shiny red hair rather than her usual harsh, bulldog appearance), who told me there was nothing she could do.  I always wake up from these dreams with muscles tensed and heart pounding, and spend the first several minutes of my day taking long, deep breaths as I look around and remember that thankfully, I’m still in Syria.

And yes, there is a lot to be thankful for–I’m thankful that deportation is my biggest fear, and thankful that I’m here, and not in Gaza, and I fervently hope that this nightmare is over for the Gazans soon.  And I do mean the nightmare they’ve been living for the past several decades, and not only the current ultra-nightmare of the war.  If anyone is unfamiliar with the issues, one of my professors from University, Rashid Khalidi, wrote this Op-Ed in the NYT: “What You Don’t Know About Gaza.”

It feels wrong to blog about anything else while this is going on, and especially wrong to blog about something lighthearted, but it seems I may do so anyway, though, so I hope you’ll forgive me.

I recently moved out of my apartment in Damascus, and in circumstances of housing duress I decided to move into a small room in Bab Tuma.  I’m excited to get to know Damascus’s Old City better, but I’ll definitely miss the balcony I had in my old place in Muhajiriin, the views from which gave me a new appreciation of the way that changes in light change the way the city appears, with harsh direct sunlight muting color variation and pushing the cityscape into a harsh and flat white, while a softer light can bring out the red and blue tones lurking on the cityscape.  I realized that the previous photo I published of my view of the city was taken in this kind of harsh, blanching light, and didn’t do the city justice.  Here are a few photos I’ve taken of Damascus at different times.  Photos after the jump (in the interest of making the page easier to load for those of us who have very slow internet connections, like in Syria.)

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Hi all,

Thanks for sticking with me over my hiatus.  I had a wonderful time traveling around Syria with my family, showing them some of the parts of Damascus that I enjoy and seeing new parts of the country with them.  I must say, I feel lucky to have a family who’s willing to look past the propaganda and go on vacation in the oft-demonized country of Syria!  I would have taken this point for granted, of course, had it not been for some of the other foreigners I’ve met who impressed upon me that their families wouldn’t willingly undertake such a journey.  As far as ruins go (and the trip did include a lot of ruins), I think the Crac de Chevaliers was a highlight for the whole family, closely followed by the citadel at Aleppo, the old cities of Aleppo and Damascus, and Palmyra.  And of course, all enjoyed the non-ruin parts of Syria:  a hammam visit, a straight-razor shave for my brother, the call to prayer at the Umayyad mosque (the best there is, in my opinion), ice cream at Bekdash, a packed Marcel Khalife concert, beautiful hand-made furniture that you wish you could just ship back to your living room in the U.S., numerous wonderful examples of Syrian food, snacks at hummous and fuul stands, and Ksara and araq drinking (no one enjoyed the Syrian wine, of course).  This isn’t really a tourism blog, but over the next few weeks I think I’ll post some photos from our trip.  I know anyone who’s visited Syria has probably seen a lot of these sights, but those who haven’t might enjoy getting an idea of what Syria has to offer a short-term traveler rather than an ex-pat student.