Leaving Syria
I’m leaving Syria tomorrow, a fact which is a cause for intense excitement (that I’ll be able to see my family and friends) and sadness (for many other reasons). I’ll be back in Portland, Oregon on Saturday in the early evening. After spending time in my home city and visiting a cousin in Alaska (also really exciting), I’m going to teach Arabic to public high school students in Boston for a month and a half (anyone looking for a subletter?). And after that egregious use of far too many parentheses comes…who knows?
A Forbidden Country
Google has been developing a new platform called “Google Wave” for collaborative work online, but it won’t be released until later this year. There’s a button on the website that allows you to ask to be notified of the release, but when I clicked on the button, I got the following message:
| Error | |
Forbidden
Your client does not have permission to get URL /fb/forms/wavesignup/ from this server. (Client IP address: 91.144.19.142)
You are accessing this page from a forbidden country.
To be honest, accessing this particular technology isn’t all that important to me; left to my own devices, I would probably follow the same strategy I’ve fallen into with most technology and trends, which is waiting to see which ones emerge as most important before adopting them. But it’s not clear why Syrians as a whole should be prohibited from being a bit more proactive than I am. That it’s also easily accessible through a proxy is beside the point.
What most caught my attention about the message, though, was the phrasing of calling Syria a “forbidden country,” as exotic as that kinda sounds; from my perspective, of course, it’s not the country that’s forbidden, but the website.
Really, there are enough reasons to hate the military already…
…but this is just annoying.
While Delta has started charging passengers $40 to check two bags, they make the following exception:
U.S. Military personnel on active duty with travel orders may check in 10 bags on Delta aircraft or 4 bags on Delta Connection® carriers at no additional charge. Each bag has a maximum weight of 100 lbs (45 kg) and size of 80 linear inches (203 cm).
Wow, so military personel could potentially load down the plane with up to 1000 pounds of luggage, for free? What on earth are they bringing? And given that I’d kind of rather not know, why should I subsidize it? Bah.
The Further Annals of Mistranslation
In Arabic, it says “sharqiyat batman;” I assume that the latter word is someone’s name, while “sharqiyat” means the sort of antique-looking “eastern” trinkets that a lot of tourist-oriented shops sell. In this shop owner’s translation, however, he became…Oriental Batman!
The End of a year in CASA
CASA ended last week. We had a party and somebody brought a cake with our photo on it:
We lit the candles and everyone decided it would be ironic and funny if we celebrated our lack of American nationalism and Amerian funding by singing patriotic songs, most of which I barely knew the words to. It was neat repeat of one of the more awkward moments of my birthday party, in which the Americans found the irony of singing the national anthem quite hilarious, while the Europeans and Syrians didn’t find it remotely amusing but tried to be excessively polite about it anyhow.
One of our teachers asked us to go around the room and report moments that we’d never forget from the past year. I said I’d always remember M going up to the bored employee puffing coolly on a cigarette at the Department of Passports and Immigration, then shouting in his face, “Smoking is prohibited!” R said she’d never forget how good I was at acting like a prostitute, as my entire class discovered when we staged an inpromptu rendition of Sa’dallah Wannous’s “A Day From Our Time” and my portrayal of the pimp/whore was said to be especially convincing.
Joking aside, it’s hard to express how grateful I am to have had this chance to study in Damascus, in this program in particular. While each semester presented its own challenges, I couldn’t have asked for more dedicated teachers, or more wonderful and thought-provoking classmates, from whom I learned just as much as I did from any professor or text. Additionally, I couldn’t have asked for more enjoyable or complicated city to spend a year in. The continuation of CASA as a program in Damascus has recently been called into question for reasons of internal politics and minute power struggles, but I’m happy to report that it’ll be held for at least another year so that a new group of Casawiin can enjoy the same chances that my friends and I have; hopefully, it’ll continue for many more to come.
Lost in Translation #88899735
At a party last night: two Syrian men in their twenties address an American friend and I as they prepare to leave:
Syrian 1: Did you know my friend is a necrovillist?
Syrian 2: Giggles.
American friend: What’s a necrovillist?
Me: Yeah, what are you talking about?
Syrian 1: A necrovillist! A necrovillist!
Syrian 2: Giggles.
Syrian friend, Y, sitting nearby: You don’t know necrovillist?!! It is an English word.
Americans: Um…no.
Y: You know, one who does love with graves? (Peals of laughter)
American friend: Oh…a necrophiliac.
Me: Your friend is a necrophiliac. Great.
The two Syrians, seeing that their joke has fallen flat, exit the scene.
It’s great that people learn the really important words in English first…
A lot of driving and a little sight-seeing
This weekend fourteen of us from CASA filled a rented microbus and visited the tomb of former president Hafez al-Asad in his home village of Qurdaha, which lies on the coast of Syria about four and a half hours from Damascus.
All the guards wore a suit and tie, and one offered guests bitter coffee in white china cups. They watched us closely, and a clump of them followed our group where ever we wandered. Unfortunately, photography was prohibited inside the tomb, which seemed large and empty since they were in the middle of renovations and had knocked down what had reportedly been walls dividing the cavernous space into separate rooms. All it contained currently was a scaffolding in addition to the graves of Hafez and his son, Basil.
Afterwards, we drove a little bit more and stopped to drink tea next to a stream before taking the long drive back to Damascus.
67% of all statistics are made up on the spot, and 90% of politics consists of symbolically doing nothing
Thank goodness the Syrian government has taken such decisive action against the threat of swine flu, preventing incoming travelers from carrying any meat products with them into tthe country.
According to the same article, Director of Animal Health Ziyad Namour stressed “that the national emergency plan connected to birds’ flu stipulates for formation of main and sub technical committees and teams for urgent interference.” Great! More committees! No issue is too important not to be added to the largess of the bureaucratic machine!
Mr. Namour also “asserted that there is not any licensed farm of breeding pigs in Syria.” Since it seems to be general knowledge that some Christians do raise pigs here, I can only deduce that their farms are unlicensed.
It’s not from the pigs
Every time I’ve mentioned swine flu to someone in Syria, I’ve gotten the same response: “Well, thank goodness we don’t have many pigs in Syria.” Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.
There have been two reported cases of swine flu in Israel (from Israelis who recently visited Mexico), but I don’t imagine Israel has a lot of pigs, either. In fact, the Israeli Health Ministry recently renamed the illness because, as Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman explained, “We will use the term Mexican flu in order not to have to pronounce the word swine.” Observant Jews, like observant Muslims, do not eat pork.
All governments, of course, have a robust Orwellian tradition of redirecting public consciousness through names — hence, the U.S. has a Defense Department to help coordinate preemptive attacks, the Israel Defense Force slaughters civilians in Gaza, and Egypt and Syria, to a lesser extent, were “victorious” in the October War.
However, in this case, as amusing as I find Litzman’s reasoning, the renaming could at least help reduce the illusion that the disease is a result of proximity to pigs; in fact, it spreads from person to person.
I wonder how the Syrian government would rename the flu if it made it here (God forbid, as I can only imagine how fast it would spread). Israeli flu?
Report Internet Censorship…
…using Herdict, where you can see if other users in your country have reported being unable to access the same websites.
