One Week In

Yesterday was a fantastic day. I'll tell you what we did in a bit. But I haven't updated in a while so I'd better try to catch up on the rest of the week first. So. Looking back at my time in Damascus from the grand viewpoint of one week in, it may be summarised as follows (divided into further subsections for ease of - I could say reading, but I'll be honest and put writing, because I'm feeling lazy):

1. The Search For The Train Station That Wasn't (aka Soaking Up The Atmosphere, Getting Lost And/Or Jostled, and Learning How To Cross The Road In The Face Of Oncoming Traffic)

This took place on Saturday. Charlie's and my landlady fed us lunch, and then in the afternoon Charlie and I decided to go for a walk, since Sarah and Nikki weren't in and we didn't know what they were up to. So we strolled the same way that we went on our first day, up to the end of Straight Street (which is a long and straight street, rather as the name suggests) and through the souks. Then we diverged from our previous route, crossed the strange, malodorous little trickle that appears to bear the name of river, and braved the traffic and the wider roads in search of the train station.

I think here would be a good place to make a note of the quintessential musical accompaniment to any stroll you happen to take along a main road in Damascus. The cacophony is hard to describe and I think probably hard to imagine unless you've walked through something similar. Every nanosecond a different horn goes off, at a different pitch, for different lengths of time. Listen for a bit, and it's strange, but you do fall into the pattern of it. There isn't a rhythm, or any kind of pattern or consonance whatsoever, but it's kind of supremely without any of these things, if that makes sense. Honestly, it's a symphony of which I'm sure Schoenberg would have been proud, a masterpiece of involuntary postmodernism or whatever you call it. Charlie and I decided that it's the kind of thing you could record and play at the entrance of the Tate Modern to perplex people. It would be sufficiently startling from an aesthetic point of view.

We went the wrong way at first, and had to double back on ourselves, and we nearly got run over a few times (this isn't as serious as it sounds, not here, anyway) crossing roads without any marked crossing points (not that marked crossing points make a difference, as we discovered later) but we eventually arrived at the train station, only to find that it - well, was defunct. Which confused us because we thought we were in the right place and we were, only there wasn't actually a station. We walked down a road to the side and eventually got to a point on a road bridge over the (former) tracks where we could peer back at the building through some fencing, and yes, the tracks had all been ripped up and the train station was, in fact, no more. Who knows when it will be replaced? But I looked it up in my (now outdated) guidebook and apparently the only trains that used to go from there were of the once-weekly, pulled-by-hundred-year-old-steam-engines and full-of-daytrippers variety. Perhaps there was a lack of demand.

So that was the end of that mini-adventure. Which just goes to prove the old maxim that the quest is the thing, not the grail. (Especially when the grail isn't even there when you get there, otherwise I'm sure the grail would count for a little as well, let's be honest.)

In the evening we went round to Nikki's to meet up with Will and Jenny, who had arrived earlier, and then we all went to a comparatively expensive (for here, where it is ridiculously cheap by Western standards) bar for drinks. I think here's a good time to introduce you to Anas and Hani, two of Nikki's Syrian friends whom (I think) she met through Tommy, an English guy who was her roommate before she moved house because of bedbugs; because all three figure in later events, too. We actually met them first at the really good restaurant we went to on Thursday night, but they were all there again tonight.

Hani is funny and cheerful and obsessed with rugby. He plays for the Syrian national team and almost as soon as we got acquainted started trying to recruit the guys in our group to play for it, too. (I think the title may be a bit of a misnomer, as this is the practice, apparently! It seems to run on a mix of foreign and national steam, and they play under the direction of the deputy to the British ambassador, Peter Ford, who has apparently played with them himself on occasion.) And as three of the guys yet to come play rugby for college and university, he was very happy. Anas is more serious. He spent three years in America studying (I think) engineering and has an extremely stressful job. They both speak very good English and anyway, you'll see how generous and hospitable they are. And Tommy, Nikki's former roommate, is a classicist at Oxford who does Arabic as a subsidiary (you know, as you do). He actually left this morning, the trip to Ma'aloula was his last day, but he'd been here for about five or six weeks and he was a really nice guy, too - very friendly and chatty.

Anyway, we stayed at that bar for a bit and then left, bumping into yet more British people (these ones from SOAS) who had come out here to study Arabic, and walked back through Bab Touma towards Le Serail, which is a club near Bab Sharqi, just round the corner from the Piano Bar. Anas patiently and politely encouraged a few of us to talk abysmal Arabic to him on the way, which must have been mildly entertaining for him. He was very good about it, though.

Anyway, inevitably, as soon as we got there, it was decided that we would go somewhere else. Right across the other side of town, as it happened. Hurrah! So some of the group caught a taxi with Hani, and as the rest of us were to go with Anas to his car, back we went to Bab Touma square, and as we emerged into it we stumbled into something of a scene. People milling around, a fire engine, hosepipes snaking round our feet, sirens going, and tucked between two other houses on the corner, something that had formerly been we didn't know what, a house or a shop maybe, seriously ablaze. I don't know if anyone was caught in it; we didn't find out, but I hope not. The entire top of it was engulfed in flames. We had to cross in front of the fire engine, through the bystanders and trying to avoid tripping over the hosepipes, which all felt strangely unregulated. The cramped conditions prevented better safety precautions. There was a narrow street on one side and then traffic still crowding the square on the other, and meanwhile people still going back and forth...somewhat chaotic, to say the least.

To round off this long and rather pointless tale, we eventually got to the car, and Anas drove us halfway across the city on these multi-lane inner-city roads that are practically like motorways, and might as well be for all the difference it makes in the driving. And when we got there, the place was closed! (Poor Nikki was thoroughly embarrassed, she having been the instigator of the change in plans.) So back we went, and ended up in Le Serail after all. And that was where we spent the rest of the evening. It was quite fun. It couldn't fail to make you smile to watch Hani - he really throws himself into his dancing, but all the Syrians seem to, even the men. Which is quite refreshing, really. The six of us who lasted till closing time meandered back home in early morning in that happy way you do.

Incidentally, contrary to what we were told before coming out here, at least, it's not true that you can't get alcohol in Syria. You can, at least in the Christian quarter, although I don't know about outside it. But a lot of things that we were told haven't been true. Another was (according to the oh-so-accurate guidebooks I purchased in a last-minute frenzy of preparation) that dollars are the unofficial second currency. That would have been nice, but no.

2. The Ultimately Successful But Extremely Exasperating While It Lasted Embassy Venture (aka In Search Of An ATM, In Search Of A Place To Get Passport Photos, Sitting In A Cafe, Waiting Some More)

Basically that is the gist of it. On Sunday Charlie and I caught a taxi in the morning to the British Embassy to get this letter of recommendation that we thought we needed in order to get another letter from the Arabic Language Center to take to the AIDS center in order to get tested for free. (Phew.) But Charlie had no passport photos, and neither of us had enough cash. (The equivalent of 50 quid for a piece of paper with a few lines of Arabic type, a passport photo stuck to it and a couple of official stamps. We felt rather hard-done-by.) So began the quest. One of the counter attendants had told Charlie that there was a cash machine across the junction and down the road. Of course, when we got there it was out of order. (It was one of these Syrian-style holes in the wall of a little hut.) So we walked all over the place, basically, looking for another functioning ATM, asking people along the way - none of whom wanted to be unhelpful and who therefore insisted to a man that there was a cash machine down this or that road somewhere. We did find one eventually, mainly by dint of walking and walking till we reached a more commercial area and not really thanks to any of the directions we'd been given, but as we walked back towards the original ATM, I remarked, not entirely seriously, that I bet it was going to be in service now, after all that. And we walked past it, and looked at it, and it was.

I suppose the moral of this story is, if there is one - never trust a Syrian cash machine professing itself to be 'out of service'. Hang around ten or fifteen minutes, just to be sure.

Anyway, after that there was still the question of finding the passport photo place, which was supposedly just around the corner, though after the experience with the cash machine we weren't terribly inclined to place too much faith in the rapid fulfilment of this mission. It proved to be almost as amusing. On the corner, we asked a couple of men. Down the street and to the left. Ok. Down the street we went. Didn't see anywhere, though we passed a pharmacy and some kind of cafe-like place. So we asked at the right-hand corner of the T-junction. The man pointed to the other side of the junction and across the road. Over the road we went, and on looking round spotted a photo place, on the other side of junction it was true, but on the original side of the road. Aha! we thought. This must be it. So we crossed over. But did they do passport photos there? Nope! They pointed us back up the first street from which we had come. By this point we were thoroughly confused. So we went back to the pharmacy and asked there, and they pointed us back *down* the street. You can imagine what we felt like. At this point the only place that remained to ask was the cafe, so we finally went in there, and the man we spoke to, when he had finally understood our question, goes, 'Oh, yes! I have passport photo!' And he showed us to a little back room where he had a manual set-up. *Not* evident from the outside! But what is life in a strange city where you don't speak the language very well without these little experiences? It's a funny phenomenon (when you're not suffering from it), but people are so keen to be helpful that they will pretend to know the answer to your question even when they, in fact, don't. Thus proving rather more unhelpful than otherwise.

After paying at the Embassy, we still had to wait till two o'clock to collect these pieces of paper, so we went to sit in a cafe where their TV was showing a rather ghastly film with Kevin Bacon in it about an invisible man who appeared to have gone mad and was trying to kill lots of people. Then we had to wait some more after we went back to the Embassy. I think the considerable waiting we had to do that day didn't grate on me quite so badly as it did on Charlie because I'm very used to the 'manana, manana' attitude of Andalucia. But still, it was the British Embassy - I suppose I did have half an idea that it might be a little more speedy. But in fact the section we were directed to was similar to the section we got our visas from in the Syrian Embassy in London.

In the evening we met yet more new arrivals at the expensive bar, Marmar, and afterwards Sarah, Charlie, Jenny and I went for dinner at a restaurant called Al-Azariyeh, although I have no idea whether it was any good or not, because I didn't have anything, my stomach at this point having given up the ghost in the fight against all these new and strange bacteria it had been subjected to since arriving.

3. A Bug

On Monday I wasn't very well, and I don't think I did anything except read. Oh, wait - I did go out briefly with Charlie to change money, which involved more time spent waiting sitting in a cafe. One spends a lot of time sitting in cafes out here. It's either that or sleep, when it gets hot. We bumped into Tommy on the way there and he told us about a film night that night at Marmar, but I didn't go in the end. (Charlie did and he said the movie was dreadful.)

4. The Failed University Venture

On Tuesday I had no idea about the incident at the American Embassy until I woke up, at about three in the afternoon (I attribute this to the heat and not feeling well) and looked at my phone to see a text from Mum asking if I was okay. Yes, I replied, why? That was when I realised that I'd been hearing rather a lot of distant sirens while lying half-awake in bed, but you know how when you're half-awake you often fail to draw any rational conclusion from your empirical observations - well, so I had. Also, Damascus is pretty noisy as a general rule - at any given time, particularly at night, you might hear what sound like bursts of gunfire or firecrackers (these are very popular, wait till I describe Maalula) not to mention the honking which is a *constant* background accompaniment for your entertainment. Then there's the call to prayer, five times a day. I'm beginning to be able to sleep through the early morning one, but it's quite a strange phenomenon, in that the volume and general sound of it seems to vary. I've not yet observed a pattern, but I haven't really tried - maybe I should. Sometimes it's quieter, and peaceful and soothing, and at other times, when all the minarets get going (neither in time nor in the key) the effect is more that of a somewhat eerie, wailing groaning. It is a definite clamour. It reminds me of the competing guild and temple bells of Ankh-Morpork.

Anyway, later it turned out that some of the Durham gang had actually been at the British Embassy when it happened, and (so much for consular protection!) got unceremoniously turfed out. Poor Hani, who works at the Italian Embassy, was outside having a cigarette when it started; he apparently flung himself to the ground and was scared to death.

Charlie and I decided to go to the university to see about registering, despite some initial chariness. It took us three taxis to find and get back from the place, which was rather less entertaining than it sounds. The first one seemed a little spaced-out and clearly had no idea where we wanted to go (this is quite common of taxi drivers here), and dropped us on what was, in effect, the side of a motorway. The second was nice, to be fair, and even though he didn't know where it was we wanted to go either and at first drove us to a mosque (owing to the very fine nuance of difference in the pronunciation of the words for 'university' and 'mosque') , he drove around and asked people until he'd found it. (It occurs to me now that we wouldn't have had this trouble if we'd had a proper map, but unfortunately all we had was a guidebook map, which ended just where the pertinent region of the city began.) After all this, when we got there, the office was closed! So back we trekked.

I can't for the life of me remember what happened on Tuesday evening. If I think of it I will come back and add it in, but I don't expect it was terribly interesting, in any case. In fact, none of this is terribly interesting - it seems more a tale of a succession of failures than anything else, but perhaps the schadenfreude (sp?) will cause some entertainment, if nothing else. (There are two Germans living in the same house as Charlie and me, and at some point, I remember, we had a conversation about different nationalities' senses of humour. He said that the Germans find the one about the man walking into a bar particularly funny. It's interesting. I find that one funny, too, but I don't know if it's because of the schadenfreude or because it is simply unexpected.)

5. Ma'aloula

This is the town we visited on Wednesday, one of the few remaining places where they speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus. We were lucky enough to be able to visit it for the Festival of Something-or-other (I looked it up in the guidebook afterwards, I didn't actually know at the time, but now I've forgotten what it was - I'll tell you it when I know again) - Anas and a friend drove a group of us there in their cars. I - we - really had such an amazing time. It had everything. The oldest church in the world at the top of a mountain, with almost as ancient altars based on sacrificial altars from pre-Christian times (i.e. on which they used to kill people; with the same hole they used to use to siphon off the blood); a bolshie nun kicking us out of her precious chapel ('Five minutes only!') with Greek-captioned paintings on the arched ceiling; secluded tree-sheltered alcoves in cliff-faces concealing tiny nun-guarded sound-muffling chapels; a long and languorous lunch on the vast terrace of a cafe where time got lost, overlooking a wild and sun-bleached countryside; a Catholic prayer service in what I think was Arabic because I recognised some of the words, with lots of what Charlie calls 'smells and bells', and much chanting of 'Kyrie eleison'; massive bangs (these began before the service had finished, I half thought war had broken out or someone had come to take away the westerners); an excitable man on some other men's shoulders excitably waving an axe and leading a vociferous chant, surrounded by lots of other men jumping up and down and shouting and chanting in Aramaic; climbing a mountain at dusk; standing at the top of a mountain with some flaming tyres and lots of other people; climbing down a mountain in the dark (all of this maybe makes it sound a simpler matter than it was; it involved squeezing through holes and being helped up and down sheer rock faces by random helpful smiling belted and bandana'd men dispersed along the path at intervals; I'm sure I wasn't insured for this kind of thing but you didn't really care at the time, it was the best adventure ever) with children racing unbelievably fast down the slope ahead of you and random men randomly firing off guns (as you do); sitting outside a cafe in the road with kids letting off firecrackers and people setting off fireworks absolutely everywhere around you, including from balconies right above your head and aiming them so badly that they threatened to land on your head, at least twice causing several of your group to leap up and flee the table in fear of their lives and consequently, fits of hysterical laughter (everything was funny by this point) and high in the distant darkness, watching flaming tyres fall and roll down the mountainside and closer, Catharine wheels whirr in and out of life.

At about quarter past ten, we drove home, happily exhausted. It was a wonderful day.

This has taken me longer to finish than I expected, because of not being very well over the weekend (I started writing on Thursday and it's Monday now, I don't know what the date of posting will come up as) and there's so much more detail I'd love to write about Ma'alula, but I think that's the essence of it, really. I think I'd bore you if I wrote another entry about it. I need to add how great it was of Anas to drive us there and give us the opportunity to go - it was a really wonderful thing to be able to do in the first week, before university starts and there's less time to do things like this. It was also absolutely mad of him, though: he had only got to sleep that morning at 2 am or later, having stayed up working that long so as to be able to take the following day off. (We met to leave at 10 am.) We expressed concern about this at the time, but he was used to it, he said. So there you go. But it was the first time he had been to the festival at Ma'alula, too, so it wasn't just for us. That would have been some truly insane altruism.

Parents, we got there safely and back so you needn't worry, not that you would, I'm sure. The driving was a somewhat hair-rising experience, as ever, but...and I say this with caution...strangely enough, the style seems to work. If you take as a starting point that from the way they drive you'd expect an accident every few metres, I mean. In general, because of the lack of rules, driving here perhaps requires drivers to be much more alert and actively responsive to the situation around them than at home, perhaps. And as long as they are, it's fine. But I don't think it would be terribly advisable to try driving here if you hadn't grown up with it. Only if you want an adventure, have nerves of steel and a laid-back attitude to match the general devil-may-care, anything-goes philosophy of everyone else. It seems a bit of a contradiction on first thought - like you have to be supremely steeled and supremely relaxed at the same time. But actually, thinking about it, that doesn't seem such a paradox; it makes sense. Probably the Syrians would make good Formula One drivers!

Okay, I'm rambling now so I'd better finish. Today we had our first class at the university. I still need to get my AIDS test done and register - oh, well. I am rapidly developing the same 'manana, manana' attitude as everyone and everything else. They're not stopping me from going to class, so there's no problem yet. All is good!

I hope you are all well. This has been a massive entry. Let's see if I have to split it up. Love to everyone.