Through The Looking Glass

From Russia With Love

2008-07-17T22:34:00.000-07:00

I'm not used to updating on the move! There's no time. I don't think I can do this trip (and the characters on it) justice without more of it, so I'll just give a really quick run-down and hopefully things will slow to a more leisurely pace once we reach China and Hong Kong and I can include all the stories and sightings.

I'm currently in an internet cafe in Irkutsk having spent a couple of days by Lake Baikal; we're soon to head off for a wander and another two delightful nights on the train, the Trans-Mongolian this time. St. Petersburg and Moscow were fascinating but with so little time we obviously weren't able to get much off the tourist trail. I can now say that I have seen Lenin, if that was indeed him, and been whistled at by a Kremlin guard for walking slightly in the wrong direction (this was surprisingly effective - you should have seen the jump and abrupt right-turn we made with no other warning necessary).

Four days on the train was - let's say, entertaining. On the first night the group managed to get thoroughly told off for being noisy, via the bemused translation of a Russian fellow passenger obviously grabbed for the purpose, by our very dour provodnitsa, including and culminating in a threat to call the police. We ate lots of noodles, played lots of cards, read a lot, and looked out of the window a whole lot. Siberia was very, hypnotically flat for two days (the horizontal equivalent of vertigo) and then became hilly overnight. I quite enjoyed having the excuse to be so ridiculously idle overall, in general you'll never be in another situation where you have so little demand on you, although not so much the lack of proper washing facilities.

Lake Baikal is beautiful, the scenery was awesome, the weather was gorgeous and we did enough walking/hiking up steep hills to old Soviet observatories guarded by angry dogs and to various other vantage-points (trees and railings adorned to the hilt with knots of ribbon and cloth tied by the locals for good luck), to make up for the four days of enforced inactivity on the train. And managed to fit in a chair lift ride and a boat trip as well.

The initial period of the trip was exhausting for various reasons and there was almost too much to take in while we were going round St. Petersburg and Moscow, but I think everyone's beginning to settle into the rhythm of it now. Lake Baikal's been a good place to stop and catch our breath a bit. Next stop is Ulaan Baatar. Goodbye, Russia! Bring on the gers!

Mamma Mia, Here I Go Again

2008-07-06T14:23:00.001-07:00

Testing, testing...just checking to see if this works (posting by e-mail, that is)...

St. Petersburg, here I come!

* * *

p.s. A qualified yes! There's an irritating Yahoo ad in the footer that wasn't there in the e-mail, which somewhat takes away from the point if I have to remove it via the blog site. (Anyone want a new e-mail address? No? Didn't think so...) Off to mess around with settings...

The Mirror Beckons

2008-03-23T06:26:00.000-07:00

Happy (white/grey/green, depending on where you are) Easter! Unfortunately I'm not back in Damascus, although I wish I were. Instead I'm stuck in the staid domains of home, relishing the miserable weather in a masochistic sort of way - it's got a kind of dour, in-your-face, sink-your-teeth-into-it quality, so solid you could cut it with a knife. Like a grumpy jailer, although you probably wouldn't want to sink your teeth into a jailer.

The sun may have come out for a bit just then. Anyway, pathetic fallacy notwithstanding, I'm really just posting to remind myself of something to look forward to, and somewhat pre-emptively revive this blog. That something being, travel is once again in the offing: in July I'm going to be heading out with some college friends on the Trans-Siberian railway from St. Petersburg to Beijing via Moscow, Irkutsk and Ulan Bataar (and afterwards from there to Shanghai and Hong Kong and surrounding area)!

I don't know how much access I'll get to the internet, at least on the train journey, but it seems a shame to leave this blog dormant indefinitely, even if it was originally for the year in Damascus, so I think I'll try to keep some record of the trip here. I don't know when I'll next get back to that region, but assuming I do - call it an Interlude!

The End

2007-09-19T15:59:00.000-07:00

Goodbye...!

Ironically

2007-08-13T14:03:00.001-07:00

Well, this explains something. Alas, dear readers! Our cesspit of subversion and dissent as cultivated in this blog can no longer continue to seethe. I had thought my cunningly adopted discourse of cooking pots, squat toilets and etymological speculation would be sufficient disguise - sadly, I was wrong.

* * *

I've written a longer entry which I tried to post beforehand but couldn't, owing to aforementioned difficulties. I'll try again later. I just thought I would mention the above, out of interest. Funnily enough, it may well be the one and only time that I will ever refer to such subjects here. How's that for irony?

Egypt; Syria; Nicole Vienneau

2007-07-08T15:47:00.000-07:00

Last things first - a Canadian woman went missing in Hama five months ago. They are still looking.

I was going to write Manic #2, which would have related the remainder of the second trip to Egypt after the high that was Mount Sinai (if you'll forgive me the dreadful pun, but then dreadful puns were a feature of the trip, as seems to happen when Will and Charlie are participating, so perhaps it's not unfitting): the scorching taxi ride to Dahab, the quiet wind-down there in its disproportionately familiar surroundings, the predictable boat shenanigans the next day. The image of hundreds of Palestinians and Jordanians and Egyptians crammed onto the boat decks watching us as we and all the rest of the foreigners were let off first and rode away in the bus to the terminal, the sleepless service ride to Amman (that's three times through Jordan overland and never once have I seen it by day), the surreal early-hours border crossing...

And then I would have talked about travelling round Syria with Nikki (in April, after our move back to Bab Touma to live respectively above and in American Jess's apartment, which she was shortly to abandon to return to the States). This was another whistle-stop frenetic sort of venture from Hama to Aleppo to Latakia and back. Hama welcomed us in cautionary fashion via our (not-so-subtle) tailing by a shady type upon our initial foray out for dinner, the same evening we arrived. He first passed us - going the other way - as we were walking down a dark riverfront road in search of a restaurant that seemed to exist only in the imagination of the Lonely Planet. Otherwise indistinguishable from a hundred and one other Syrian males of the leather jackets and furtive glances, he did however boast a distinctive clip-clopping footstep thanks to a pair of impressively heeled shoes, and I can only suppose that he was either stupid to the implications of this - on a mostly deserted road! - or shameless about them when he decided to about turn and tail us considerable distance and across several traffic intersections back to our hotel. This was a little disturbing, not least because it was dark, but even so, we were unable to believe it, or at least unwilling to ascribe our suspicions to more than paranoia, until we got back to our hostel. It was at this point that the creepy crystallised into the seriously freaky, when, having hurried through the lobby to the inner stairs, and perhaps hoping we had imagined it all, we paused and looked back to check the state of the coast - only to see him hovering there on the pavement in the frame of the open entrance, staring hoodedly in at us. Whether because he saw us looking at him or because he had lost interest, I don't know, but he then slouch-prowled off in, I suppose, an attempt to appear casual.

Sinister would-be stalkers aside, we got paid a disconcerting amount of attention in general (even having come from half a year in Sham, so be aware of that if you ever visit, as a foreigner and especially as a female)! One lucky juice shop likely owes us for a certain amount of its custom that night (empty when we went in, five minutes later it was full - of men) and Nikki swears she saw, as we passed a cafe, a group of men practically knock their drinks over in the rush to get to the window and stare out. Since it is too exhausting to go round being made uncomfortable the whole time, we settled for being amused.

Anyway, so we hid in the hostel for a bit, and only ventured out again in company with a group of fellow hostel guests, who had invited us to join their tour-by-night of the city, safety in numbers and all that. Off we went, and proceeded to tiptoe round the norias, massive, groaning monsters of water wheels - a somewhat eerie experience at night to find oneself dwarfed in darkness by these backlit leviathans issuing pained and gloomy groans in the manner of arthritic mountains, grumbling and creaking ornamentally amid the ceaseless cycling and cascading of water. Like Ents trapped into a new form for all eternity and definitely not happy about it. So we have been for centuries, they seem to say, in spite of everything; so may we continue. They did seem to me to be a great tangible of history. Not just superimposed onto the present, like the pyramids, but still functioning within it - and in a way that leaves a more profound impression. They're a live connection with the past, not only a relic of it.

We then wandered through the citadel and sneaked a midnight peek into the workings of a hammam, unceremoniously invading the privacy of its solitary bather; emerged in front of a festively lit line of stands that looked like the kind of thing you get at a fair, but turned out to be something more along the lines of a Household Cleaner Happy Hour Sale (which seemed entirely random but no doubt had a perfectly rational explanation); strolled through the throngs cheerfully jamming up the road, and strayed right into a televised concert - there were fluorescently jacketed security people hovering in the crowds outside and everything - where we were ushered into front-row seats next to dour-faced army officers and important-looking men in suits and subsequently treated to an Experience. With a capital E. (In case you didn’t get that.) I still have no idea what it was in honour of, but it was in a large tent divided into mostly women on one side of the floor and all-clapping, cheering, swaying-on-their-feet ranks of men on the other, and having entered during the phase of full-throated warbling from some be-suited, gesticulatory pop singer (apparently famous), we were then treated to some beatifically vague sword-waving and gentle jig-like turns from men in traditional dress, the ubiquitous, inevitable screechy frenetic wail of the dubke (like bees in stereo, with a coloratura of tortured cats), and a fantastic spectacle of dancing by an exuberantly joyful troupe in Aladdin-style costumes (apologies for not knowing the correct term) whose sense of fun was so contagious that you couldn't help grinning constantly yourself.

So, that was Hama. I'm not sure how valid they are, but from first impressions, small, seemingly quite closed and conservative, with a very pretty centre, and a bloody episode in its recent history which you wouldn't necessarily (I don't think) guess at if you hadn't previously known about it. (On a thoroughly trivial, frivolous note, it was nice to go somewhere with a flowing river for a change.)

THEN, we saw more ruins in the space of a day than is frankly advisable if you want your appreciation of piles of old stone to stay fresh. So (ho ho) ruined out were we by the end of it that I still can't bring myself to recite the full litany here. However, it was very enjoyable and we made the trip in a ’52 white, winged Pontiac with an inbuilt TV and DVD system, driven by a very jolly and doubtless, very financially astute old gentleman. One ruined castle (windy), one set of Roman ruins (with accompanying self-attaching entourage of sweet but persistent schoolchildren on field trip), and one tour of some very Dead Cities later, he finally dropped us off in Bustling Little Town With Mosaic Museum, which we of course visited, before catching a service to Aleppo, along with some other people and several large bags of pink roses. The women proffered one to each of us, in that generously insistent way people do - small gestures across the language and the culture barrier.

Aleppo: big and confusing, less cramped-feeling than Damascus although perhaps that was just because we don't live there, also conservative with a !!! Developing, evidently, faster than Lonely Planets can be issued. We found a hostel; ate very well and exotically at a restaurant I would recommend if I could remember the name (but it was, shockingly, to be found in the Lonely Planet); souked (and spooked) it up at night in the empty, bunting-festooned maze of the Old City, earning for our pains a rather wonderful view of the lit-up Citadel at labyrinth's end – its bridge is very like something out of Lord Of The Rings, as a friend pointed out – and getting very nearly well lost in the dark on the way back; slept on the hostel roof (not as romantic as it sounds, but something you have to do at least once; also to call it ‘sleep’ is optimistic/taking a bit of poetic licence); visited the impressive Citadel in the morning, along with umpteen other Syrian and Arab tourists (nice to see); and finished up with a wander round the lovely, clean, narrow-alleyed, church-dotted, altogether European-feeling Jdeida Quarter, where the elderly caretaker of one of the churches we went into invited us to stay for tea. We had no time to accept because we had to get to the station to make the train, but I’m sad now that we didn’t - all he had in the world seemed to be in this little room, and he, glad of the company. And then we took the train from Aleppo to Latakia, which if you ever happen to have the occasion to make that trip constitutes a well-spent 79p on a really beautiful route, if occasionally necessitating the crossing of some dodgy bridges and navigating of perilous cliffside twists and turns in the track.

In Latakia, an evening wander met with some disappointment. There was nothing in particular to distinguish the city, except perhaps the relaxed attitude to foreigners and general liberality of the atmosphere; the seafront wasn't actually a seafront owing to the sea being some distance away on the other side of the unaesthetically sited port, and no cheap, non-intimidating dining options stood out. Many, many bars filled with people smoking argileh, not many of them women. Some, though. Slumming it with bread and cheese from a corner shop it was, and a Milo-fuelled chat with the owner of our hostel and a couple of friendly Finns from Istanbul, also staying there. The next day we visited Qalaat Salah ad-Din with the friendly Finns.

Salah ad-Din! And all that that name conjures up. (The sublime.) It may be in a state of more advanced deterioration than Krak de Chevaliers but for all that - or maybe even because of it – it was so much more. So run-down and remote is it, so high up and isolated from the world, so hidden on the approach (what I shall call the Zig-zag of Terror) that for a while, you can convince yourself you have had a taste of real adventure and exploration. You feel like a child again, overcome with wonder. You imagine you yourself have stumbled on it out of the blue, you the discoverer, the first to set foot here since its abandonment centuries ago... You feel like Cortez and his men on the proverbial peak in Darien. There is a scene that’s stuck in my mind that I have to describe, as I was so disappointed that the Kodak shop managed to lose it from my camera and I’m obsessed with memorialising it somehow. We went on a blazing, blue-skied day so clear that from the overgrown, most run-down end of the castle, it was possible to see the luminous silver-blue of what looked like a bay in the far distance, shining out of the thick forests that surround the castle on all sides. You can’t imagine the beauty of it, the feeling of being suspended high above the world in such a fairy-tale setting. And it *is* like something out of a fairy-tale, with that same elusive pull on the imagination. Krak de Chevaliers was more intact, more complete, but also felt less strange, more connected with reality... Since I seem (perhaps shallowly) to base my appreciation of castles on how far away from civilisation they appear to be, and how possible it is to fancy yourself an olden-day explorer on roaming their remains, it was Salah al-Din for the win.

And then, fairy-tales are all about strangeness. And this castle has a wildness and a strangeness about it…not least of which is an actual honest-to-goodness gorge hacked by the Crusaders out of the mountainside as a defence, with a pillar – a pinnacle – about as high just left standing in the middle of it, as a support for the drawbridge. But the drawbridge is gone, and now there is just this tall, thin, alien pillar standing there in the middle of the approach to the castle that looks like it ought to have fallen over long ago, and at first you would be forgiven for thinking it were a natural formation, there without reason, one of those oddities of creation of which nature is so fond, just because it looks so utterly random. But there is a small see-through platform that juts out from one of the lower chambers of the castle that you can step onto and from which you can peer at the sheer gap that drops away between you and this pillar, and between you and the ground...and somehow the vertigo that this induces brings home the enormity and strangeness and near-Gothic fantastic quality of this thing, as even stranger - because *men* did it, and because of why they did it.

***

(Yikes.)

That's what I would have written about. Having dragged you through it anyway, I’d like to do my part, poor and belated and without effect as it may be (but I know now that this blog is or was at one point linked on The Damascene Blog, so maybe some people will read it who wouldn’t otherwise have) to publicise the Canadian woman who went missing from Hama at the end of last March and has still not been found. Check out her brother’s blog; he updates it regularly on developments in the search, such as they are.

On second thought, I will post the link at the top, because it’s a bit cocky to expect people to read through the entire post and I certainly didn’t mean to go on as much as I did, having said that I wouldn’t.

P.S. It appears I can still post on this blog, even though people who are also here can't read it either. Leading to the philosophical question of the day: If a blog is published on the Internet and no one can read it, is it still making a metaphorical sound?

Manic #1

2007-06-27T06:42:00.000-07:00

I'm at home with unbounded internet access for the first time in a while, so I thought I'd make an entry here while I remember. And have the chance. It's been so long that I'm quite ashamed and there is so much that I wish I could write down but can't possibly or I'd be here till September and I only have two weeks.

So what happened in between January and June? University drew to a close in a pretty subdued, low-key fashion, after all the emotional stress and pyrotechnics. After three of the class left, there was none of the former underlying friction that had characterised class - at least, not in the same way - but at the same time I think that was the beginning of the end. The point at which everyone began to stop caring. I don't think Manal ever quite got over the departures; forever after, if the subject came up, we would be exposed to her continued self-questioning and justifications over what had happened. The workload, or at least the pressure to hand in work, decreased dramatically to almost nothing overnight. Even the group who had previously been so charming and enthusiastic seemed to lose their motivation. One of them left early, in April, and after that it all just lost steam. By the time the end came, I don't think anyone really was that sad - either people were glad because the end meant they were leaving Syria, or if they were staying, felt like the inevitable had only been drawn out. It was the end of an era, but such a draining one that it was more a relief than anything else.

But credit where it's due to Manal and her course. By hook or by crook I think we did get a lot out of it. Speaking is so dependent on personality and group dynamics, I don't think any course or teacher could overcome the limitations imposed by those fully; and sometimes her expectations of us were ridiculously optimistic given our level - for example, studying ancient and archaic Arabic poetry, which is about the equivalent of studying Chaucer for a foreign student of English. And she wasn't always as professional as might have been desirable - she made everything in that classroom personal, turned it into a soap opera, and seemed to feel the irresistible urge to stir up drama the same way a kid will stick his finger in the cake mix. But I'm pretty sure everyone's vocabulary, reading and writing improved beyond recognition. It was worthwhile for that.

I went travelling! I can't describe how awesome this was. Twice to Egypt - the first time with Will and Sarah, for a week, which we spent at Dahab, a great little backpackers' resort for diving halfway down the east coast of the Sinai Peninsula. It was in early March and the season hadn't started, so there was no one there, and the weather was beautiful - beautiful beautiful beautiful! You can't imagine how wonderfully strange and unfamiliar felt the sun when we stepped off the boat from Jordan onto land at Nuweiba, having come from the cold grey miserableness of Sham, still swathed in winter sweatshirts and jackets. The story of the boat journey (journeys - I must have been crazy, but I ended up taking that boat twice more in the course of later travels) is another one in itself so I'll save it for a separate entry.

Anyway, so that was the first foot I set in Egypt. It was duly fascinating, and a refreshing break from Syria. Because we were in a tourist-oriented area, everything naturally felt more relaxed and a little bit more open; there was less ogling and harassment of the 'ooh, it's a foreign female with her head uncovered and we have never seen one before!' variety and more of the 'it's a tourist! business opportunity!!!' variety, which, while it may not be intrinsically preferable, was at least a change, and is easier to rebuff.

Dahab was all we really saw (my hopes of climbing Mount Sinai went sadly unmet, but keep reading for a continuation of that story) except for a brief evening trip to the tacky, glitzy, even more tourist-oriented Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai, which left us distinctly underwhelmed and with a definite preference for low-key, peaceful, pleasant Dahab. But although we didn't do anything except laze around on decks overlooking the water, and eat, and drink, and explore the place a bit, it was still a first taste of Egypt, or a part of Egypt, I guess. Bite-size. Koshary, fava bean sandwiches, people being surprised at your knowledge of even just basic Arabic and ridiculously amused by your Syrian accent and -isms, and the constant 'g' and 'Ismak eih?' and 'Azayak?' and 'Min fein?' (to which we were fond of replying 'Sooria', just to confuse whoever asked, which it usually did). And drenched in sun! So we were happy.

Where else? Oh, and we made an impromptu visit to the resort town of Nuweiba during the course of our unanticipated 24-hour wait for the slow boat back to Jordan (like I said, another story) which was one of those unexpectedly beautiful places to go that no one tells you about.
It was a ghost town, completely deserted - eerie, even. It seemed that it used to be popular with Israeli backpackers but had evidently suffered a downturn after the Taba bombings. After we arrived and negotiated our way as politely as possible past a restaurant owner who was uncomfortably desperate for our custom - stopping to 'ooh' and 'aah' over a newborn kid that a young boy on a donkey rode up with in his arms, all gangling legs and unsteady steps and absolutely adorable - we suddenly found ourselves on this awesome expanse of white sandy shore, curving right round underneath the peaks of the mountains in the distance, empty except for a group of local children playing down at the water's edge, and a still, silver-blue bay.

The beach was pretty dirty, and the children's attire was indicative of the general state of poverty of the place, a reminder that this wasn't exactly paradise, if the run-down appearance of the town itself didn't suggest it. The vast open silence would have tried to convince otherwise if it could, but I think it was an apposite reminder. You can't - or if you can, should you? -separate a place from the people who live in it and sometimes I wonder if tourism encourages just that attitude. I wonder what it must be like to live in such awesome surroundings as a daily matter of course. I suppose you would take them for granted.

The second trip to Egypt was less of a chill-out trip and more of a frenetic sense-strewn five-day whistle-stop tour from Alexandria to Cairo to Mount Sinai and back to Dahab. And that makes it sound less eventful than it was. Will, Charlie and Claire and I decided to go literally the week before, found some cheap tickets online, and we were off. We flew Al-Jazeera Airways to Alexandria via Kuwait (and McDonald's for lunch). The flights passed without serious incident (except for a decidedly dodgy take-off from Damascus, and I can't say the prayers they blared out over the plane beforehand instilled a great sense of reassurance, but never mind, we got there). We clandestinely scoffed the cake we sneaked onto the plane at Kuwait Airport, and got a phenomenal extended panoramic view of the desert in its various shapes and colours.

Upon arrival, we caught a taxi into the city, a short time into which journey it became apparent that the driver was high on some form of narcotic or other (as Charlie put it, 'off his tits'), as he spent the entire drive looking over his shoulder at us and talking cheerfully to us with sublime inattention to the road, culminating in his generously offering us hash. When I say 'to us', I mean that we attempted to talk to him, but since we speak a mixture of standard and Syrian, and he spoke Egyptian, and was not particularly coherent anyway, communication was haphazard and somewhat at cross-purposes, upping the farcical quotient. However, he at least seemed to be having a very good time, which it was hard to begrudge him, despite the sense that oblivion was just an infinitesimal cross-section of time away at any moment.

Having narrowly escaped with our lives (and I don't just mean from nervous hysteria), we found a cheap top-floor hostel with dingy rooms that however benefited from a great location overlooking a square on the seafront, and embarked on a night-time explore of the city, which consisted of crawling a few bars and a pleasant encounter with some helpful and not at all suspicious locals who showed us the way to one of the only places to eat that still seemed to be open at 12 or 1 in the morning. All fun and good.

The next morning Claire and I breakfasted at the patisserie next to our hostel, on the terrace fronting the square, feeling like we could have been in France and enjoying the relaxed, European feel of the city - in that part of it, anyway. We walked to the Roman amphitheatre, which was fairly standard as these things go, and from there to the catacombs, which involved taking the tram. This was an interesting experience as we had no idea where to get off and then ended up having to walk through a distinctly more conservative area of the city...a long, colourful street lined with shops and street-stands and sellers milling around, and a slow torrent of shoppers passing up and down, and I think this was the first time I had been anywhere in the Middle East and not seen a single sign in English, anywhere. Every sign was in Arabic. It was great. English is like this infectious disease that you can't escape; it follows you everywhere, even places you would think might be immune from it are secretly carrying it. So to come upon somewhere that was having none of it was...oddly satisfying.

Anyway, the Catacombs were suitably musty and morbid. If you ever go there, be warned that the entrance proper is right off to the left as you go in past the ticket office; we didn't see it, and wandered straight ahead towards the grassy area where there is a sign saying 'Entry Forbidden', and a hovering guard or two, one of whom will probably try to lead you down a riskily steep and rubbish-strewn back route to the back of the off-limits catacombs and then expect baksheesh for his 'tour'. Just so you know what you're getting into. Since Claire and I had asked him where the entrance was, and not for the backstage tour of the dangerous bit, we didn't feel obliged to pay, but judging by the distinctly dour looks we got from the officials on the way out, after seeing the actual catacombs, these tours are probably an unofficially sanctioned bit of business on the side.

Having passed up the unimpressive Pompey's Pillar on the way there, we caught a taxi back to the seafront, lunched and ice-creamed and took a walk along said seafront. By that time the weather had fickly clouded over. We caught up at random with Charlie and Will, who in the meantime had stumbled into a table tennis game with local kids, among other things, and went to visit the modern Library of Alexandria together. This was an impressive dome of steel and concrete and glass that must look quite amazing under blue sky and bright sunlight (well, you probably can't even look at it), which we unfortunately couldn't get inside, not being students at the university. There are inscriptions in ancient languages around the inside of its hollowed-out wall that trigger the sudden urge to learn these languages so you can read what they say. Then Charlie, Claire and I took, for the sake of it, one of those horse-drawn barouches (whatever a barouche is, but I've always wanted to use that word and the vehicle in question looked like what that word sounds like) along the seafront back to the hostel, where it was a hasty pick up the bags and pay the bill and head off, again minus Charlie and Will, who hadn't yet got back from the university (this became something of a running theme throughout the holiday)...

The next stop was the train station - French-looking and beautiful lit up at night. The train itself was decently comfortable and clean, if a little worn, and ran on time; it took two hours to get to Cairo and once we got there spent at least fifteen minutes standing under an Arabic platform sign advertising that we were in fact in Cairo while Will attempted to get a good picture of us all on his camera, before taxiing it to the Lialy Hostel in the central Cairo, which proved a distinct upgrade on the previous night.

Then we braved Cairo: our first introduction to the game of chicken that is crossing the road (it's worse than Damascus, they don't even stop) and to the sardines-in-tins public transport system. After several minutes watching buses and services round the corner with people hanging out of the doors, we decided that this was probably not a time-efficient option and caught a taxi instead. This was an entertaining journey if only for the analogy it spawned, in the course of conversation and in view of the reasonably well-flowing traffic system in said gargantua of a city, of Damascus to a little Arab village that had been sick everywhere, whereas Cairo was more of a 'tactical chunder'. I leave the extemporisation that followed to your imagination. It stretched as far as the River Bile... I don't remember precisely how long we had to walk in order to find somewhere to eat, I don't think many places were open in the area the taxi took us to, which according to Will's guidebook was restaurant central, but we eventually plumped for an Italian place where the pizza proved okay and Charlie ended up talking Premier League football scores with the waiter.

Day one saw Claire and I rising early to play chicken and catch the bus to the Pyramids, leaving Tweedles Dum and Dee (otherwise known as the dormice) asleep in bed. We ended up approaching them by way of a somewhat circuitous back route, after the bus driver signalled to us and an unassuming Japanese couple to get off at the entrance to a back alley somewhere in the shanty town-like area that surrounds the Pyramids. Suspicious, but having no idea where we were, and the driver being rather emphatic about it, we got off, and it turned out, after much twisting and turning through a run-down area, to lead us past the local hang-out of camel and horse drivers, on the look-out for just such unsuspecting misdirected tourists as us. I'm afraid we proved disappointing prey, though.

Seeing the Pyramids was a bit of an odd experience at first. I think I had seen so many pictures of them, the way we do, in the overexposure of the modern world, that actually being there just felt like looking at another, bigger picture. Superimposed onto the world. It didn't feel real. I'm not sure the swarms of tourists helped that feeling, either. The place was crawling with them. Package-tour ants in hats and shorts and strappy tops, snapping away with their digital antennae! Of which we were but two more, it's true. Just not package-tour. And not wearing shorts or strappy tops. (Too Syrianised for that, already.)

Anyway, after becoming an object of attraction for roaming groups of schoolchildren and young locals who all seemed to have an inexplicable desire to have their pictures taken with us - and actually having a decent conversation with a group of younger boys who were surprised that we could speak Arabic to them, before a group of older ones came along and made themselves more of a sleazy nuisance - and after penetrating the dank inner depth of Khufu (even more musty and morbid than the catacombs of Alexandria) and being joined by Will and Charlie, complete with headdresses, who sadly failed in their attempt to blag their way into the pyramid on our tickets - we went on the requisite camel ride, had lunch at whatever American fast food outlet it was right outside the site gates, and returned to Cairo by taxi and metro.

While Claire met up with a friend at the hostel, Will, Charlie and I went for a wander through old Cairo. The men at the entrance to Al-Azhar Mosque found me a headscarf to wear and we slipped in (shoeless, obviously) and wandered quietly around for a while. It was well-maintained, beautiful and serene. I very much liked it and would love to go back again if I ever had the chance. Sacre-Coeur gave me the same feeling. Sacrilege! I would be a saint if I had such friendly feelings towards the second large mosque we visited, whose name I've forgotten (it had a green and silver carpet) but which wouldn't let me in under any circumstances. While we were there, all its female worshippers were crowding through an outer gate and into a small chamber to the side, and back at the front entrance, a man came up and literally forced some oil bottles into my hand and then wanted me to pay for them. The bazaars and small, winding backstreets were colourful and interesting, especially the backstreets, which were targeted to local as opposed to tourist custom, and where there was space, crammed with people.

We raced back on the metro, spent an hour and a half traipsing round the area around our hostel looking for somewhere to eat (the sign 'Sheep Exlant Brains', with accompanying smell permeating at least the two neighbouring shopfronts deserves honourable mention here) before finally plumping on the second place we'd come across. However, the food was good, so that made up for it. Then to a bar to meet up with Claire and her friend and his friends, who turned out to include a Durham classmate of ours. Small world! Claire and I left early, being exhausted; Will and Charlie, we found out the next day, continued to live it up, somehow finding their way to a local African bar where they were the only foreigners present. You have to hand it to them. They displayed a knack for finding the unique experience.

Day two saw a visit to the National Museum, Will and Charlie-less, a certain amount of sitting around in the hostel waiting for them to complete their own visit, and at Will's behest, a last ditch-effort to dominate the rest of Cairo (i.e. Coptic Cairo) in an hour and fifteen minutes, which we perhaps inevitably didn't quite manage; after racing up the big tower whose name I've forgotten and spending disproportionately long at the top, and various taxi and Metro rides thereto and from, we were sadly left with only fifteen minutes or so in Coptic Cairo, and we barely left the road that runs parallel to the Metro stop. Still, that leaves more for another time and though ridiculous, the dashing to and fro was, I admit, exhilarating.

Then: catching the bus to Suez; the last bus from there having already gone; sitting around drinking shai outside a cafe in a godforsaken service depot at eleven o'clock at night while waiting for transport options to materialise (you get used to this); the standard injection of insanity into proceedings upon accepting a suspiciously smiley, spaced-out old gentleman's offer to take us to Sinai for a good price, only for the proposed driver to turn out to be his 12-year-old son, or grandson, or other random kid; the eventual, freezing cold service ride (needless to say with a different driver) through the desert, complete with abrupt emanation of godawful grinding noises from the gearbox about halfway through, subsequent pootling along in the darkness for 20 miles an hour for about half an hour, and eventual breakdown in the literal middle of nowhere, except for three giant fish. And Charlie's strange sleeplessness-fuelled attack of psychosis, which involved a game of 'I Spy' - played driving through the desert, in the dead of night - conducted in a crazed, creepy stalker-type voice from the back of the service and a stary-eyed face. It doesn't really get more surreal than that.

Anyway, we got to the village at the foot of Mount Sinai eventually, no thanks to any of this; upon which we dumped our bags in a room at the first camp we got to, layered up in sweatshirts, borrowed a couple of torches (minus batteries) from the owner, and leaving Claire, who wanted to sleep, took the same service to the foot of Mount Sinai. And thus, at three o'clock in the morning, almost without really realising what we were doing, it was all so haphazard and spontaneous, began our epic climb.

The rush from doing this is something impossible to describe. You start off in the still darkness of early morning, torch painting wan, unsteady circles on the rocky ground ahead of you, fuelled by a subdued thrill of excitement and the sense of embarking on something different - an adventure, a challenge. One that you are consciously choosing. There's no one else doing this right now except you and your friends; you're a bit odd. You walk, and you walk, and you say (in Arabic, for perversity's sake) to the camel drivers that come riding past you at intervals, in response to the inevitable question (directed at you in English), no, no, thank you, I don't want a camel. Walking is more beautiful. And that reinforces your suppressed sense of excitement and determination. So you walk, and you walk some more, and you get tired, and your legs begin to flag, but that's still okay... You take a steeper and debris-strewn shortcut to a higher level of the path, which zig-zags slowly and interminably up the foot of the mountain, and get shouted at by a man riding his camel round the distant bend that it is dangerous, dangerous! which is exciting, and rejuvenates you temporarily, and carries you a bit further, until the lack of any end in sight starts to take its toll... You keep on walking, but now you have to fight down the frustration of your obviously stamina-abundant companions striding ahead because you stop more often to rest, and the pride which insists on trying to keep up. Your legs are pretty tired by now. But you carry on, because let's face it, you're half way up a mountain at this point.

And then, at a significant u-bend, you pass a little waystation where a camel rests by the edge with its legs folded under it, and gazes out at the horizon with a serene imperturbability that could be indifference or else just simple habituation to the beauty of it. You have reached the ledge carved by the path into the mountainside. The first redness of dawn appears in the sky, and as you walk along it, slower now, you look out yourself, and you take a breather alongside the row of camels, and you have a glimpse, or a taste, of why it will be worth it. You keep going...

At six o'clock, the colours intensif€y above the silhouetted mountain range in the east, and it flies its first shimmers of gold. You haven't quite reached the top, but you've reached a rocky outcrop at the base of the final steep ascent. You sit on a rock and watch the sunrise, with a few other tourists and locals who happen to have ascended independently that night. Then you make the final ascent, against the tide as it were, while all the people who have spent the night at the top come down, and try not to crack up when, at one point halfway up, your companions, wearing their Arab headdress, take up position at either side of the steps and completely dead-pan ask for 'baksheesh, baksheesh' from the descending tourists, who actually take a few seconds to figure out what's going on and then give an involuntary chuckle over their shoulder.

Then you get to the top, and everyone else has gone down, and you are the only people up there. You shove your foot into the windowframe of the little church at the top and somehow manage to swing round the corner, get one foot into a notch in the perpendicular wall and the other into the rock face that juts out therefrom, and heave yourself up onto the flat rock next to the roof of the church, at cost of some serious agony to your upper body but it doesn't matter because now you're higher than you've ever been and looking down at the world, the hostile alien landscape outspread below in every direction and the sky is blue and the air is cold and the morning is new and there is nothing to beat this, nothing. The peace is indescribable - and the sense of freedom from everything. You feel that if everyone could come up here, and look down this, they would forget their wars, their petty conflicts, their games of power and blood and money. You wish they could. This is where we all come from, in the end. This strange and awe-inspiring earth - vulnerable! So much bigger than us and so much smaller than the universe. The scale of destructibility.

There is a little bell in the corner, on top of the church, which doesn't look like it's been rung for a while. And behind and below, a Nigerian woman walks past the church on her way down, and shouts up to you, Bless me! Bless me! Charlie says, er, I'm not a priest. But bless you anyway! And another group of Arab-looking young people who appear look up at you and shout at you in Arabic and he calls down, it's the best place! And Will, be-headdressed and de-sweatshirted (it's still cold up there but you're all pretty warm by now), scrambles down and over to another outcrop, slightly lower down, and performs the 10 Geordie Commandments for the benefit of the camera, the sky, the entirety of the surrounding mountain range and any listeners contained therein. Words drift away in the big empty vastness and you speak anyway. There's something exhilarating in making a noise when you know you won't be heard and no one or nothing will care. (Talk about a microcosm of the fundamental underlying condition of human existence!)

to be continued

Some Time Later...

2006-12-04T10:56:00.000-08:00

*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!

Searching Vainly For The Holiday

2006-10-29T12:04:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd better make a quick update in commemoration of time flown, as it's Sunday and the holiday is nearly over. Well, is over, for all intents and purposes. Goodbye, holiday. It was nice while it lasted.

I'm feeling a little lethargic, though, so this won't be very long. What have I been up to? A whole group of us went to Beirut again last weekend for someone's birthday, and did the going-out thing instead of the sightseeing-thing (although we did a bit of that, as well). We climbed down to the outermost point of the shore near the Pigeon Rocks in the dark (while some random individual of the male persuasion ferociously urged us to 'Zur! Zur!') and ate Will's Hezbollah birthday cake (courtesy of one of the cake shops in Bab Touma) in a shorefront cafe, before going back to our one room (for nine people), falling asleep, then waking up, playing drinking games for a while, and going out. Half of us came home the following day; the other half stayed (up) an extra night, nearly went down the side of a mountain when their taxi lost a wheel while driving back in the early morning; and allegedly hitchhiked back across the border in an NBC news van, pretending to be journalists. So yes, it was all fun and games on this side of the world last weekend.

Apart from that, I haven't really done anything. We still haven't managed to get up the mountain, despite numerous suggestions and attempts to formulate a plan for doing so (and the idea having been in the works since we got here). Last Sunday I went to church with Firas and Charlie and American Matt and a friend of Firas', which was interesting. It's the church whose grounds we use for playing football: Orthodox, quite grand, and not particularly old (I don't think - at least, it looks new) with big stone pillars and lit by chandeliers. At the back of the church were a row of little alcoves with red curtains hung across the front and there are icons and paintings everywhere you look. Almost all the prayer was sung, and the singing was very distinctive - I don't quite know how to describe it. I liked it. It was very evocative - insistent and powerful and self-perpetuating, in a melodic way. Sometimes it soared, lifting you with it. And even though the service was entirely in Arabic, when the congregation spoke prayers in unison, it was possible to recognise some of them from their rhythms and the repetition of words, which for some reason gave - gives - me a thrill. On Monday, we played a football game to the accompaniment of sporadic flashes of lightning lighting up the darkening sky and the build-up of a thunderstorm. I was knackered by about halfway through, but it was a lot of fun. I scored a goal - I'm still not quite sure how that happened.

I can't for the life of me remember what else I've done this week. I don't know where the holiday's gone - I certainly don't seem to have done anything with it. It's freezing in Damascus these days, sometimes seasoned with a sizeable side-helping of rain and occasionally a bit of thunder. There have been jumper- and blanket-buying expeditions. I've somehow managed to do some work but I haven't really been putting any belly into it. It's time to rediscover that motivation.

Anyway, I'd better finish there - conversation exchange in an hour. Life goes on here - I'm happy to be here. In general and on the whole, if sometimes there are hiccups. (but that's life) Hope life is treating you all well, too.

If I Had A Thousand Syrian Pounds...

2006-10-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

(if I had a thousand Syrian pou-ounds) ...I'd decide to spend some more time in an internet cafe. 1000-pound notes are the bane of my life and at present all I have in my wallet is two of them. I need to make a dent in them. So, I'm back! Onto the week of EFDem.

On Tuesday a bunch of us went to the cinema, which was funny. We saw 'A Perfect Man' with Hilary Duff at the Cham Palace. Before you say anything, it was the only film showing. I think everyone actually enjoyed it though. It was mindless, if occasionally cringeworthy (and corny in extremis) light entertainment. Afterwards we discovered an excellent ice-cream and brownie place somewhere round the corner, so it would have been worth it just for that, anyway.

On Wednesday the same group of us went to the iftar being held at the Spanish Cultural Centre in Damascus, which we knew about through Will (the funny one) who is taking Spanish lessons there. (I'd kind of like to do the same, just to keep up my Spanish, but I'm struggling enough to tread water with all the Arabic work we get at the moment, so maybe when things even out a bit.) As an event, this was a bit of a mixed bag. We had planned to cook and take food as a group, but lessons had gone on long that day, and the Ramadan traffic was particularly bad, and we were very disorganised, and found ourselves contemplating the cooking of a bunch of hastily bought ingredients in a kitchen that might kindly be called minimally equipped, half an hour before we needed to leave. (yep.) The long and the short of it was that we borrowed one of my landlady's big pots to cook it in and then to carry it in as well, and then (and I think this had a whiff of inevitability about it) at the end of the night, when it came time to go and we looked for our big pot to take it home - it wasn't there. Well, the lid was there. But someone had taken the big pot. (Though why would you just take the pot and not the lid?) Cue a somewhat upset landlady...

The event itself was good, though. The food was absolutely gorgeous, especially the umpteen rice dishes that different people had brought, and it was a huge crush at first and you had to eat standing up and it seemed like if you didn't hurry all the food might go, so you had to eat quickly. I felt stuffed afterwards.

On Thursday evening some of the guys in our class held a party at their house, at which the entire foreign student population of Bab Touma seemed to be present, plus a few Syrians. The party was graced by some severely dangerous punch. Anyway, it was a lot of fun. I told a guy who shall remain nameless that he was horrible for trying to take a photo of me and immediately he and another one of them tried to induce me into a screaming contest with him on the top of their roof. I think this was supposed to be amusing because I'm normally quiet. I just said no and gave them a few seconds to forget about it completely, which as they were drunk seemed likely. And then there was dancing and such. Some of us went to a club afterwards and danced there, and that was fun, too.

Actually, looking back at all that, it doesn't sound like such a bad week. It sounds like all I do here is go on holiday and go out and go to parties! (That really isn't true. I also spend a lot of time sitting inside and outside the internet cafe.)

Speaking seriously, though, the demoralisation has more to do with Arabic in general, the nature of our classes at the university, and my own personality. This is the broadest of summaries, but, in our class, there is a group of about four guys who know each other pretty well and are close friends and went to public school and are of the - fairly self-assured brand of personality, let's say. There are three other guys who can hold their own against them, more or less, if they try, though they don't always. The remaining four of us are girls. It wasn't so evident at the beginning, when we were all in the same boat (ha, sorry, see below) of confusion and ignorance and could all (or not) assert ourselves equally, but in class, particularly when it comes to speaking, the growing tendency has been for the public school boys to dominate. They have this dynamic whereby they feed off one another, making jokes, telling stories, and it can make it very hard for those who are quieter or less confident to break in.

Okay, this is all well and good and it's not a new situation. But on Thursday, at the end of the class (this was after we'd done a 'who will you throw off the boat?' exercise for which we were supposed to have chosen jobs beforehand but a number of us hadn't and consequently there was among us a diplomat, a doctor, a housewife, a farmer, Baloo the happy bear, the cook of Baloo the happy bear, a peasant, and a teacher who midway through the conversation decided to become a man of religion, who promptly got thrown off the boat) and because we had recently handed in evaluations of the lessons and the teaching so far, Baloo the happy bear asked Manal what she thought of the class as a whole.

She proceeded to tell us, and then to tell each one of us, in front of everyone else, her impressions of us as individuals, in terms of our work and our class participation. I'm not sure this was the best approach to take, considering what she had to say - which was (among other things, obviously) effectively to praise the four boys to the skies, and criticise the quiet ones among us for not speaking more. Obviously this made the guys happy, but it has had the effect of demoralising some of the rest of us.

I think I'd have less of a problem with this if I hadn't already been trying to speak more in class, after she encouraged me privately, and found it extremely frustrating because I simply can't think quickly enough on the spot and hesitation or pausing to think loses me my chance to speak by giving it to someone else - either by their own interruption or through Manal asking them, and usually to one of the guys, who then proceeds to expound at length. I struggle to speak on the spot in front of a large group in my own language - having to do it in Arabic is not an aid. I have been trying. She cannot expect the rest of us to compete with the guys if she lets them dominate, surely - and there is a feeling among the rest of the class that she lets them dominate, whether justified or not, I don't know.

Also I felt a little bit insulted because when she gave me my evaluation in front of everyone else, she asked me if when I wrote, the words came from my head or if I used the dictionary a lot. She was looking for an explanation of why I didn't speak, I understand that. But how can you explain the difference between writing something on paper in the company of your paper and your thoughts only, and the pressure of having to speak in front of a group and produce words on the instant or you fail, effectively?

I have a feeling this problem is going to dog me for the rest of my days unless I do something about it, but I simply don't know what. Perhaps I need to be prepared to look a fool. Actually, I know that's what it is - I just need to say something, anything, get something out and not care what, and gradually I'll get accustomed to the feeling and be able to speak without losing the thread of my thoughts. Actually, that's funny - I just remembered a conversation that I had with Matt (of the Durham not the American variety) a couple of weeks ago. He said that he lied a lot, came out with all sorts of rubbish just in order to speak. Heh. Hm. The only problem with this that it's a course that's quite alien to me and I really don't think that I would find it easier to lie than to tell the truth.

Anyway, so as a result of what she said at the end of that class, some of us came out feeling a bit demoralised. It had been building up for a while, I think, and on top of the exhaustion and frustration from the lessons (which are a bit of a pressure-cooker of a situation, to be honest - four hours a day with the same teacher and the same people) and from the work, that simply catalysed it. I know I came out feeling absolutely wretched and as if I were being faulted for my personality, and it turned out not to be just me.

Anyway. Time gives perspective, and you can't continue to feel demoralised indefinitely - you either have to give up or become more determined to bring about a change. Maybe that was her aim, to provoke us into being louder? A bit of a gamble, if so. We'll see, I guess! The thing is that it's easy enough to resolve to do something but when push comes to shove...somehow it doesn't, quite. But we'll see.

This was a complete rant and I'm very sorry. On a positive note, my landlady fed me lunch yesterday, two full helpings (I only asked for a little more the second time, so I don't know what she thinks is a lot) and some kind of semolina pudding today, which was really nice. And I got masses of work done today - in fact, work is all I've done today. Oh, and it's been raining! I think the famous rains have started. It rained this morning, and there was some thunder this afternoon, which was quite thrilling.

And that's enough. I've still got some words to learn, and I must have spent enough time on here by now to make a dent in that 1000-pound note...

What's The Arabic For 'Demoralisation'?

2006-10-14T06:35:00.000-07:00

Cynicism is the order of the day.

I've been working fairly steadily since I got up this morning and have achieved a decent amount (though still with a considerable amount left to do) so I'm treating myself to more than ten or fifteen minutes on the computer this time, which means I have time to do more than check my e-mails...

Anyway, looking at the dates, it seems to have been almost two weeks since I updated last. Last weekend I went to Beirut with Trish, another Durham-ite who got here recently (and who isn't going to the university but to the French Institute), entirely because I wanted to, but also partly because my visa was going to expire unless I either obtained an iqaama (magically, within the next few days, without yet having applied for it at all) or left the country. In the face of this Lebanon took on a very inviting air. Expediency is the mother of something-or-other. Impulsive decisions, possibly. So we hopped across to Beirut, as you do - jumped in a taxi of a connection of the family Trish lives with on Friday morning, got invited for coffee and asked slightly awkward questions by the guards at the Lebanese border, met a very kind something-or-other strategist in downtown Beirut who showed us the way to a camera shop and told us how to get to the Pigeon Rocks, watched the sun set from the seafront by the (apparently famous, though I'd never heard of them before I read about them in my trusty guidebook) Pigeon Rocks, had dinner in one of the wide cafe-lined European-style boulevards near the Place d'Etoile surrounded by lots and lots of well-dressed Lebanese, returned to our hotel only to have to deal with the efforts of the sole two members of staff on duty, male and obviously extremely bored and deprived, to chat us up (one of those stories that's amusing in retrospect), then the following morning visited the site of some ancient-to-present-day inscriptions left by conquering armies on the side of the mouth of a historically tough-to-cross gorge, and then the awe-inspiring caverns of Jeita Grotto, and then took the ten-minute trip by cable car (the Teleferique, which according to the guidebook is also known as the Terrorifique, which I would say is not entirely without reason) to the top of a nearby mountain to see the gigantic statue of the Virgin Mary there and some phenomenal views of the coast. Then we had lunch, said goodbye to the Australian whom we'd met at the gorge, and caught the service back to the hotel (at which point we had to walk for half-an-hour to find a place to cross what was effectively a coastal highway despite being built up on both sides) where we waited for our taxi driver to come and pick us up.

It was a great trip, and it was wonderful to get into a different sort of countryside. The contrast between the landscape of Lebanon and that of Syria (at least in the vicinity of Damascus) couldn't be greater. The latter is arid, bare, pale and dusty; the former is lush. As soon as you cross into it, the mountains suddenly 'get' forests. Like they'd forgotten how to have them and all of a sudden they remembered. All the green can make you feel a bit drunk, as if you'd been parched from the lack of it. And there's a whole drama of contrasts going on within Lebanon as well. You really have to see it, though. There's something incredibly breath-taking about mountains side by side with the sea. Forgive me for sounding like a guidebook. Perhaps sometimes there's a reason why it's hard to express something originally!

As for the timing of the visit, we didn't go to the south, so there was little physical evidence of the war in any of the places we visited. Only a great big hole in a bridge on the way into Beirut (we had to take the old road instead) and the surprise of many of the people we talked to at our visiting. The general attitude seemed to be, 'What are you doing here? You're tourists? Really? Hooray!'

And Lebanon itself, culturally, is such a contrast from Syria. That too was like a breath of familiar yet somehow more pungent air, after a month in Syria. It was like - goodbye Syria, hello Lebanon - McDonalds - Pizza Hut - a tidal wave of Western influences. We hardly saw any women wearing the hijab; in Beirut we saw them walking around dressed as daringly as at home (I make no judgments about style, as I have no fashion sense); we walked through streets of which if you hadn't known yourself to be in Beirut, you might have thought yourself in Paris; and we heard French and English spoken everywhere far more than Arabic, almost to the exclusion of it.

So, yes. That was Lebanon, and I have a couple of lovely satisfyingly tangible border stamps in my passport confirming my visit. We got back on Saturday evening and the next day I visited one of the convents at Sednaya (the other one proved to be closed when we tried to go there) with Firas and Nikki and a friend of Firas', which was a fun way to spend the day. It was a holiday and everyone in Sednaya had apparently gone to Damascus because of the holiday and the town was very quiet and there wasn't much else to do there, and we ended up sitting on the roof of the convent drinking soda and joking around. At the beginning Firas and his friend were peremptorily press-ganged into helping move boxes of fruit by a nun standing near the entrance of the convent, as we were climbing the steps. I tried to get a picture of them carrying apples but wasn't quick enough, as they promptly absconded. On the steps we were also privileged to see the miracle of the Virgin Mary that had been created by a spillage of oil (not often you hear that and 'miracle' in the same sentence) I don't know when. It was surrounded by a little grating of bars to which had been tied a considerable number of white pieces of cloth. It was intriguing. Firas thought us cynical because we weren't suitably awed (smiled) when we were shown it, but that was because we couldn't see it. It is a very small Virgin Mary.

In the evening, after the Kuwaiti gang returned from their trip with smiles and lots of shopping bags, we had a hafla at the apartment of American Jess, which involved alcohol and singing loudly well into the night to the accompaniment of Charlie's guitar. The power cut out and we went on singing, which may give you some idea. It was a lot of fun, though. We got out all the old classics. The neighbours apparently complained the day after, however...oops. Though this was a bit strange as people don't seem to go to bed here until one or two anyway.

***

OK, it's Sunday now, so I'm going to post this and tell you about the rest of the week later, because some entertaining things happened. Actually, on the other hand, it was exhausting and latterly, frustrating and demoralising, so maybe I won't get into it too much, otherwise it will turn into a rant/self-pity session, which I know Mum will have no patience with and isn't the point of the blog, anyway. Things'll be okay. Love to you all!

P.S. Happy Birthday, Mum!!! (belatedly)

In Which I Fail To Come Up With An Appropriately Witty Title

2006-10-02T15:23:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the delay in an update - all I can say is that I've been pretty busy without actually managing to achieve very much. Not in terms of progressing through the multiple layers of bureaucracy in this place, at any rate. Have I posted since I got my AIDS test result last Monday? (I don't have it, as I'm sure you were all on absolute tenterhooks to know.) Well, then, on Wednesday I finally handed in my registration form at the university but to no tangible result since I didn't actually have a sufficient number of passport photos. My month for applying for an iqaama expires on the 7th, so I rather need to get moving on this. But, apart from that, I've been going to class and doing work and this weekend went to Latakia with four others, on the way to which and where we had some 'majnoon' (crazy) experiences and gained some good memories.

Today was pretty good, too. It began shakily but evened out and improved steadily. I feel contented. I picked up my passport photos; got falafel with some of the guys from my class; sat outside the internet cafe eating it and working and listening to people and watching them play with Mungo, the child of the diplomats who live in the house opposite; went to do my homework with Jess at the side of the weekly football game; came back and did more work outside the internet cafe and talked some Arabic (Jess is under a self-imposed rule of no English except on Sundays, because there are so many foreigners in Bab Touma now, which I think is an excellent idea and may have to try adopting at some point - it's already encouraging those foreigners around her to talk more Arabic, too); then had two and a half hours' conversation with Samah, a Syrian student with whom Manal put me in contact. We've only had two meetings so far (the first was last Thursday, but crossed wires and the trip to Latakia impeded a second until this evening) but it's really useful practice speaking-wise and in terms of gaining vocabulary. So that's good. Then I wandered back into the internet cafe and ended up going for food with Charlie and Nikki in Shadi's place (Alarisha), and having a quiet meal there. Which is sometimes just nice, you know. Nikki's a bit under the weather so it was good to keep her company. Then we said goodnight and dispersed, and I have now come to the internet cafe to do some e-mail checking and get some photocopies of this iqaama form I borrowed from Charlie in order not to have to visit the hole that is apparently the immigration office before I absolutely have to. I'm making progress on the admin!

Anyway. I've got to stop there, as I have a bucket-load of work still to do (this is a regular occurrence) and it's twenty past midnight. I'm sorry this hasn't been an amusing update, not that I think the usual ones are particularly, but this one feels particularly perfunctory. I will write another post about Latakia if I can because I really had a good time and as I said, there were satisfactory dollops of bizarreness, hilarity and enjoyment, which I couldn't possibly have you miss out on the satisfaction of knowing about.

Love to you all. Thanks for the comments, everyone who leaves them. I really appreciate them. I confess that I couldn't resist the call of sisterly sarcasm, James, but you know how little effort that requires. :p The truth is that in general, I like to take time about responses and that's something I'm lacking in at the moment, or I would reply! I'm really sorry about that. (Also, I did think it was an excellent picture. Kudos, Chris.)

Okay, it's not even twenty past midnight any more, it's nearly one o'clock because I went back to edit and add things in. I really must go. Hasta luego!

...And More Thoughts

2006-09-24T03:49:00.000-07:00

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!

Thoughts

2006-09-19T12:11:00.000-07:00

I think - touch wood - that I'm getting better.

Thanks for the comments, everyone - I really appreciate them. Sorry about not being able to answer questions directly - I would reply individually if I could, but there has been a slight hitch in that I haven't quite been able to work out how you do it. Whenever I do, I will!

So. An update, let's see if I can make it briefer than the last. (Which to be honest won't be hard.) On Thursday was the placement test, about which the less said the better. The rest of the weekend was uneventful. Not being well kind of threw a damper on things. There was a rugby tournament on Friday between the Syrian national team and various other Arab sides which some of the others went to, although I didn't. (I wanted to, but I was asleep.) Apparently the standard isn't quite top-notch, but if Hani is anything to go by they must be enthusiastic. I spent rather a lot of time at the internet cafe (this place is literally the social hub of Bab Touma, at least for all the foreigners: anything you need or want - a room, a phone, a chess game, a football game, calligraphy lessons, a lift back to a restaurant on the other side of the city where you left your shopping - Firas and Fadi are your men) and otherwise not doing very much. I watched people play chess. I bought a phone. (Syrian simcards object to functioning inside my English phone, for reasons I don't entirely understand.) I wandered round the streets a lot.

The nice thing about having to stay in was that on Saturday evening, I got to know the German lady staying in the same house as me a bit better, and she took me to a restaurant she knew - Haretna, another bustling, inconceivably vast two-storeyed, open-roofed eatery of the style they seem to be fond of here, tucked away down a little Bab Touma street like it was a tiny one-room cafe. We had a thought-provoking conversation, though I can't explain why here... Take my word for it, though. It was topical.

Then on Sunday, Mum, you will be glad to hear I got some washing done. By hand, which wasn't much fun, but with hot water, which is something. (All had become clear about how to obtain not only hot water for washing but also for showers the day before.) So that's one problem resolved. In the evening Suzanne and Robert, a German boy who is also staying in our house, invited me out to eat with them. This was very enjoyable. I can now speak a little German. Ich kann nicht deutsch spreche. Ich lerne gerne Fremsprachen (?). Ich kann nicht mehr essen. Apparently overcome by a fit of mischief, Robert told me that this was ich mochte noch mehr essen, but then Suzanne took pity on me and a German lesson ensued. I can conjugate some regular verbs in the present and express a few trivialities.

(Also, how cool is it that many of the verbs for basic actions in English are similar to those in German - lachen, sprechen, singen - betraying the Saxon origins of our language? I remember reading somewhere that 1000 of these basic words are the same in German or the Nordic languages - that in English we use these terms in simple everyday speech and the Latin- and French-derived forms are 'fancier', so to speak, and that's because after the Norman invasion the upper classes spoke French and the peasants went on speaking their own language. I love etymology.)

Explanation: This was originally one post together with the entry above it - I started writing it on Tuesday and finished today (Sunday). But I split it up because I don't think it made much sense to be writing about next Sunday in a post made on Tuesday. So you get two for the price of one today! Start of Ramadan special...

One Week In

2006-09-14T06:37:00.001-07:00

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.

Here Part #2

2006-09-08T09:11:00.000-07:00

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!

Here

2006-09-07T05:06:00.000-07:00

Phew. Ok, well, just a quick update. I'm here, very exhausted, currently vaguely absorbing my first impressions of Damascus from inside a bit of a bubble of sleep deprivation and spaced-out-ness. The flight was actually really smooth, for which I was very thankful (although I hadn't expected the layover in Aleppo!) , and interesting. I was sitting next to an Iraqi who's lived in the UK for twenty years and speaks Arabic, Farsi, English and various other languages I've forgotten, and who returns to Syria and Lebanon to visit quite often; and we just started talking at some point and then passed a lot of the flight in conversation, about languages and learning and travelling and helping people. (Politics we avoided, but more because his attitude towards it and to political debate was one of profound disillusionment.) He was very friendly and chatty, which suits me as I like to listen, with many interesting perspectives to offer and some funny anecdotes. Another lover of travel and meeting people. He was very kind and helpful on the flight and when we got to customs, too. I could write more (I could always write more), but I need to get on with the update... So anyway, I was on the flight with Charlie, a fellow Arabic student at Durham, and we got through customs without too much trouble (we'd landed at half five in the morning so there weren't exactly queues, though the bus from the plane nearly drove off without Charlie, who chose that moment to drift off) and got our luggage, said goodbye to Jafar, and were met by Nikki, another Durham student who's been out here for a couple of weeks already and a Syrian friend (one of many she's made already!), Fadi, who drove us back to Damascus. This was a unique experience. I had thought the Spanish were somewhat careless drivers (and carefree pedestrians), but it didn't have anything on this! There were no apparent rules for passing or anything and at one point - this was a motorway - some guy strolled across our side of it, right in the line of oncoming cars, casual as you please. Also there were a lot of billboards, in English and Arabic, advertising hotels and such like. I'm sure there was an unusual amount of billboards. It was a little overwhelming, one whizzed past every half-second or so.

Also something else they like - really like - to do here is honk, as I've discovered walking through the city today, but anyway, back to the update. Fadi drove us to the Christian quarter and dropped us off near Nikki's place where Sarah, another Durham student who arrived the day before, was already sleeping - it's on the ground floor of a block of flats that surrounds an open-air courtyard. Not luxurious, but with quite a bit of higgledy-piggledy charm. Once there we sat and talked for a while in Nikki's room, catching up and getting her story so far, and then made plans to go to the British Embassy later on in the morning to get the letter of recommendation we need to enrol at the Arabic Language Center. Only this didn't happen, because we all fell asleep, including Nikki, who hadn't slept at all that night, crazy girl, and didn't wake up till ten to twelve (by which time the Embassy was about to close). So instead this afternoon, after we had finally all bestirred ourselves, Nikki took us to a really nice little cafe called Alarisha.

OK, I have to go - I'll finish this later! I hope you're all well - lots of love.

"A Damascene Moon"

2006-09-02T09:05:00.000-07:00

This is fun! Presenting Superfluous Post #2.

Here's a poem I found at random when I googled 'damascus moon', by a very well-known and popular Arab writer whom we heard about in Arabic and/or Egyptian Colloquial Arabic last year. If I'd taken Introduction to Arabic Literature last year I think I might have been able to study him. I have the feeling we studied him a little in Introduction to Middle Eastern Cultures in my first year, but it was as part of the section on all types of literature at the very end of the year, and would have been little more than a brief overview, if that.

Testing, Testing

2006-09-02T08:59:00.000-07:00

1, 2, 3...