...And More Thoughts

On Monday, classes started. These entail four hours a day, 9 to 1, conducted entirely in Arabic. Well, technically three hours and twenty minutes, broken up into fifty-minute slots between ten-minute breaks, which is nice because the concentration demanded in order to even get the most minuscule handle on what's going on isn't negligible. I think all schools and universities should adopt this system; they'd get a lot better results. And a lot fewer students falling asleep in class. Even as is the classes are tiring. But I did well, I think; I didn't actually fall asleep in the afternoon until Thursday. Our teacher is called Manal (usual disclaimer about transliteration applies) and she is the most phenomenally upbeat teacher ever. In the first lesson, when we faced her as a generally tired, still culturally bewildered, somewhat wary bunch (okay, well, I say 'we', but I ought to clarify that I mean 'I' and am generally extrapolating from my own condition) it was like she literally picked us all up and carried us along by the force of her enthusiasm. It was actually enjoyable. Lessons have quietened and slowed down a bit since then but they're still pretty good. The breaks really help. And she still has that energetic quality, but I reckon you need it in her job, or you'd get down pretty quickly. All teachers should have such enthusiasm.

I don't really remember what else has happened. I *am* better, so far. I've been out to eat a few times. Well, more than a few, to be honest. It's very easy to be lazy here, food-wise, one because cooking is a pain, and two, because it's so cheap to eat out or buy food from a stand. I've done most of the weekend's homework. We get given quite a bit, which is good, I suppose. Sometimes a gang of guys get together in the evenings and go to play football on a concrete pitch in the grounds of a nearby church, Syrians vs foreigners. I went to watch on Friday, and it was an - interesting game. Some international tension going on there, and a few boots flew. (Also there was a highly entertaining amount of miskicking going on. Before the game had even started the ball went flying over the walls into some poor unfortunate's house, an event which threatened to repeat itself on a number of occasions.) The foreigners won 3-0, payback for their thrashing the previous week. After it was over Sarah and I ended up having an impromptu kickabout with Firas in the big courtyard of his house, or a lesson, however you like to call it. That was great fun. I'm pretty bad, I have no doubt, but it was great fun to try hard and play on instinct. It's brilliantly energising. Then a bunch of us went out to eat and afterwards went back to American Matt's room and watched some Arabic TV without understanding the vast majority of it, and the end of 'Entrapment' in which Catherine Zeta Jones somewhat ew-inducingly gets off with Sean Connery, which was amusing. That was a good evening!

On Friday we were supposed to go to Mar Musa, a monastery high up in the mountains somewhere, but that didn't happen because of the crazy Kuwait scheme of Will Dawson, who wanted to go, quote unquote, in order to get a picture of himself standing at the Iraqi border by a 'Welcome to Iraq' sign so that he can use it for his Facebook profile. (Will is funny.) Some people actually are going, but not literally for that reason. Anyway, they spent a load of time booking flights and then the afternoon somehow whiled itself away in sunbathing (or looking for a place to sunbathe, Will's landlady booted us off her roof when we tried there first, 'because of the neighbours', but really it may have had something to do with either the presence of girls, or the presence of beer, or the fact that various people had their shirts rolled up or off - so basically, the three cardinal offences) so we never even got out of Damascus, and we didn't even end up going up the mountain that overlooks Damascus, which had been Plan B. So Plan B was postponed till yesterday evening, but it didn't even happen then, either. So Plan B may happen this evening, or then again, it may not. It's beguilingly easy to sit around, which we ended up doing in American Matt's place again last night - and oh, it was so cool, we watched 'Foyle's War' on one of the satellite channels, what might have been the first episode. It was like a little breath of England. It seemed to amuse the Americans. I wonder if this is typical of English drama? I've never thought about it before. You've just got comfortable watching this nice, staid, cosy-seeming English drama, with a gentlemanly action scene in which a man in a suit and a hat chases another one, who is then knocked out by the former gentleman's female sidekick driver with a frying pan. Then a particularly gruesome part is sprung on you in which some blonde lady gets garrotted by a wire while happily riding along on her horse.

This morning I finally went to the Centre For Aids Testing (otherwise known, appealingly, as the Centre For Infectious Diseases) and got my AIDS test done. I won't describe the trials and travails of that experience in detail. It's the usual tale of getting lost, the place turning out to be about fifty yards further down the road from where I'd originally gone wrong, not having everything I required when I got there etc etc blah blah blah. I got it done in the end. I can get the results tomorrow and then register and then see about getting an iqaama. Ha - I was just about to make some comment about the level of bureaucracy we have to go through, and I remembered a dream I had this morning. This AIDS test was clearly preoccupying me. In the dream, I went the way that Charlie had described to me when I asked him how to get there earlier on in the week - down to the restaurant in an aeroplane that he described as something out of a nightmare. (He said that on first seeing it he wondered why no one had told him that a plane had crashed in Damascus.) I got there - I think someone else from my class who'd already done the test had come with me, or they were there when I got there. I showed the receptionist my letter, and she said something - I don't remember what, but as if I was in the wrong place or didn't have the right documentation. Basically turning me away. I think I tried again, and got turned away again. So I came away crying and angry and to my companion I waved the papers furiously and said something about a certain bureaucracy that I don't want to repeat here in case what we say is watched and it gets me in trouble; and the other person turned away unsympathetically and said: "Oh, stop it. They sort the naughty ones out eventually, too." Or something along those lines. Which makes me think I have some sort of guilt complex about something or other. Perhaps about existing in general.

So. That was weird. (Last night other people were describing really vivid dreams that they'd had since getting here, too. One had had a dream that he'd been taken hostage in Iran and forced to convert at gunpoint inside a mosque. Another dreamed that she was married with a daughter and her husband had started beating her but she didn't tell anyone. Very strange.)

Ramadan starts today. When we were talking, Peter, the young English journalist who's living in the same house as me and Charlie (Bab Touma has been invaded by the British, seriously) expressed an interest in trying the fasting. I think the problem would be going without drink rather than without food - generally I eat very little if anything during the day at all. Apparently everyone gets very bad-tempered during Ramadan, during the day, and you need to watch out for that if you venture out into the city. There was much joking about this which I probably shouldn't repeat. It might be seen as rather provocative. I don't think it was too bad, but you never know.

I had some general thoughts about the general state of certain things that I wanted to put down, which were first triggered while we were at the church service in Maalula. It is an interesting subject, I think. But they're quite serious and I've already written loads and loads and loads, so I think I'll save them for another time. That will be a rambling entry because they are only half-formed ideas and vague impressions. I won't know exactly what I want to say until I start to write.

So, I'll end there. I've been on here for ages. Love to everyone!