The Blog and the Shower

I’ve known for a while that if I came back to live in the Middle East, I wanted to live in Damascus. Of course, this may have been because my first visit to Syria came after living in Amman, Jordan, and after three and a half months straight of that city, any other country was bound to look like paradise. It’s not really heaven on earth, of course, but my first few weeks here have born out my assumption that Damascus would be a thoroughly pleasant place for me to live. Here are just a few of the reasons why:

1. It’s a city I can walk in. I hate driving and going places in cars, so sidewalks and street life are important to me.

2. Good city planning (or lack of stringent city planning). In many U.S. cities, zoning ordinances prevent mixed-used neighborhoods: a given block is usually designated as residential or commercial, and not both. In Damascus, as in the rest of the Middle East, most neighborhoods contain several of the kind of tiny stores that sell whatever I might need in daily life. Just on the short walk from the main road to my apartment, I pass a cheese/milk/olives/bread store, a vegetable store, a pharmacy, a stand selling baked bread with various toppings (called mana’ish), and a tiny stand with just soda, ice cream, and chips. Having most basic goods just a short walk away makes life indescribably better.

3. Relative lack of harassment. Harassment of women in particular and foreigners in general has reached epidemic levels in Egypt, where I first studied. Ranging from common hissing and catcalls to the rarer groping, it made going anywhere alone somewhat daunting. Perhaps I shouldn’t complain; while my blond hair drew attention to my presence, it also protect me from the worst harassment that fell on the Ethiopian, Eritrean, Sudanese and other refugees there. In Jordan and Morocco, where I’ve also lived, harassment was much less intense but still existed at a higher level than what I’ve found here. Harassment exists everywhere in the world, of course, including New York, but it’s not a daily worry here.

4. A plethora of parks and other public spaces. I love being able to meet a friend at the tiny park located at the convergence of three streets near my house to eat hummus and fuul (fava beans in oil) outside.

5. Public transportation. A system of public buses and shared taxis or minibuses (one is called a service, pronounced serveess, and the plural is seravis) makes it easy to get to and from school. The service routes are clearly marked and at peak hours they come by several times per minute.

6. A friendly atmosphere. I cannot emphasize enough how many genuinely nice and welcoming people I’ve met here, or how much easier of a time I’ve had making friends than in other places I’ve studied. Of course, there are plenty of nasty ones, too, but overall the atmosphere does remind me more of my hometown of Portland, Oregon than anywhere else.

7. Relatively cheap cost of living…for me, at least. Here’s one of the many places in which my privilege as a foreigner enters the bargain; Syria remains affordable for Americans despite a declining dollar, but it’s significantly less affordable for Syrians themselves, a great many of whom work two or three jobs. Occasionally a shop clerk still insists on giving me something for free (and on a cultural note, I still haven’t figured out how many times I’m supposed to resist such an offer), and when I ran into two girls I recently met at Damascus University while waiting for a service, one immediately presented me with the bottle of guava juice she’d just bought. It was not the juice, of course, that made an impression me, but her eagerness to make some welcoming gesture to a foreigner.

8. A mix of new and old. The presence of the past in Damascus is one of those rather cliched topics that guidebooks love to expound on, but I have to concur: the architecture that dates back hundreds of years mixing with much newer buildings does give the city an undeniable charm (and I hope it’s not just some orientalist mindset at work).

For now, I’m quite content to be living here.