Where to live?
I’ve spent much of my time so far in Damascus searching for suitable housing, a task I hadn’t expected to undertake. To be fair, a CASA administrative employee did take us all over Damascus’s Old City looking at rooms in traditional Arab houses built in a square around a courtyard open to the sky, several of which were exceedingly beautiful with trees growing and fountains whispering in the middle of the yard. However, I was shut out of a house that eight Casawiin (that’s the Arabic plural of a person in CASA, by the way) took together because of an error on the part of a CASA employee; the next day, when I was all but ready to sign a contract with a landlord for a room in a different house, I found out that opposite-gender guests were forbidden to come anywhere in the place but the courtyard. My time living with a host family in Jordan exhausted my tolerance for these kinds of rules, so I gathered my bags and left. I was later told that such restrictions were a hallmark of the more conservative Old City.
Having drained the patience of the CASA employee, I set out to search on my own—or rather, with the help of a friend from Columbia who spend the last eight months studying at the Institut Francais du Proche-Orient here. Apartment hunting is particularly arduous in Damascus, it seems, as the expat community here lacks any sort of centralized mechanism for listing vacant living spaces. While in Cairo a hundreds-strong expatriate list serve provides help with all manner of problems, here one must ask friends, who will in turn ask their friends, if they know of any housing opening, or check the French Institute’s meager listings. If this fails, one can go to a real estate agent—for a fee. Quite luckily, my friend was able to put me in touch with a French student returning to France whose apartment I’ve verbally committed to taking.
The place has a single bedroom, which means I’ll be living alone—a first for me. The place’s downsides include its semi-automatic (and semi-functional) washing machine and Turkish toilet (yes, the kind you squat on), but I think they’re far outweighed by its pros: reasonable rent, a balcony, a great view, a nice big bed, a living room with two couches, and a convenient location in a calm area of the city (in contrast with the hectic Old City, where foreigners and tourists tend to live and congregate). The current tenant isn’t moving out for another two weeks, but she offered to let me move in a few days before she leaves, and her terms convinced me to assent: she first offered that I could sleep in the large double bed with her as long as I didn’t snore. When I politely deferred, saying that I would gladly sleep on one of the two couches, she declared that she would also sleep on a couch, then, so that neither of us would feel jealous of the other.
I met the landlord a few nights ago, and I felt lucky to be dealing with this very kind and circumspect man. A few minutes after meeting me, he was instructing me–quite sincerely, I think–to phone him if I had any problems in Syria, even if at three in the morning. Although I’ve met several less-than-hospitable landlords during my apartment search, Abu Rasheed seemed to exemplify some of the best in the tradition of Arab hospitality. I was reminded of him during a presentation in our orientation where a CASA student told us, “You will spend a lot of time this year wondering whether or not you deserve all the hospitality that you receive. In some respects, this is a waste of time. You will never be able to thank anyone enough for the hospitality that they give you, unbidden.”
