The Blog and the Shower

I left Bab Sharqi at 2:30 pm yesterday; now it’s 10:45 pm, Syria time, on the following day and I’m still not home.  Gotta love the West Coast.  But at least I can cross borders easily, unlike my friends back in Syria, who pay for hundreds of dollars in application fees for visas that are never issued, or take months to emerge out of the bowels of the bureaucracy.  I’ve heard of Americans being question upon returning to Syria from the U.S., so I mentally prepared myself for the possibility of being delayed and missing my next flight.  However, the border official who stamped my passport coming in was an amicable middle-aged man with a fluffy gray beard who wasn’t too concerned with the details of my travels.

“Do you know some Spanish?” he asked me conversationally.

“Umm…a little,” I said, more than a little perplexed by the question.

He peered at the customs form I’d filled out, at the space where one lists the countries one has visited while outside of the U.S.

“Oh…Syria,” he said.  “I thought you had written Spain.”  He didn’t ask me if I knew any Arabic.

Getting through the Egyptian airport the previous evening was a little more challenging, since the official in charge of transit first tried to insist that there was no flight to New York that night and that he would find me a hotel to stay in instead; after some arguing, he checked and found out that there was indeed a flight, but set up a special chair for me to wait in by myself for assistance because apparently transferring to a Delta flight required extra procedures.  At first I found the Egyptians cold in comparison to Syrian friendliness, but they warmed up after one was impressed by my Arabic and insisted for several minutes that I must be from an Arab country.  I showed him my passport but perhaps he couldn’t read English very well; at any rate, he didn’t change his mind.  He was so enthusiastic about the idea that I finally told him my family was Syrian but had lived in the U.S. for a long time, and hoped there were no Syrians walking by at the moment, since they would see through my story in a minute.  He found the answer extremely satisfying and devoted personal attention to finishing up my paperwork, which took several hours nonetheless.

Everything in the U.S. airports–all I’ve seen of the country, up till now–seems ridiculously shiny and new.  The fast food tastes ridiculously like plastic.  And  I no longer feel like The Other; that has to be the strangest thing.