Some Time Later...

*shuffles in, blinks slightly, looks round at the vaguely familiar surroundings*

I forgot about this, sorry. At least, I didn't forget, but I got busy. Well, at least, technically, I got exhausted, then I got ill, and then I moved house. And that's pretty much the sum of the last month. And I've only got two weeks until I fly home for Christmas and I still have all my Christmas shopping to do, so that's my time laid out for me already. (Well, that and work.) If anyone wants anything specific from Syria please comment!

I don't really know what else to write at the moment. It's got very cold here. Things are getting interesting over the border. (A day after the murder of Pierre Gemayel, Will and Charlie made a last-minute trip to the Lebanese border in order to renew their visas and once there decided, as you do, in such situations, with everyone else coming *out* rather than going in, to go to Beirut. Said city was apparently completely dead. Also, within twenty-four hours all the billboards from Beirut to the border had been stripped and covered with posters of the deceased - efficient work.)

Oh, I know. I finally paid my first visit to the Maktab al-Hijra a week (or maybe it was two weeks, I forget) ago, upon my visa's being about to run out and the prospect of the Maktab for once seeming, on balance, less hassle than a trip across the border. This was nowhere near the hellhole that I had been led to expect. Actually, I think I probably benefited from everyone else's bad experiences. I went there anticipating a nadir of filth and heat and smelliness and chaos and almost thought there'd been some kind of mistake when I first stepped in. It was only a not-very-clean building, practically empty because of the early hour (another tip for visiting the Maktab) and really almost peaceful. Anyway, so my first impressions were almost positive.

I then proceeded to spend three hours filling in forms and going back and forth between a) the Maktab al-Hijra, the photocopying place (which was thankfully right next door) and home (because at first I appeared to need a contract for whatever it was I wanted to get) and b) various uniformed officials within the Maktab, trying to clarify what exactly it was I wanted. But that's almost incidental, especially as the whole thing was so farcical as to be entertaining.
At first (as it turned out some time later) they thought I wanted an actual residence permit and I got all the way, by way of various other officials and going home twice (once to check my new address, which I didn't know, and the second time to get my contract, which the official dealing with me didn't tell me I needed until *after* I'd come back from the first trip and handed in all my correctly filled-out forms), to the chief guy who informed me, after scanning the umpteen million required papers that I'd handed him, that I couldn't have an iqaama because my house contract was only for one month. Which you know, was funny, because what I thought I'd asked for in the first place was a visa extension. So I said, can I have a visa extension instead? Mumkin shahr wahed? He nodded and said 'Mumkin' and sent me off on another quest which involved a lot of circuitous bouncing back and forth from official to official, some grumpy, some polite ('Go and see my friend Asab' - 'take this to my friend Mahmood') and waiting (by which time the Maktab was getting a bit crowded and I was beginning to see how people might have got a bad impression of it if they'd only seen it like this) and me feeling like a particle in some kind of random, peculiarly pointless bureaucratic Brownian motion.

But anyway, in the end, after only three hours, which might have been less if it hadn't been for the iqaama mix-up, I got my visa extension (the anticlimactic manner of that was another stupid thing that I found hilarious at the time - after all that running around and half an hour of waiting it was literally an 'oi, ya britaania' and a passport with a piece of card stuck in it shoved into my hand and I was no concern of theirs) and I walked out having got what I'd come for and missed most of class and not feeling too stressed out, considering. So I reckon I was lucky. By and large I found the whole thing more entertaining than anything else.

What else? I'm enjoying living somewhere warm and comfortable at the moment, unbeleaguered by high-ceilinged heat-dissipating rooms and unfragrant Turkish-style toilets and crazy sisters of landladies. (I'll let you fill in the details for yourself on that one.) The warm and comfortable somewhere is an apartment in the centre of the city, out of Bab Touma (that's another reason for not getting to the internet as often, it's more expensive in the centre) with proper heating and a proper bathroom with a bath and a Western toilet and no necessity of going outside to get anywhere in the house, and a living room with a TV (previous landlady never let us watch hers) and comfy chairs, and a dining room, and a kitchen with an oven and lots of cooking utensils supplied, and a washing machine, and even a balcony. It may sound a little weird that I'm getting excited about these very normal things, but if you had lived in Bab Touma you would understand. And, in the new area we can buy sliced almost-proper bread and non-shrivelled vegetables and various other things not found in the Bab, and with this and a decent kitchen cooking for oneself suddenly becomes a lot more appetising. Downside is that the area is more expensive, but the truth is, it's nice to be comfortable.

Incidentally, my flatmate Sarah and I had our first party in our new house last weekend; it was for our members of our class only, 'to improve bonds'. (This at the behest of Manal.) It ended up going pretty well, although there was almost no Arabic spoken so from, you know, the overall perspective of the year and its goals it was a nice big failure. We played poker and then Ring of Fire; inebriation and raucousness ensued. I won't go into the details.

Gotta go now! I hope everything's going well for you all in your respective places. Lots of love!