Here Part #2

I'm so overwhelmed by all the new impressions and things that have happened that it's getting very hard to sort them out in my head and decide what to say.

I suppose the most important thing is that yesterday evening we all found somewhere to live, which I still can't quite believe - it was still only our first day. (It felt like a week. It was a long day.) So I didn't end up having to stay in a hotel at all. It's an amazingly high-ceilinged, spacious room in a house not far from Nikki's here in the Christian quarter, just down the road from this internet cafe, in fact. It's on the ground floor, off a shady, vine-draped courtyard with a fountain in the centre. (The fountain is usually turned off.) Charlie has a room in the same house. Getting the rooms was a mildly entertaining experience, though maybe a story for another time.

Our landlady lives alone with her sister and doesn't have a job, so is dependent on foreigners for the income. She speaks only Arabic and French so we communicate with her in a mixture of rusty school French and even poorer Arabic. Lots of perplexing fun. Throw in the German lady who's also staying there and various other foreigners and the conversation occasionally puts your head in a whirl. I don't know if it's worse if you do understand all the languages or if you don't!

The rest of yesterday was fun, too, but I don't want to bore you with a note-by-note description of it. We went for a walk round town after going to the cafe I talked about in the last entry, which involved venturing out of the Christian quarter, and wandered through a couple of the big souqs or however you spell it in transliteration, which was an experience. In the Christian quarter you can go about dressed more or less as you would at home, and you see the other women doing the same, but outside it the headscarf suddenly becomes noticeably more ubiquitous. Maybe not universal, but nearly so. Then you have the type that covers the mouth, as well. We saw a couple of women who were covered entirely, head to toe, in the black garment whose name I forget. It wasn't immediately apparent how they could see, but I suppose the part that covered the eyes must have been a very fine mesh. Then we found ourselves outside the Ummayyad mosque, but didn't go in - something to go back to another day. It was scorchingly hot at this point.

After we got back, the saga of obtaining rooms began. We didn't actually have to look very far - the brother of Fadi, Firas (I'm probably transliterating these very badly) took us down the road to this house where there were two rooms free, but then we had to sit and wait for a while while the lady negotiated a leaving date with someone who was already staying in one of them (for free, because she knew him from before) and was upset at having to leave because he wanted to stay until he'd finished his exams. In the end Charlie was given a different room to stay in until the other guy leaves, and which is just as nice, so the entire charade probably wasn't necessary!

After we'd finally got the rooms and brought in the rest of our luggage, which had been sitting in the trunk of Fadi's car since the morning, and had showers, and chatted a little to the others in the house, hunger drove Charlie and me round to Nikki's house, where Sarah had been installed in another room. More hanging around and talking, and then we all went out with Sarah's new landlord to eat, to a restaurant where the food was very, very good indeed, and incredibly cheap. We were joined there by some of Nikki's friends, and after that we went to a place that people seem to call the Piano Bar even though its name is Folleys or Volleys, outside Bab Sharqi, about two minutes from where we live, as it turned out. But I was exhausted so left earlier than everyone else.

This morning I lay in bed for an hour or so in a peaceful daze, listening to the call for prayer and in that vague way you do when you're not fully awake, comparing the singing style to that of flamenco and wondering if they had any connection or common root. It was considerably less strident than from Nikki's house yesterday - lulling, even.

When I finally emerged from my room our landlady unexpectedly fed us coffee and biscuits and grapes, which was a nice surprise. It's true about the hospitality. After that Charlie and I called at Nikki's and went with Sarah to the same cafe as the day before to eat lunch (well, I say lunch but at this point it was about four o'clock), where we bumped into a couple of other Arabic students - Nicolas, a Greek who lives in the same house as me and Charlie, and his friend, who for someone with a lean physique shoved down an extraordinary amount of food. They were a lot of fun. Then Nikki turned up and someone else called Jorge (my head is spinning with all the names) and finally Nama, Sarah's landlord. There is some sort of feud between him and Nikki's family over something that happened years ago, which is making life a little difficult for Nikki and Mac, the American who rents from them as well, and he walked in just as Nikki was telling us about it, somewhat uncannily.

Then we went shopping for food, and then came here. And that's all I've done today so far. Yesterday was long, and today has been short!