Today I went out with the HHHarriers again for my second weekend. We met around 1230 and I brought with me two friends who were interested in trying it out-Frank and Nanju. Once everyone had gathered together we piled into cars (what a luxury to have people with cars!) and caravaned west out of the city, heading towards the Lebanese border. As we drove out, Rick, who works at the Canadian embassy, was telling me that this area outside of the city was being developed for mega-mansion houses as many of the embassies and ambassadors are moving out to this area, along with many wealthy families who want a nice three-story villa with 2 acres of land. He explained the motivations as security reasons, but my first thought was how much of a pain it will be to have to come all the way out here just to visit the embassy. And then my second thought was how silly it is to further isolate all of the foreign service workers and diplomats and such from the local culture.
Once we turned off the main highway we drove by more development lots of unattractive partially-built apartment buildings, some of them with 'for sale' signs on them, meaning they wouldn't be finished until someone actually buys them. We ended up getting lost several times and making several wrong turns (a few times into no-entry military zones) but eventually we made it to our destination and found Paul, one of the two brothers who are in charge of the Damascus chapter, who had laid the trail and organized the run.
It was a nice long run with plenty of steep uphill climbs as we ran(/trekked) up and over the hills that branched off the Anti-Lebanon mountains. The area is pretty sandy but it is in the process of being reforested so the area we were in had some small green growths (other fun fact: we were apparently within eyesight of the mountain on which Cain murdered his brother Abel). Once we reached the summit of our trail and headed back down the other side, we came across a flock of goats and a shepherd, and as we stumbled down the loose rocky mountainside we could hear some guys from the village below shouting to us. One of the people in our group spotted a donkey trying to come down the mountain and then falling, getting up and limping off, which gave us a bad omen for our own attempt to get back down (and a new definition for the phrase 'haram al-hameer'). But we made it down without any major falls and sat in the shade, waiting for the walkers and enjoying warm drinks; eventually when we all had gathered again we did the usual post-run circle, though this time was much more tame and family-friendly, particularly because there were, in fact, families and children present. Then a picnic with chicken salad sandwiches and soon after back to Damascus.
--
This afternoon I was about to leave the house to come here, to the internet cafe, when I noticed that the cheers of the afternoon's soccer match were growing ever closer to my house. Looking out my window (on the first floor of the house, facing the street) I saw masses of young men gathering in the parking lot in front of my house, where their tour busses were parked. They seemed to be the cheering squad for the losing team, because soon enough they were shouting, ripping off garbage cans and throwing them in the street and chucking soda cans at the residents in the apartments above me, who were probably telling them to go away. I was surprised how long it carried on for, considering my house is right next to the police station and there are always plenty of soldiers stationed around the stadium, but eventually sirens sounded, tour busses moved out, police came running through and I really wanted to go outside and see what was going on but decided I didn't want to be the lone (foreign) female wandering into a group of disgruntled youths. It was the first time that I had seen anyone being outright violent or aggressive here (beyond a few street arguments and fights over car accidents).
Friday, May 8, 2009
This week has been...
- getting stopped (twice!) by the armed guard (by armed I mean AK 47 armed and by guard I mean young man in street clothes, which sometimes means a purple sequined shirt, or something else equally in line with men’s fashion here) because he thought I was a local and therefore needed to show my student ID (foreigners don’t need to show anything)
- not getting lost, neither on the way there or the way back, for the first time, going to my tutor’s house Wednesday
- a new yoga class—same place, new teacher (this time an Indian woman), new price (about $12 per class) and a lot more people. So much for my $5 private lessons…although the legitimacy level of the class certainly corresponds with the price
- and my walks to yoga, now in the evenings, past the overflowing gardens of every apartment block, branches of blossoming trees reaching into the sidewalk, whose scents gladly overpower the diesel fumes from the busy road on which I walk. Women walking stop and sniff their neighbor’s bushes, break off a twig to bring home or give to a friend, old women puttering around their rose gardens, endlessly washing and cleaning and trimming. It is spring! and the weather is in the seventies and eighties every day and forties and fifties in the evening
- spring also means spring cleaning; every house with their winter rugs out to dry, then rolled up and stored away til next year
- it also means buying boxes and boxes and kilos and kilos of fool (beans), which is now in its agricultural prime, to cook and freeze for the year, and kilos and kilos and kilos of bazila (peas), for the same reason, and hours and hours and hours of shelling them (my host mother had been doing it all day Tuesday, then at night they invited our Finnish neighbors over for knafe dessert and everyone helped out, then they left and the shelling continued til 1 am)
- walking back from yoga to night games in the soccer stadium across the street from my house: taxis pulled over on the side of the road, their drivers clinging to the fences trying to get a glimpse of the game, two men watching from a broken bed frame abandoned on the side of the road, huddled under a blanket, and the stadium lights glaring directly into my bedroom
- a midterm this past Sunday, which means the class is now more than half-over
- reading Syrian authors in our new unit on short stories and poetry
- and a holiday on Wednesday for the Shohodah (martyrs executed in Beirut and Damascus in 1916 by Ottomans); celebrated by my family with everyone off from work and school and a lunch in the garden of grilled kibbe patties and tabbouleh.
- Also, it’s May! How and When did that happen? Six more weeks…
- not getting lost, neither on the way there or the way back, for the first time, going to my tutor’s house Wednesday
- a new yoga class—same place, new teacher (this time an Indian woman), new price (about $12 per class) and a lot more people. So much for my $5 private lessons…although the legitimacy level of the class certainly corresponds with the price
- and my walks to yoga, now in the evenings, past the overflowing gardens of every apartment block, branches of blossoming trees reaching into the sidewalk, whose scents gladly overpower the diesel fumes from the busy road on which I walk. Women walking stop and sniff their neighbor’s bushes, break off a twig to bring home or give to a friend, old women puttering around their rose gardens, endlessly washing and cleaning and trimming. It is spring! and the weather is in the seventies and eighties every day and forties and fifties in the evening
- spring also means spring cleaning; every house with their winter rugs out to dry, then rolled up and stored away til next year
- it also means buying boxes and boxes and kilos and kilos of fool (beans), which is now in its agricultural prime, to cook and freeze for the year, and kilos and kilos and kilos of bazila (peas), for the same reason, and hours and hours and hours of shelling them (my host mother had been doing it all day Tuesday, then at night they invited our Finnish neighbors over for knafe dessert and everyone helped out, then they left and the shelling continued til 1 am)
- walking back from yoga to night games in the soccer stadium across the street from my house: taxis pulled over on the side of the road, their drivers clinging to the fences trying to get a glimpse of the game, two men watching from a broken bed frame abandoned on the side of the road, huddled under a blanket, and the stadium lights glaring directly into my bedroom
- a midterm this past Sunday, which means the class is now more than half-over
- reading Syrian authors in our new unit on short stories and poetry
- and a holiday on Wednesday for the Shohodah (martyrs executed in Beirut and Damascus in 1916 by Ottomans); celebrated by my family with everyone off from work and school and a lunch in the garden of grilled kibbe patties and tabbouleh.
- Also, it’s May! How and When did that happen? Six more weeks…
Weekend Update, pt. 2
This past weekend I went north to Krak des Chevaliers for a second visit, although this time under slightly different circumstances. I went up with a group called the Hash House Harriers, an international running group that has branches in most major cities around the world (here it seems to be predominantly based around the embassy community). I first heard about them when I was visiting Rachel in Amman and we were discussing the frustrations of not being able to run outside (due to pollution, city drivers and city streets, getting weird looks). She told me about HHH and said that they had a chapter in Damascus that I should look up when I get back.
A few weeks later when I was back in school, I was talking about the same thing with my friend Sam from class and it turned out that his friend had joined the group and that he was going on his first run that coming weekend. He called me on his way back from the run and told me how they had gone for a run outside of the city into the mountains and had gotten really lost and that it was great and I should join them next time.
Apparently I picked a really good time to join the group; this weekend was a shared trip between the Beiruti and Damascene branches in celebration of Damascus’s 1500th run (also called hashes; also divide 1500 by 52 weeks to figure out how many years they’ve been running in Damascus). The trip cost $90 and included transportation to and from, hotel for one night, four meals, entrance to the castle and most importantly, in the eyes of the participants, lots and lots and lots of beer. The group’s motto is “drinkers with a running problem” and they manage to live up to it quite well; they also shared an obscene sense of humor and a few of them also happened to be serious runners with backgrounds in ultra running, marathons, half-marathons, triathalons. I should also mention that Sam, myself, and Sam’s friend Alex were the only participants under the age of 30 (also the only Americans), and the vast majority was probably over 50. Most of them worked together at various embassies, the European Commission, or some UN group. There was a large constituency from Northern Europe (Fins, Danes, Norwegians), one from Ireland, 1 Dutch, 2 Canadians, 1 South African, 2 Egyptians, and the rest were from Syria and Lebanon.
But before I could go running, I realized that I had to get myself a pair of running shoes. I had left my sneakers at home in CT, figuring I would more likely go hiking than run in the city, so I would have to buy a new pair if I wanted to go on the trip. Finding real running shoes here turned out to be an adventure in itself. My older host brother, Ihab, had suggested that I look in the Adidas and Diadora shops in Qassa, a neighborhood near our house, on the way to the Old City, and of course I put off the task until the day before the trip.
On my way there, I looked in vain for a local shop that might sell the same merchandise—1) because I had no idea how much imported running sneakers would cost and 2) I realized that if I didn’t find them in these shops I had no idea where else to look. There are a few ‘sporty’ shops, but most of them sell sports fashion and casual ‘sporty’ shoes without the actual function of using them for sportly activities. Even asking for running sneakers in these stores was difficult because if I specified ‘women’s’ shoes they would point me in the direction of the casual fashionable type and also most salespeople didn’t know the difference between an actual running shoe and any other sneaker.
I figured I would have better luck in Adidas. I did, at first, but it was a small shop, and it only had a few models for running sneakers, though my options were expanded slightly when I told them my shoe size and I realized I might have better luck looking in the men’s section. But they didn’t have my size anyway, so I went on to Diadora, where I had the same problem (plus the sneakers were all ugly). I had run out of options, so I called my Syrian friend Ibrahim, hoping he would have a better idea of what to do. After we worked out what I was looking for “sneakers” not “snickers” and so on, he told me he would check with a few friends because he had no idea and didn’t want me to pay full price at expensive shops so he would call me back.
An hour later he called me to say that I could go to a store south of the city where they sold smuggled goods from Turkey. He told me he would try and come with me if he could (he wanted to look for Harley Davidson shirts), but if I wanted to go alone he could explain the directions. Take a bus to Someria garage (about 30 minutes from my house), then get on this bus to this place, then get out here and ask how to get here… I told him that if he couldn’t make it, I would look elsewhere because I didn’t want to go alone to the shop in the first place, and secondly it didn’t sound like I would ever make it there anyway. He called me back an hour later and said he was too busy to go that afternoon.
I returned to my house and found Ihab there, so I asked him again for ideas of where to buy sneakers. This time he recommended going to the malls on the outskirts of the city (I didn’t even know that we had malls!) where there were Nike, Puma and Adidas stores. I was about to leave the house (by now it was after 7 pm) when another one of my Syrian friends that I had called earlier called me back and also recommended the malls, but then she offered to drive me there. Hoooorray for people with cars!
About an hour later I had met up with her and we headed for the malls, stopping first to pick up her 2 ½ year old nephew to bring with us. He had curly blond hair and blue eyes and was dressed more fashionably than I was, with his black and white checkered Van slip-on shoes, skinny jeans and Hurley hoodie.
The first mall we went to was Cham City Center, a pretty normal looking mall, though smaller than the ones in Beirut. We checked out the Adidas store first, but again they didn’t have my size, so we left the mall for the one directly next door, which had just opened and was in a building originally intended for a medical center, making it the strangest mall I had ever been in. It had a pretty large Nike store, though it sold more clothes than shoes, and only offered about three models of women’s running sneakers, and of course none of them fit me. There were two men’s options that fit, though one was $150 because it had a chip inside that counted your mileage for you (though they didn’t have the computer attachment to read the chip in stock), and the other one was decent but still pretty ugly. So we went to Puma, found nothing, and finally returned to Nike to buy my sneakers, relieved that the whole process was finally over and I wouldn’t have to back out of the trip after all.
Before we left we visited the supermarket in the first mall, mostly because I hadn’t been to one here yet, but also because my friend works for the marketing department of a food distribution company and has to go check up on their products and how they are being displayed etc etc. She pointed out to me the difference between smuggled goods and legally traded goods (smuggled goods don’t have any Arabic writing on them) and I was surprised to see that somewhere like one of the largest/only supermarkets in the city would sell smuggled foods. Looking down the aisles and aisles of familiar brands just made me grateful that I didn’t have to do my own food shopping here, and could resist the temptation of eating my favorite cereals with skim milk for breakfast every morning but having to come all the way out to the malls to find it (everything will taste all the better when I finally go home again).
--
The next morning, after a late night out and an early rise, we met up around 10 am and set off on our 3-4 hour ride north, arrived for a quick lunch at the hotel, then changed and met to get back on the bus and drive to the castle, where we would start our run, ending back at the hotel. I had to cringe a little on the inside and hold my tongue against better LNT judgement when, in our circle before the run, the organizers of the run (the mis-management) announced that we could follow their trail according to piles of shredded office paper in celebration of a weekend away from paperwork. The leader of the Damascus group, an older Danish guy named Viggo, read aloud from Wikipedia about important events of the year 1500 (to celebrate the 1500th run) and the day May 1st in history.
The area around the citadel is, in a word, hilly, and if you remember from our photos from our trip last month, also really really beautiful (unfortunately I didn’t run with my camera, but Gustav, the resident marathon/ultra runner, did—he would often stop to take the perfect shot of the group, the landscape or a flower, and then sprint ahead to the front of the group—hopefully we will get some of his photos soon). We split into two groups of walkers and runners and began the run on the road next to the citadel but soon moved off-road to a newly-forged trail in the fields of unfortunately thorny wildflowers. Our paper trail got us lost pretty frequently (for one because sometimes they blew away, for another because the trails are designed to confuse you and take you down false paths) and once we got off the smooth pavement onto the uneven and rocky trails and had to bushwack through long grasses with lotso thorns, we ended up walking most of the time, following shouts of “On On!” from the head runner when s/he discovered new trail markings.
By the end of the run we had completely lost the trail and just cut across the hillside directly to the hotel. Unfortunately the weather was not nice enough to enjoy the unheated hotel pool (although two or three still opted to jump in) and most people waited for the walkers to catch up sitting in chair with a beer in hand (I stuck to my water bottle). Once everyone had gathered again, the group circled up to partake in one of the HHHs most important traditions: inducting new members, christening relatively new members with nicknames, and calling out old members for transgressions against the group (ie. wearing matching clothes, smoking on the run, wearing new shoes [somehow I was exempt from the fate of having to drink out of my newly broken-in sneakers [drink beer filtered through my dirty socks, that is]]…). There was plenty of ceremony and ritual involved, most of which is best left undescribed, but suffice it to say that it kept the people eating lunch in the restaurant above the pool area well-entertained (as were the poor hotel guests that had to share the restaurant with us for dinner later that night).
The next day we circled up again after breakfast for run #1501, again with an introduction of Wikipedia facts. This time the run was predominantly downhill along the road and fairly easy to follow and it ended by following a driveway up a hill through a someone’s backyard and vegetable garden (“Don’t step on the fool!”) up to St. George’s Monastery. We were certainly a strange sight in front of this church, hanging out in spandex and running shorts, most people drinking beer and smoking. A group of us went inside the church, though a few were turned away by the priest for indecent dress, and found ourselves walking into a prayer service. The women had veiled their hair and after singing they filed to the front, which was covered in icons, and knelt, praying in front of the icons. When they stood up again I was surprised to see the faces of the icons were blacked out from being rubbed.
That day was much nicer than the day before, and while we waited for the walkers to catch up everyone was dreaming of the hotel pool. However, once they returned we realized one of the walkers was missing, so we waited a bit longer and a bit longer (Gustav decided to run back to the hotel), and then finally got back on the bus to go to the hotel and look for him. The lost walker was there, already showered and changed, and Gustav had already been for a swim in the pool that was somehow colder than the day before.
After the post-run circle, we all changed and checked out of the hotel and headed to lunch at a restaurant on the way to visit the castle. Our visit started off with a bit of chaos as we tried to figure out how many Syrians, foreigners living in Syria, Lebanese, and foreigners living in Lebanon we were, since they all paid different entrance fees, and then we gathered up for a brief historical introduction to the citadel from our resident PhD in Archaeology, then split up to explore the citadel to our liking, trying not to get too lost and get back to the bus again in one group. From there, the Lebanese group headed back to Beirut and the rest of us to Damascus and so ended my first hashing experience. I came home to studying for my midterm the next day and early sleep.
A few weeks later when I was back in school, I was talking about the same thing with my friend Sam from class and it turned out that his friend had joined the group and that he was going on his first run that coming weekend. He called me on his way back from the run and told me how they had gone for a run outside of the city into the mountains and had gotten really lost and that it was great and I should join them next time.
Apparently I picked a really good time to join the group; this weekend was a shared trip between the Beiruti and Damascene branches in celebration of Damascus’s 1500th run (also called hashes; also divide 1500 by 52 weeks to figure out how many years they’ve been running in Damascus). The trip cost $90 and included transportation to and from, hotel for one night, four meals, entrance to the castle and most importantly, in the eyes of the participants, lots and lots and lots of beer. The group’s motto is “drinkers with a running problem” and they manage to live up to it quite well; they also shared an obscene sense of humor and a few of them also happened to be serious runners with backgrounds in ultra running, marathons, half-marathons, triathalons. I should also mention that Sam, myself, and Sam’s friend Alex were the only participants under the age of 30 (also the only Americans), and the vast majority was probably over 50. Most of them worked together at various embassies, the European Commission, or some UN group. There was a large constituency from Northern Europe (Fins, Danes, Norwegians), one from Ireland, 1 Dutch, 2 Canadians, 1 South African, 2 Egyptians, and the rest were from Syria and Lebanon.
But before I could go running, I realized that I had to get myself a pair of running shoes. I had left my sneakers at home in CT, figuring I would more likely go hiking than run in the city, so I would have to buy a new pair if I wanted to go on the trip. Finding real running shoes here turned out to be an adventure in itself. My older host brother, Ihab, had suggested that I look in the Adidas and Diadora shops in Qassa, a neighborhood near our house, on the way to the Old City, and of course I put off the task until the day before the trip.
On my way there, I looked in vain for a local shop that might sell the same merchandise—1) because I had no idea how much imported running sneakers would cost and 2) I realized that if I didn’t find them in these shops I had no idea where else to look. There are a few ‘sporty’ shops, but most of them sell sports fashion and casual ‘sporty’ shoes without the actual function of using them for sportly activities. Even asking for running sneakers in these stores was difficult because if I specified ‘women’s’ shoes they would point me in the direction of the casual fashionable type and also most salespeople didn’t know the difference between an actual running shoe and any other sneaker.
I figured I would have better luck in Adidas. I did, at first, but it was a small shop, and it only had a few models for running sneakers, though my options were expanded slightly when I told them my shoe size and I realized I might have better luck looking in the men’s section. But they didn’t have my size anyway, so I went on to Diadora, where I had the same problem (plus the sneakers were all ugly). I had run out of options, so I called my Syrian friend Ibrahim, hoping he would have a better idea of what to do. After we worked out what I was looking for “sneakers” not “snickers” and so on, he told me he would check with a few friends because he had no idea and didn’t want me to pay full price at expensive shops so he would call me back.
An hour later he called me to say that I could go to a store south of the city where they sold smuggled goods from Turkey. He told me he would try and come with me if he could (he wanted to look for Harley Davidson shirts), but if I wanted to go alone he could explain the directions. Take a bus to Someria garage (about 30 minutes from my house), then get on this bus to this place, then get out here and ask how to get here… I told him that if he couldn’t make it, I would look elsewhere because I didn’t want to go alone to the shop in the first place, and secondly it didn’t sound like I would ever make it there anyway. He called me back an hour later and said he was too busy to go that afternoon.
I returned to my house and found Ihab there, so I asked him again for ideas of where to buy sneakers. This time he recommended going to the malls on the outskirts of the city (I didn’t even know that we had malls!) where there were Nike, Puma and Adidas stores. I was about to leave the house (by now it was after 7 pm) when another one of my Syrian friends that I had called earlier called me back and also recommended the malls, but then she offered to drive me there. Hoooorray for people with cars!
About an hour later I had met up with her and we headed for the malls, stopping first to pick up her 2 ½ year old nephew to bring with us. He had curly blond hair and blue eyes and was dressed more fashionably than I was, with his black and white checkered Van slip-on shoes, skinny jeans and Hurley hoodie.
The first mall we went to was Cham City Center, a pretty normal looking mall, though smaller than the ones in Beirut. We checked out the Adidas store first, but again they didn’t have my size, so we left the mall for the one directly next door, which had just opened and was in a building originally intended for a medical center, making it the strangest mall I had ever been in. It had a pretty large Nike store, though it sold more clothes than shoes, and only offered about three models of women’s running sneakers, and of course none of them fit me. There were two men’s options that fit, though one was $150 because it had a chip inside that counted your mileage for you (though they didn’t have the computer attachment to read the chip in stock), and the other one was decent but still pretty ugly. So we went to Puma, found nothing, and finally returned to Nike to buy my sneakers, relieved that the whole process was finally over and I wouldn’t have to back out of the trip after all.
Before we left we visited the supermarket in the first mall, mostly because I hadn’t been to one here yet, but also because my friend works for the marketing department of a food distribution company and has to go check up on their products and how they are being displayed etc etc. She pointed out to me the difference between smuggled goods and legally traded goods (smuggled goods don’t have any Arabic writing on them) and I was surprised to see that somewhere like one of the largest/only supermarkets in the city would sell smuggled foods. Looking down the aisles and aisles of familiar brands just made me grateful that I didn’t have to do my own food shopping here, and could resist the temptation of eating my favorite cereals with skim milk for breakfast every morning but having to come all the way out to the malls to find it (everything will taste all the better when I finally go home again).
--
The next morning, after a late night out and an early rise, we met up around 10 am and set off on our 3-4 hour ride north, arrived for a quick lunch at the hotel, then changed and met to get back on the bus and drive to the castle, where we would start our run, ending back at the hotel. I had to cringe a little on the inside and hold my tongue against better LNT judgement when, in our circle before the run, the organizers of the run (the mis-management) announced that we could follow their trail according to piles of shredded office paper in celebration of a weekend away from paperwork. The leader of the Damascus group, an older Danish guy named Viggo, read aloud from Wikipedia about important events of the year 1500 (to celebrate the 1500th run) and the day May 1st in history.
The area around the citadel is, in a word, hilly, and if you remember from our photos from our trip last month, also really really beautiful (unfortunately I didn’t run with my camera, but Gustav, the resident marathon/ultra runner, did—he would often stop to take the perfect shot of the group, the landscape or a flower, and then sprint ahead to the front of the group—hopefully we will get some of his photos soon). We split into two groups of walkers and runners and began the run on the road next to the citadel but soon moved off-road to a newly-forged trail in the fields of unfortunately thorny wildflowers. Our paper trail got us lost pretty frequently (for one because sometimes they blew away, for another because the trails are designed to confuse you and take you down false paths) and once we got off the smooth pavement onto the uneven and rocky trails and had to bushwack through long grasses with lotso thorns, we ended up walking most of the time, following shouts of “On On!” from the head runner when s/he discovered new trail markings.
By the end of the run we had completely lost the trail and just cut across the hillside directly to the hotel. Unfortunately the weather was not nice enough to enjoy the unheated hotel pool (although two or three still opted to jump in) and most people waited for the walkers to catch up sitting in chair with a beer in hand (I stuck to my water bottle). Once everyone had gathered again, the group circled up to partake in one of the HHHs most important traditions: inducting new members, christening relatively new members with nicknames, and calling out old members for transgressions against the group (ie. wearing matching clothes, smoking on the run, wearing new shoes [somehow I was exempt from the fate of having to drink out of my newly broken-in sneakers [drink beer filtered through my dirty socks, that is]]…). There was plenty of ceremony and ritual involved, most of which is best left undescribed, but suffice it to say that it kept the people eating lunch in the restaurant above the pool area well-entertained (as were the poor hotel guests that had to share the restaurant with us for dinner later that night).
The next day we circled up again after breakfast for run #1501, again with an introduction of Wikipedia facts. This time the run was predominantly downhill along the road and fairly easy to follow and it ended by following a driveway up a hill through a someone’s backyard and vegetable garden (“Don’t step on the fool!”) up to St. George’s Monastery. We were certainly a strange sight in front of this church, hanging out in spandex and running shorts, most people drinking beer and smoking. A group of us went inside the church, though a few were turned away by the priest for indecent dress, and found ourselves walking into a prayer service. The women had veiled their hair and after singing they filed to the front, which was covered in icons, and knelt, praying in front of the icons. When they stood up again I was surprised to see the faces of the icons were blacked out from being rubbed.
That day was much nicer than the day before, and while we waited for the walkers to catch up everyone was dreaming of the hotel pool. However, once they returned we realized one of the walkers was missing, so we waited a bit longer and a bit longer (Gustav decided to run back to the hotel), and then finally got back on the bus to go to the hotel and look for him. The lost walker was there, already showered and changed, and Gustav had already been for a swim in the pool that was somehow colder than the day before.
After the post-run circle, we all changed and checked out of the hotel and headed to lunch at a restaurant on the way to visit the castle. Our visit started off with a bit of chaos as we tried to figure out how many Syrians, foreigners living in Syria, Lebanese, and foreigners living in Lebanon we were, since they all paid different entrance fees, and then we gathered up for a brief historical introduction to the citadel from our resident PhD in Archaeology, then split up to explore the citadel to our liking, trying not to get too lost and get back to the bus again in one group. From there, the Lebanese group headed back to Beirut and the rest of us to Damascus and so ended my first hashing experience. I came home to studying for my midterm the next day and early sleep.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Yuthir-ing Al-Jadl
This past week of class has been typified mostly by the Arabic phrase “yuthir al-jadl” (to stir up debate). When it was first introduced in a vocabulary lesson, one of the students gave the example, “The differences between Syrians and Lebanese stirs up debate.” Immediately our professor jumped in and argued that there are no differences between the Syrians and Lebanese and thus there is no debate. We then spent the next 15 minutes arguing about if there are differences, what they are, and whether or not Syria entered Lebanon lawfully and orderly in order to protect their neighbor (and their own former citizens) in distress. Henceforth the issue, did indeeed, stir up debate.
In the same way, it seems that there is no issue we can talk about in class, no matter how benign, that doesn’t lead to some animated discussion about Israel/Palestine, Middle East v. West, or the Media. One morning there were only three of us in class, so we spent the first hour talking about the news. I mentioned that I had had a conversation with my private tutor (p.s., I have a private tutor now, more on that later) about how Western news channels will all broadcast the same inane news items about the president or other celebrities/public figures (the example at hand was a bird that was loose in the White House, or from the past, the death of Pres. Bush’s cat), whereas from an Arab perspective (such as that of my tutor’s) it was incredibly stupid and meaningless. I tried to explain that Americans like to feel like the people that they put on a political or social pedestal are sometimes just like the rest of us and that they can relate to them as individuals. My professor in class then turned that discussion into how CNN/BBC may broadcast news about birds in the White House but not footage from the Israeli invasion of Gaza this past winter. Or on the other hand, how Arab stations may not have personal information about their heads of state but they did enter directly into the place of conflict and many correspondents lost their lives capturing the events that took place. So which one is free media?
Or another favorite topic: Racism! Our reading for this unit was about Arab immigrants in European countries and the prejudices they endure, particularly in the job market and particularly when Arab = Muslim = Terrorist in the minds of the local people. Our conversation then turned to our professor’s experiences in Italy and the kind of disrespect that she encountered for wearing a hijab, and the kind of disrespect she has encountered working in language institute from (the few) foreign students who have no interest in the local culture, but only want to learn the language for work reasons, and throughout their stay maintain significant prejudices against Arab culture and Muslims in particular. I was surprised to know that someone would actually choose to live here and study in a local institute in a country that is 90% Muslim and the whole time be walking around with hatred and prejudice for just about every person s/he met. What a torturous way to spend six months.
So although these lessons have been somewhat enlightening, or at the very least, entertaining, it has already gotten a little old and a bit frustrating when you can’t even get through a single lesson without stumbling onto some controversial tangent that you didn’t even know you were bringing up. While its good to learn how to defend yourself in a heated argument, the problem ultimately lies in the fact that our professor always has the upperhand of language, and we are always limited by our ability to articulate our own ideas and are always forced to make blatant generalizations that we would never make in English. Last example: today in class, one student was giving a presentation on the Barbary pirates and he referred to part of Northern Africa as the Barbary States (doul barbary) and our professor immediately called him out on being prejudiced. She thought he was referring to them as Barbarian states, i.e. without a legitimate culture or civilization (and the word ‘barbarian’ is derived from the Berbers). However the problem lay in the translation from English to Arabic and not in his prejudicism, because in English there is a difference between Barbary and Barbarian, but in Arabic apparently they refer to the same thing. Another student pointed out that it is the same problem with the name “Sudan,” which comes from the Arabic word for black and literally means “country of the blacks.” Eventually we moved on but the presenter dug himself into another hole when he said that the pirates found religious justification for their actions in the Q’ran and our prof. demanded to know where it was written that it is justified to kidnap and ransack your non-Muslim neighbors on the basis of religion (and thus you see the same problem with terrorists today, it lies in the varied interpretations of the text).
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So. I have a tutor now! I found her through a friend from Georgetown who was in Damascus last year and who worked with her studying Arab Media. Since I’m supposed to be doing the same thing for the class that I am missing at Georgetown, I figured that the best way to keep up would also be with a tutor and some sort of structured lessons involving practicing discussion (since I don’t get enough of it in class). My friend warned me that she wasn’t great at grammar (which I have now learned for myself once we had something of a standoff over a simple grammar exercise in my first lesson). So now twice a week in the afternoons I’ll be making my way out to the suburbs of Damascus to meet with Leila at her house.
The first time I went, I thought it would be easier to take a taxi directly there, rather than deal with the service (minibus) and having to figure out when to get out. But unfortunately my taxi managed to get into a (minor) car accident and had to pull over to sort it out with the other driver, so I gave up and decided to take a service anyway (it only costs 7 lira compared to the usual 10 and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a 1 lira coin). I told the driver the name of the stop and that I didn’t know where I was going, so he told me where to get off and Leila’s son came out to meet me and show me the way to her house.
The next time that I went, aka yesterday, I thought I had perhaps seen enough of the way to her house to figure it out on my own, so I tried to keep a lookout and figure out when to get out. However the first time the drive seemed much longer, so I was completely disoriented and it was only when we crossed a highway and I saw the driver giving me funny looks that I looked up and realized that we were already on our way back to Abbasiyin Square, where I live. He let me down and I took a taxi. But even then I couldn’t find the house and I walked in and out of little alleyways trying to recognize something, until I finally called her and realized that I was looking on the wrong side of the street. Her son came out again to get me and eventually I made it up to her house on the third floor where she greeted me warmly in her pajamas (it was about 5 pm, but my host family does the same thing where as soon as they get home from work they put on their pjs).
Our first lesson was disrupted by a disagreement in a simple grammar exercise where unfortunately I was right and she was mistaken, and then I decided (mentally) that perhaps it would be better to focus on media and leave my grammar studies for home. After the lesson we turned our attention to the television, which was covering demonstrations in Lebanon celebrating the release of four wrongly-jailed suspects in the assassination of Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri over four years ago.
In the same way, it seems that there is no issue we can talk about in class, no matter how benign, that doesn’t lead to some animated discussion about Israel/Palestine, Middle East v. West, or the Media. One morning there were only three of us in class, so we spent the first hour talking about the news. I mentioned that I had had a conversation with my private tutor (p.s., I have a private tutor now, more on that later) about how Western news channels will all broadcast the same inane news items about the president or other celebrities/public figures (the example at hand was a bird that was loose in the White House, or from the past, the death of Pres. Bush’s cat), whereas from an Arab perspective (such as that of my tutor’s) it was incredibly stupid and meaningless. I tried to explain that Americans like to feel like the people that they put on a political or social pedestal are sometimes just like the rest of us and that they can relate to them as individuals. My professor in class then turned that discussion into how CNN/BBC may broadcast news about birds in the White House but not footage from the Israeli invasion of Gaza this past winter. Or on the other hand, how Arab stations may not have personal information about their heads of state but they did enter directly into the place of conflict and many correspondents lost their lives capturing the events that took place. So which one is free media?
Or another favorite topic: Racism! Our reading for this unit was about Arab immigrants in European countries and the prejudices they endure, particularly in the job market and particularly when Arab = Muslim = Terrorist in the minds of the local people. Our conversation then turned to our professor’s experiences in Italy and the kind of disrespect that she encountered for wearing a hijab, and the kind of disrespect she has encountered working in language institute from (the few) foreign students who have no interest in the local culture, but only want to learn the language for work reasons, and throughout their stay maintain significant prejudices against Arab culture and Muslims in particular. I was surprised to know that someone would actually choose to live here and study in a local institute in a country that is 90% Muslim and the whole time be walking around with hatred and prejudice for just about every person s/he met. What a torturous way to spend six months.
So although these lessons have been somewhat enlightening, or at the very least, entertaining, it has already gotten a little old and a bit frustrating when you can’t even get through a single lesson without stumbling onto some controversial tangent that you didn’t even know you were bringing up. While its good to learn how to defend yourself in a heated argument, the problem ultimately lies in the fact that our professor always has the upperhand of language, and we are always limited by our ability to articulate our own ideas and are always forced to make blatant generalizations that we would never make in English. Last example: today in class, one student was giving a presentation on the Barbary pirates and he referred to part of Northern Africa as the Barbary States (doul barbary) and our professor immediately called him out on being prejudiced. She thought he was referring to them as Barbarian states, i.e. without a legitimate culture or civilization (and the word ‘barbarian’ is derived from the Berbers). However the problem lay in the translation from English to Arabic and not in his prejudicism, because in English there is a difference between Barbary and Barbarian, but in Arabic apparently they refer to the same thing. Another student pointed out that it is the same problem with the name “Sudan,” which comes from the Arabic word for black and literally means “country of the blacks.” Eventually we moved on but the presenter dug himself into another hole when he said that the pirates found religious justification for their actions in the Q’ran and our prof. demanded to know where it was written that it is justified to kidnap and ransack your non-Muslim neighbors on the basis of religion (and thus you see the same problem with terrorists today, it lies in the varied interpretations of the text).
--
So. I have a tutor now! I found her through a friend from Georgetown who was in Damascus last year and who worked with her studying Arab Media. Since I’m supposed to be doing the same thing for the class that I am missing at Georgetown, I figured that the best way to keep up would also be with a tutor and some sort of structured lessons involving practicing discussion (since I don’t get enough of it in class). My friend warned me that she wasn’t great at grammar (which I have now learned for myself once we had something of a standoff over a simple grammar exercise in my first lesson). So now twice a week in the afternoons I’ll be making my way out to the suburbs of Damascus to meet with Leila at her house.
The first time I went, I thought it would be easier to take a taxi directly there, rather than deal with the service (minibus) and having to figure out when to get out. But unfortunately my taxi managed to get into a (minor) car accident and had to pull over to sort it out with the other driver, so I gave up and decided to take a service anyway (it only costs 7 lira compared to the usual 10 and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen a 1 lira coin). I told the driver the name of the stop and that I didn’t know where I was going, so he told me where to get off and Leila’s son came out to meet me and show me the way to her house.
The next time that I went, aka yesterday, I thought I had perhaps seen enough of the way to her house to figure it out on my own, so I tried to keep a lookout and figure out when to get out. However the first time the drive seemed much longer, so I was completely disoriented and it was only when we crossed a highway and I saw the driver giving me funny looks that I looked up and realized that we were already on our way back to Abbasiyin Square, where I live. He let me down and I took a taxi. But even then I couldn’t find the house and I walked in and out of little alleyways trying to recognize something, until I finally called her and realized that I was looking on the wrong side of the street. Her son came out again to get me and eventually I made it up to her house on the third floor where she greeted me warmly in her pajamas (it was about 5 pm, but my host family does the same thing where as soon as they get home from work they put on their pjs).
Our first lesson was disrupted by a disagreement in a simple grammar exercise where unfortunately I was right and she was mistaken, and then I decided (mentally) that perhaps it would be better to focus on media and leave my grammar studies for home. After the lesson we turned our attention to the television, which was covering demonstrations in Lebanon celebrating the release of four wrongly-jailed suspects in the assassination of Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri over four years ago.
Weekend Update
Let’s start with last weekend. Thursday evening I went with my host mom, Leila, to a classical music concert in an old Greek church called Church Zeitoon (Olive Church) in the old city. The orchestra performing was visiting from a church in London and played a mixture of classical ‘spiritually-themed’ music and contemporary Christian music, which was overall much more bearable/enjoyable than the previous week’s performance. Some of the songs included audience sing-alongs, for which there was a program on every seat with lyrics in English and Arabic. The crowd was mostly Syrians but there were also a few foreigners scattered, many of whom Leila knew from church.
There was a local Syrian pastor acting as translator for the British pastor, who worked at a local church and was hosting the event, and the British conductor, who was a little crazy and invariably tried to make his speech more welcoming to the foreign/local audience but at the same time made it impossible for the other pastor to translate. I could understand enough of what the translator said to see how much he condensed and simplified the speech of the conductor, and there were times when the conductor would list off foreign cities and composers and the translator would stop mid-sentence and ask how to pronounce something, or try to keep up but then trail off and disregard the rest.
Translation was also a problem when the Greek Patriarch stood up to make a speech and made it in Arabic, and the poor translator was so confused that he began condensing it into Arabic instead of English. Also, when it came time for the audience sing-along, the conductor invited up a man from Leila’s church to lead the Arabic singing while he himself led the English singing, at the same time. Of course the English was drowned out and it sounded terrible. Also I could read enough of the Arabic to know that it did not say anything of the original English lyrics and that they had been completely rewritten into contemporary Christian verse, which was something of a crime for traditional hymns such as Ode to Joy.
The whole event lasted nearly 2 ½ hours, with maybe 17 songs and an intermission, and a lot of prayers and announcements at the end. Afterwards I went with Leila to visit one of her friends that we met at the concert, who lived nearby and invited us over for tea. They lived near the hotel that my parents and I stayed in in the old city, in one of the apartments of an old Damascene house on the upper floor above a courtyard of lemon and orange trees. We stayed for about 20 minutes, until about 11 pm, and it was my first typical house visit for tea, Easter sweets and awkward conversation. Afterwards I walked to my friend’s house in another part of the old city to switch gears and go to a student party in another old Damascene house. When I arrived, the party had already split into the British faction and the American faction. The Americans were greatly outnumbered, there were only about four of us (myself, my friend from class and 2 kids from Princeton, who were exactly what I expected two guys studying Arabic at Princeton to be like). The foreign student social scene is pretty much exactly like it is, well, in America and Britain, except that everyone goes to the same one bar with bad music, lured in by weekly “specials” of free entry and one free drink. However it manages to be a good time regardless.
There was a local Syrian pastor acting as translator for the British pastor, who worked at a local church and was hosting the event, and the British conductor, who was a little crazy and invariably tried to make his speech more welcoming to the foreign/local audience but at the same time made it impossible for the other pastor to translate. I could understand enough of what the translator said to see how much he condensed and simplified the speech of the conductor, and there were times when the conductor would list off foreign cities and composers and the translator would stop mid-sentence and ask how to pronounce something, or try to keep up but then trail off and disregard the rest.
Translation was also a problem when the Greek Patriarch stood up to make a speech and made it in Arabic, and the poor translator was so confused that he began condensing it into Arabic instead of English. Also, when it came time for the audience sing-along, the conductor invited up a man from Leila’s church to lead the Arabic singing while he himself led the English singing, at the same time. Of course the English was drowned out and it sounded terrible. Also I could read enough of the Arabic to know that it did not say anything of the original English lyrics and that they had been completely rewritten into contemporary Christian verse, which was something of a crime for traditional hymns such as Ode to Joy.
The whole event lasted nearly 2 ½ hours, with maybe 17 songs and an intermission, and a lot of prayers and announcements at the end. Afterwards I went with Leila to visit one of her friends that we met at the concert, who lived nearby and invited us over for tea. They lived near the hotel that my parents and I stayed in in the old city, in one of the apartments of an old Damascene house on the upper floor above a courtyard of lemon and orange trees. We stayed for about 20 minutes, until about 11 pm, and it was my first typical house visit for tea, Easter sweets and awkward conversation. Afterwards I walked to my friend’s house in another part of the old city to switch gears and go to a student party in another old Damascene house. When I arrived, the party had already split into the British faction and the American faction. The Americans were greatly outnumbered, there were only about four of us (myself, my friend from class and 2 kids from Princeton, who were exactly what I expected two guys studying Arabic at Princeton to be like). The foreign student social scene is pretty much exactly like it is, well, in America and Britain, except that everyone goes to the same one bar with bad music, lured in by weekly “specials” of free entry and one free drink. However it manages to be a good time regardless.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
The Last of the Traveling Pics (for now)
My dad posted the rest of his traveling photos; find them here.
Also I'm pretty sure today was the hottest day yet: 89 degrees! It begins...
Also I'm pretty sure today was the hottest day yet: 89 degrees! It begins...
Oh Right, School.
On Monday, after the national holiday, I returned to the university to begin another month of class. I am definitely grateful to be back in school after a long break, and this class in particular looks promising. It started out with eight students and has now shrunk to six (two opted to advance to level seven); our professor, Huda, is firm and a good teacher with a lot of personality and a good sense of humor, and even our sessions with the listening professor, Abdurabuh (his name means ‘worshipper of his god’), are off to a good start.
Our class is made up of two Korean girls, one British guy, two Americans (myself and a graduate from Yale) and one Swiss woman. The students who left were American and British as well, and I was not sad to see them go since they were both a little bit of know-it-alls, though I still can’t understand how the American kid knows so much (Liz, he’s another Spokaner! so no wonder he is crazy) because this is the first time he has ever studied Arabic in a university/classroom setting, or even with a professor, or even with anyone he can actually speak Arabic with. Instead he studied on his own for three years (on the side, while he got his degrees in computer science, political science and Islamic studies), making it through all three Al-Kitaabs (the standard Arabic textbook in the US), and apparently learned to speak from listening to internet programs—all of which are seemingly impossible.
Class usually begins with a discussion about the news, so yesterday Huda started class by asking us about Ahmedinijad’s speech at the racism conference that singled out Israel and caused attendees to walk out of the room and others to boycott the conference altogether. She noticed that Sammy and myself (the two Americans) stayed quiet for the conversation so she called us out on it and asked if it was because Americans are afraid to talk about politics here. I told her I just don’t like to participate in a discussion, especially in Arabic, if I don’t know what I am talking about, but regardless it started another conversation about the way this country is portrayed in the media as a religiously conservative and closed society and Western perceptions of muhajibeen (women who wear the headscarf/hijab); and although I didn’t suffer from too much culture shock when I arrived due to these misconceived notions, it was nonetheless refreshing to have this kind of conversation with a woman here who dresses conservatively and wears a white hijab and is strong, intelligent, opinionated and well-informed.
She also informed us that we would be responsible for two ! presentations this month, and that since my name was on top of the class list, I would be first to go. Therefore I gave my presentation this morning and used the same subject that I used in my last class (about America’s cultural food crisis) as I never had the chance to finish my presentation last time or open it up to any kind of discussion. This time I had 15 minutes to talk and 30 minutes for discussion and I survived and the class participated and all was well with the world. Then I came home after class and had lunch with my host mother (leftover stuffed grapeleaves from yesterday’s lunch and green beans in tomato sauce) and we were talking about how good the green beans were and how she cooked them with the tomatoes and garlic without boiling them in water in order to retain the flavor and how she used tomatoes that she preserved from last summer because the tomatoes now aren’t any good, and then I turned on CNN afterwards and there was a news story about Japan’s declining economy and how that is pushing more people to eat McDonald’s rather than the traditional healthy (though expensive) Japanese diet and how McDonald’s had record profits in 2008 while the rest of the country/world was falling to pieces. And it all comes together like so.
Our class is made up of two Korean girls, one British guy, two Americans (myself and a graduate from Yale) and one Swiss woman. The students who left were American and British as well, and I was not sad to see them go since they were both a little bit of know-it-alls, though I still can’t understand how the American kid knows so much (Liz, he’s another Spokaner! so no wonder he is crazy) because this is the first time he has ever studied Arabic in a university/classroom setting, or even with a professor, or even with anyone he can actually speak Arabic with. Instead he studied on his own for three years (on the side, while he got his degrees in computer science, political science and Islamic studies), making it through all three Al-Kitaabs (the standard Arabic textbook in the US), and apparently learned to speak from listening to internet programs—all of which are seemingly impossible.
Class usually begins with a discussion about the news, so yesterday Huda started class by asking us about Ahmedinijad’s speech at the racism conference that singled out Israel and caused attendees to walk out of the room and others to boycott the conference altogether. She noticed that Sammy and myself (the two Americans) stayed quiet for the conversation so she called us out on it and asked if it was because Americans are afraid to talk about politics here. I told her I just don’t like to participate in a discussion, especially in Arabic, if I don’t know what I am talking about, but regardless it started another conversation about the way this country is portrayed in the media as a religiously conservative and closed society and Western perceptions of muhajibeen (women who wear the headscarf/hijab); and although I didn’t suffer from too much culture shock when I arrived due to these misconceived notions, it was nonetheless refreshing to have this kind of conversation with a woman here who dresses conservatively and wears a white hijab and is strong, intelligent, opinionated and well-informed.
She also informed us that we would be responsible for two ! presentations this month, and that since my name was on top of the class list, I would be first to go. Therefore I gave my presentation this morning and used the same subject that I used in my last class (about America’s cultural food crisis) as I never had the chance to finish my presentation last time or open it up to any kind of discussion. This time I had 15 minutes to talk and 30 minutes for discussion and I survived and the class participated and all was well with the world. Then I came home after class and had lunch with my host mother (leftover stuffed grapeleaves from yesterday’s lunch and green beans in tomato sauce) and we were talking about how good the green beans were and how she cooked them with the tomatoes and garlic without boiling them in water in order to retain the flavor and how she used tomatoes that she preserved from last summer because the tomatoes now aren’t any good, and then I turned on CNN afterwards and there was a news story about Japan’s declining economy and how that is pushing more people to eat McDonald’s rather than the traditional healthy (though expensive) Japanese diet and how McDonald’s had record profits in 2008 while the rest of the country/world was falling to pieces. And it all comes together like so.
Who Says You Can’t Talk About Religion and Politics Here?
Saturday I left the house because the cleaning lady was there and returned later in the afternoon to a house cleaned and decorated for Easter. Colored eggs hanging on the wall, bowls of candies, stuffed chicks, ducks and bunnies sitting in various corners of the rooms. I spent some time with my family the only way I know how, sitting and watching TV with them (it really seems to be, unfortunately, the only group activity they partake in, other than eating and church). The past few days, since its been a holiday and my host father didn’t travel to his farm this weekend and I hadn’t started my new class yet, I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time watching TV with them. Sometimes it is good because my host father will watch the news, either in English or Arabic, or maybe Farah will be watching an American movie, so I can justify my television-time as 1) ‘quality’ time with the family 2) creating opportunities for conversation/discussion and 3) listening practice! (this is clearly a good excuse for just about anything I wouldn’t otherwise want to do) or in the case of movies in English, translation practice as I switch between listening and reading the subtitles (mostly paying attention to how they translate American slang into formal fus’ha).
If my host mom is watching, however, or if the family is watching together, the channel is usually on one of the 10 or so Christian channels (there must be some kind of satellite TV programming where you buy the package based on your religion, clearly Muslims would have different channel options), either showing a debate, lecture, preach-fest with a televangelist, musical event, religious film or most unfortunate of them all/my host mother’s favorite, kids’ programming (although my hostfamily belongs to a Protestant church, their religious activities suggest a likening to evangelism).
This particular session started out promising. My hostfather was watching a political debate on an Iraqi news channel between four men (two Arabs and 2 Americans) about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It was most interesting because it may have been the first time that I saw a Westerner/American participate in a debate in the media with Arabs and actually speak to them in fus’ha (the other American spoke English and had it translated). It was encouraging for me to watch as a student, because it reminded me that there may be some purpose to my studies after all; though I may not ever be in this exact context, it exemplified the benefit of being able to have a discussion between Western and Arab perspectives on the same level/in the same language. Likely the other participants knew English well enough, but it was an Arab TV channel with a debate in an Arab context with an American guest—plus, one can appreciate the symbolic gesture/rarity of having an American in this field/in this position of knowledge/power/influence know fus’ha well enough to speak it.
But the channel was soon changed to a religious debate between a priest and a Muslim on the vowelling in the Qu’ran [at the time of the revelation of the Qu’ran, the written Arabic langauge didn’t include diacritics such as short vowels, so there is debate (primarily among Christians, that is) over whether different versions of the Qu’ran exist and if Muslims even really know what their Holy Book says]. Although I’m all for a good religious or political debate, and even though I didn’t fully understand what they were saying, I didn’t like the look of this priest and I didn’t need to hear him to not trust the words that were coming out of his mouth that I couldn’t understand. Plus I don’t trust any of these channels because I figure that anything written by Christians for Christian audiences in order to boost their self-esteem about how much more correct their religion is compared to the Other Religion, is more than a little suspect. It’s like when they bring Muslims on the show who have converted to Christianity in order to explain the differences between the religions and why his new religion/Your Religion is the better choice.
Thus I have realized that not everything can be endured for the sake of language practice (and I now have to leave the room everytime the channel is changed to one of the first 10). There does, in fact, have to be SOME substance in what is being communicated in order to even have the desire to figure out the meaning.
Yet here is an example of the same idea from the other end of the spectrum: I went out a few nights ago to meet Frank and a friend of his to go to a poetry reading. Frank has only studied Arabic for a few months and his friend doesn’t even really study Arabic (I forget why he is here) so we all acknowledged the fact that we probably wouldn’t understand anything but it was worth the visit. But first, we hung out for a bit with Frank’s roommates and their friends and sweets that two Syrian girls had brought from Homs. The group spoke English/French/Arabic/German and it was the first time that the only common language was Arabic (finally!) so I had a good conversation in fus’ha with a friend who is French and Muslim and here to study the language in relation to his religion.
After some time, we left for the reading, which was held in a bar located in the basement of a five-star hotel and packed with locals, cigarette smoke and bottles of beer. Admittedly, it was a little pretentious for any foreigner to go to such an event and pretend to appreciate anything that was being said, but at the very least, it was a great cultural experience—for one, because the poets were definitely local but shared origins from Libya to Iraq to Palestine, and for another because poetry is an important part of the Arab literary tradition and though I’ve had to (attempt to) read some in class this was the first time I ever heard it performed. And though the scene itself was not unfamiliar: the darkened room, jazz posters on the wall and people crammed wherever they could fit: the people showed their appreciation not with snaps or polite clapping but with shouts and raucous applause and calling out or jumping to the podium themselves.
--
Sunday was the most important day of the year, again. I slept in again, even did a little (/a lot of) studying in order to prepare for my return to the university the following day. We had lunch again with the family in the garden—this time we had frikie (at first I thought it was called Afrikiye aka African food), a green wheat served with cashews, tender lamb chunks on the bone and a yogurt and cucumber sauce.
During the meal, the conversation was appropriately themed for the holiday and the others tried to bring me into the discussion by asking if I knew that Muslims didn’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus (they believe in him as a prophet and therefore have respect for the religion of Christianity but they don’t agree that he is the son of God and divine in nature) and then a little later if I knew that the Muslims don’t believe in Jesus in the way that he is written about in the Bible, only through the words of the Qu’ran. Yes, that is because they are…Muslims. And they can’t believe in the divinity of Jesus because they believe it is not possible for God to live on earth, and if they believed in Jesus according to the Bible, and took the Bible as God’s Word, well, then they would be Christians. You realize that you are two different religions, right?
Then post-lunch: Ihab started by asking me if I believe in Jesus Christ. He already knew that I didn’t believe in the religiousity of the story, so he clarified it by asking if I believed in his existence from a historical perspective. He prefaced the conversation by saying he hoped he wasn’t offending me, but that there is not much opportunity for this kind of religious debate and he was curious to know what I thought about some of religion’s big questions: life and death, creation, human nature, divine nature, the meaning of life. I did most of the talking, but ultimately I tried to explain that usually I find that in talking with people of different beliefs that we share similar hopes/dreams/fears about life and what it all means, where it all comes from—we just happen to use different words or metaphors to represent our ideas. He responded that this isn’t true because I don’t have God in my heart; I said well you can call it God and I can call it something else, but how do you know what is in my heart? and again that we all share the same questions about life but we have different ways of getting to the answer, but it doesn’t mean any one way is better than the other—and then he told me, no that’s not true, I have the right and the best way. Henceforth the conversation went downhill from there, finally ending with a crash and burn when he told me “I believe that if only you thought about it more, you would see that I am right.”
Wafa in her broken English intervened with, “I believe in the end, we get what we plant and we love you anyway.”
If my host mom is watching, however, or if the family is watching together, the channel is usually on one of the 10 or so Christian channels (there must be some kind of satellite TV programming where you buy the package based on your religion, clearly Muslims would have different channel options), either showing a debate, lecture, preach-fest with a televangelist, musical event, religious film or most unfortunate of them all/my host mother’s favorite, kids’ programming (although my hostfamily belongs to a Protestant church, their religious activities suggest a likening to evangelism).
This particular session started out promising. My hostfather was watching a political debate on an Iraqi news channel between four men (two Arabs and 2 Americans) about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It was most interesting because it may have been the first time that I saw a Westerner/American participate in a debate in the media with Arabs and actually speak to them in fus’ha (the other American spoke English and had it translated). It was encouraging for me to watch as a student, because it reminded me that there may be some purpose to my studies after all; though I may not ever be in this exact context, it exemplified the benefit of being able to have a discussion between Western and Arab perspectives on the same level/in the same language. Likely the other participants knew English well enough, but it was an Arab TV channel with a debate in an Arab context with an American guest—plus, one can appreciate the symbolic gesture/rarity of having an American in this field/in this position of knowledge/power/influence know fus’ha well enough to speak it.
But the channel was soon changed to a religious debate between a priest and a Muslim on the vowelling in the Qu’ran [at the time of the revelation of the Qu’ran, the written Arabic langauge didn’t include diacritics such as short vowels, so there is debate (primarily among Christians, that is) over whether different versions of the Qu’ran exist and if Muslims even really know what their Holy Book says]. Although I’m all for a good religious or political debate, and even though I didn’t fully understand what they were saying, I didn’t like the look of this priest and I didn’t need to hear him to not trust the words that were coming out of his mouth that I couldn’t understand. Plus I don’t trust any of these channels because I figure that anything written by Christians for Christian audiences in order to boost their self-esteem about how much more correct their religion is compared to the Other Religion, is more than a little suspect. It’s like when they bring Muslims on the show who have converted to Christianity in order to explain the differences between the religions and why his new religion/Your Religion is the better choice.
Thus I have realized that not everything can be endured for the sake of language practice (and I now have to leave the room everytime the channel is changed to one of the first 10). There does, in fact, have to be SOME substance in what is being communicated in order to even have the desire to figure out the meaning.
Yet here is an example of the same idea from the other end of the spectrum: I went out a few nights ago to meet Frank and a friend of his to go to a poetry reading. Frank has only studied Arabic for a few months and his friend doesn’t even really study Arabic (I forget why he is here) so we all acknowledged the fact that we probably wouldn’t understand anything but it was worth the visit. But first, we hung out for a bit with Frank’s roommates and their friends and sweets that two Syrian girls had brought from Homs. The group spoke English/French/Arabic/German and it was the first time that the only common language was Arabic (finally!) so I had a good conversation in fus’ha with a friend who is French and Muslim and here to study the language in relation to his religion.
After some time, we left for the reading, which was held in a bar located in the basement of a five-star hotel and packed with locals, cigarette smoke and bottles of beer. Admittedly, it was a little pretentious for any foreigner to go to such an event and pretend to appreciate anything that was being said, but at the very least, it was a great cultural experience—for one, because the poets were definitely local but shared origins from Libya to Iraq to Palestine, and for another because poetry is an important part of the Arab literary tradition and though I’ve had to (attempt to) read some in class this was the first time I ever heard it performed. And though the scene itself was not unfamiliar: the darkened room, jazz posters on the wall and people crammed wherever they could fit: the people showed their appreciation not with snaps or polite clapping but with shouts and raucous applause and calling out or jumping to the podium themselves.
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Sunday was the most important day of the year, again. I slept in again, even did a little (/a lot of) studying in order to prepare for my return to the university the following day. We had lunch again with the family in the garden—this time we had frikie (at first I thought it was called Afrikiye aka African food), a green wheat served with cashews, tender lamb chunks on the bone and a yogurt and cucumber sauce.
During the meal, the conversation was appropriately themed for the holiday and the others tried to bring me into the discussion by asking if I knew that Muslims didn’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus (they believe in him as a prophet and therefore have respect for the religion of Christianity but they don’t agree that he is the son of God and divine in nature) and then a little later if I knew that the Muslims don’t believe in Jesus in the way that he is written about in the Bible, only through the words of the Qu’ran. Yes, that is because they are…Muslims. And they can’t believe in the divinity of Jesus because they believe it is not possible for God to live on earth, and if they believed in Jesus according to the Bible, and took the Bible as God’s Word, well, then they would be Christians. You realize that you are two different religions, right?
Then post-lunch: Ihab started by asking me if I believe in Jesus Christ. He already knew that I didn’t believe in the religiousity of the story, so he clarified it by asking if I believed in his existence from a historical perspective. He prefaced the conversation by saying he hoped he wasn’t offending me, but that there is not much opportunity for this kind of religious debate and he was curious to know what I thought about some of religion’s big questions: life and death, creation, human nature, divine nature, the meaning of life. I did most of the talking, but ultimately I tried to explain that usually I find that in talking with people of different beliefs that we share similar hopes/dreams/fears about life and what it all means, where it all comes from—we just happen to use different words or metaphors to represent our ideas. He responded that this isn’t true because I don’t have God in my heart; I said well you can call it God and I can call it something else, but how do you know what is in my heart? and again that we all share the same questions about life but we have different ways of getting to the answer, but it doesn’t mean any one way is better than the other—and then he told me, no that’s not true, I have the right and the best way. Henceforth the conversation went downhill from there, finally ending with a crash and burn when he told me “I believe that if only you thought about it more, you would see that I am right.”
Wafa in her broken English intervened with, “I believe in the end, we get what we plant and we love you anyway.”
Easter Round 2; Or, Jesus Rises! Again!; Or, Sin and Repentance
This past weekend I celebrated Easter for the second time this year. I started off Good Friday (Juma’a Azzima) by sleeping in until noon after a late night out and decided to skip breakfast once I smelled what was coming out of the kitchen. Or rather, the garden; my host mother had prepared meat for grilling and my host brothers (Farah and Ihab who came for lunch with his wife, Wafa) were outside setting up the charcoal grill. I probably could have managed to eat breakfast since we didn’t have lunch for another three hours, but at least I had a good appetite for the meal that was laid out before us: a pan lined with flatbread, filled with three kinds of grilled meats, as well as grilled onions, tomatoes and keem (a local kind of mushroom ?), with fresh greens, onions and spices for toppings and on the side, tabbouleh scooped in fresh lettuce leaves, with beer and wine to top it off. The flatbread was soft, having soaked up the drippings from the cooked meat, and made an excellent base for a wrap. We ate outside in the garden for the first time since I arrived, enjoying the summer weather, and afterwards I quickly fell back asleep (the only downside about all this sleeping was that I missed out on the cooking in the morning).
When I woke up the rest of the family were also arising from their own afternoon naps and started getting ready for church. I was invited to join them for the special GF service and since I hadn’t visited their church yet, I decided that a holiday was a good reason to make the trip. The special event of the evening was a singer/pastor from Jordan and another guest pastor, so I figured at the very least I could practice my listening skills in Arabic.
We arrived about 30 minutes early (I went with Ihab and Wafa, Leila was already there, Philip and Farah also came separately) and Ihab went to work helping to seat and organize the overflowing church. The musical guest was accompanied by a keyboardist who loved the synthesizer and the music was, in a word, painful. At first it was somewhat intellectually stimulating to figure out what they were saying (the words were projected on a screen which helped a lot) but an hour and a half later I didn’t care anymore I just wanted the music to stop. And once I could figure out what they were singing it began to drive me crazy even more, as did the pictures of God’s Wonders projected behind the lyrics: sunsets, roses and mountainscapes, a blonde-haired boy staring out the window at Jesus sitting with children under a tree, stills from cinematic recreations of Jesus’s life… Sometimes the audience would sing with the pastor, sometimes he solo-ed, sometimes he took a break to pray and preach for a while… Finally he took a seat and the other guest pastor took the stand and preached for about half an hour about our fears from watching the news and getting a new heart from God (that’s about all I understood), then more group prayers, then I was really starting to lose my mind (this is about two hours into it) and debated how much I would insult my hostfamily if I just walked out, then the prayers stopped and the singer-man got up again and sang SIX more songs and then there were closing prayers and church announcements. And then I wondered what I had done to deserve this kind of punishment and figured it must have had something to do with going out on Holy Thursday.
THREE HOURS after we entered, we left the church and I walked back with my host parents. The streets were blocked off to cars and instead filled with young people and families (mostly young people) converging on one street in particular, where people were hanging out on their balconies and watching the streets below. We rounded the corner and there was an arch covered in flowers being paraded through the crowd, followed by rows of torches (carried by youths in uniform), followed by a massive float of Jesus on a rock, followed by a cross covered in flowers and lit up in the night, followed by a crowd of Sunday School-ers in uniform carrying flags, followed by marching band (teens in uniform)… It was a parade for the Orthodox Church and the ceremony and ritual of it all stood in stark contrast with the scene we just came out of. Then we continued on to the next block where even more people were gathered and came upon a stage set-up for a street concert for the Syrian Church and my host mom asked if I wanted to stay to see the music (I asked if it was the same kind of music that we just saw, she said yes, I said no thank you, its not necessary) and we continued walking home, only to stop again to buy sweets: dates stuffed with almonds and also kenafe, for dinner.
When I woke up the rest of the family were also arising from their own afternoon naps and started getting ready for church. I was invited to join them for the special GF service and since I hadn’t visited their church yet, I decided that a holiday was a good reason to make the trip. The special event of the evening was a singer/pastor from Jordan and another guest pastor, so I figured at the very least I could practice my listening skills in Arabic.
We arrived about 30 minutes early (I went with Ihab and Wafa, Leila was already there, Philip and Farah also came separately) and Ihab went to work helping to seat and organize the overflowing church. The musical guest was accompanied by a keyboardist who loved the synthesizer and the music was, in a word, painful. At first it was somewhat intellectually stimulating to figure out what they were saying (the words were projected on a screen which helped a lot) but an hour and a half later I didn’t care anymore I just wanted the music to stop. And once I could figure out what they were singing it began to drive me crazy even more, as did the pictures of God’s Wonders projected behind the lyrics: sunsets, roses and mountainscapes, a blonde-haired boy staring out the window at Jesus sitting with children under a tree, stills from cinematic recreations of Jesus’s life… Sometimes the audience would sing with the pastor, sometimes he solo-ed, sometimes he took a break to pray and preach for a while… Finally he took a seat and the other guest pastor took the stand and preached for about half an hour about our fears from watching the news and getting a new heart from God (that’s about all I understood), then more group prayers, then I was really starting to lose my mind (this is about two hours into it) and debated how much I would insult my hostfamily if I just walked out, then the prayers stopped and the singer-man got up again and sang SIX more songs and then there were closing prayers and church announcements. And then I wondered what I had done to deserve this kind of punishment and figured it must have had something to do with going out on Holy Thursday.
THREE HOURS after we entered, we left the church and I walked back with my host parents. The streets were blocked off to cars and instead filled with young people and families (mostly young people) converging on one street in particular, where people were hanging out on their balconies and watching the streets below. We rounded the corner and there was an arch covered in flowers being paraded through the crowd, followed by rows of torches (carried by youths in uniform), followed by a massive float of Jesus on a rock, followed by a cross covered in flowers and lit up in the night, followed by a crowd of Sunday School-ers in uniform carrying flags, followed by marching band (teens in uniform)… It was a parade for the Orthodox Church and the ceremony and ritual of it all stood in stark contrast with the scene we just came out of. Then we continued on to the next block where even more people were gathered and came upon a stage set-up for a street concert for the Syrian Church and my host mom asked if I wanted to stay to see the music (I asked if it was the same kind of music that we just saw, she said yes, I said no thank you, its not necessary) and we continued walking home, only to stop again to buy sweets: dates stuffed with almonds and also kenafe, for dinner.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Easter Week Part ---: Mountain Retreat
Tuesday morning we were off to visit the Mazra'a. The last time I went was when I was here with my family eleven years ago, so although I had distinct images in my mind of the house, of course it was still completely different from how I remember it. When my mom and aunt were here last month, we wanted to go up, but it was too complicated with bad winter weather, not knowing the way, the house being under renovation, and my aunt Nagibe not wanting to come with us. Sr Agnes had spent every summer from May to November at the house and she was the primary caretaker of the house and the family land, so of course memories of her are very closely tied to the house and it is still difficult for family to visit it, especially in the state of disrepair that it is in now, being under construction.
The house itself is over a hundred years old and a place of summer retreat for my grandmother’s family, who like most Lebanese, preferred to escape the heat of the city in a mountain house. There are only three bedrooms in the house, the parents would stay in one room, the three boys in another, and the seven girls in the other, with tiny bathrooms and a small kitchen, all of which are being expanded (for future family reunions, of course). In the 80s the house was occupied for several years (I think seven) by the SY army and when they finally left, they had stripped it of its marble floors, Italian chandeliers, burnt all the doors for firewood, etc. The houses around it (some of them are still abandoned and in disrepair) were destroyed from bombings that occurred between this area and the neighboring mountain. After they left, Sr Agnes undertook rebuilding the house to its previous state, though without the fancy ornamentations.
The drive up to the house was probably my highlight of the week. Spring had certainly begun, and Tia Renee pointed out that even since the last week since they came, trees had begun to sprout and wildflowers to bloom. The mountainscape was more dramatic than any other region I’ve driven through in Lebanon, with patches of different kinds of trees, snow-capped mountains in the background, farmland. The air was perfectly still and it was the most at peace that I’d felt since I arrived. If it weren’t for the neighbors, it reminded me of being in Vinalhaven and Renee confirmed the fact when she mentioned that she thought my dad would like it there a lot.
We only spent about an hour and a half at the house, my aunt and uncle went around supervising the work that was being done and talking through various tasks with the repairman that we brought up with us. Before we left, we drove a little further up the road so I could see a better view of the mountains and the surrounding area. And on our way back down the mountain we stopped at the family’s farmland and apple orchards below the house to talk to Charbel, the caretaker of the land and overseer of the renovation project.
After the winding mountain roads we came to a small town and stopped there for lunch at a bakery. The three of us ordered za’atar and jibni pies (cheese and dried thyme), which were surprisingly delicious, with fresh squeezed orange juice.
When we got back to the house, Renee Henri and Nagibe set to work planning Sr Agnes’ memorial mass for the following weekend and I drifted around the apartment, waiting to watch Obama speak about the economy on CNN live from Georgetown. Oh life. What a time not to be in DC.
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The next day I was on a bus back to Damascus and arrived in record time: 2 ½ hours! It can be done.
And waiting for me was lunch: artichokes stuffed with ground meat and carrots, cooked in lemon and garlic.
The house itself is over a hundred years old and a place of summer retreat for my grandmother’s family, who like most Lebanese, preferred to escape the heat of the city in a mountain house. There are only three bedrooms in the house, the parents would stay in one room, the three boys in another, and the seven girls in the other, with tiny bathrooms and a small kitchen, all of which are being expanded (for future family reunions, of course). In the 80s the house was occupied for several years (I think seven) by the SY army and when they finally left, they had stripped it of its marble floors, Italian chandeliers, burnt all the doors for firewood, etc. The houses around it (some of them are still abandoned and in disrepair) were destroyed from bombings that occurred between this area and the neighboring mountain. After they left, Sr Agnes undertook rebuilding the house to its previous state, though without the fancy ornamentations.
The drive up to the house was probably my highlight of the week. Spring had certainly begun, and Tia Renee pointed out that even since the last week since they came, trees had begun to sprout and wildflowers to bloom. The mountainscape was more dramatic than any other region I’ve driven through in Lebanon, with patches of different kinds of trees, snow-capped mountains in the background, farmland. The air was perfectly still and it was the most at peace that I’d felt since I arrived. If it weren’t for the neighbors, it reminded me of being in Vinalhaven and Renee confirmed the fact when she mentioned that she thought my dad would like it there a lot.
We only spent about an hour and a half at the house, my aunt and uncle went around supervising the work that was being done and talking through various tasks with the repairman that we brought up with us. Before we left, we drove a little further up the road so I could see a better view of the mountains and the surrounding area. And on our way back down the mountain we stopped at the family’s farmland and apple orchards below the house to talk to Charbel, the caretaker of the land and overseer of the renovation project.
After the winding mountain roads we came to a small town and stopped there for lunch at a bakery. The three of us ordered za’atar and jibni pies (cheese and dried thyme), which were surprisingly delicious, with fresh squeezed orange juice.
When we got back to the house, Renee Henri and Nagibe set to work planning Sr Agnes’ memorial mass for the following weekend and I drifted around the apartment, waiting to watch Obama speak about the economy on CNN live from Georgetown. Oh life. What a time not to be in DC.
--
The next day I was on a bus back to Damascus and arrived in record time: 2 ½ hours! It can be done.
And waiting for me was lunch: artichokes stuffed with ground meat and carrots, cooked in lemon and garlic.
Easter Week Part Four: A Day of Rest on Holy Monday
I had originally planned to go back to Damascus on Monday, since my cousins had all left and was looking forward to spending another week of free time in the city before classes began again next week. However, my aunt tempted me to stay a few extra days as she and my uncle were going up to the Mazraa, the family’s summer house in the mountains, on Tuesday. Thus my long-weekend excursion became a full week visit.
Monday was thus spent sleeping, eating, reading, catching up on missed episodes of the Office and with friends/family on Skype…generally not leaving the house or moving all that much. I was rudely jarred from my day of solitude and isolation by the sound of voices upstairs and when I came up for dinner I was greeted by a living room full of people. Ack, people! J&E had two couples over for dinner and the living room table was covered in a spread of fresh cuts of ham, chorizo, smoked salmon, cheeses, olives, breads, etc. If I wanted to eat I clearly had to be social, so I took a seat and went through the usual introductions of “this is our young cousin, she is studying Arabic! Arabic Nahawi! And she doesn’t know French, so speak to her in English or fus’ha.” And then I realized that my talent of speaking in a nearly-irrelevant language was something of a party trick: “Look! She speaks fus’ha! Matha tureedina an ta’akulina, yaa Maggie?” Followed by, “And she lives in Damascus! She wanted to live there because you know, they don’t speak English and French like we do, only Arabic.” “Damascus?! Why Damascus!? You know we have the best Arabic program in the Middle East at AUB. Are you happy in Syria? Do you come back to Beirut every weekend? You know, I have a son, he can show you around.” “No thank you, but I stay in Damascus, you can have fun there too.”
Monday was thus spent sleeping, eating, reading, catching up on missed episodes of the Office and with friends/family on Skype…generally not leaving the house or moving all that much. I was rudely jarred from my day of solitude and isolation by the sound of voices upstairs and when I came up for dinner I was greeted by a living room full of people. Ack, people! J&E had two couples over for dinner and the living room table was covered in a spread of fresh cuts of ham, chorizo, smoked salmon, cheeses, olives, breads, etc. If I wanted to eat I clearly had to be social, so I took a seat and went through the usual introductions of “this is our young cousin, she is studying Arabic! Arabic Nahawi! And she doesn’t know French, so speak to her in English or fus’ha.” And then I realized that my talent of speaking in a nearly-irrelevant language was something of a party trick: “Look! She speaks fus’ha! Matha tureedina an ta’akulina, yaa Maggie?” Followed by, “And she lives in Damascus! She wanted to live there because you know, they don’t speak English and French like we do, only Arabic.” “Damascus?! Why Damascus!? You know we have the best Arabic program in the Middle East at AUB. Are you happy in Syria? Do you come back to Beirut every weekend? You know, I have a son, he can show you around.” “No thank you, but I stay in Damascus, you can have fun there too.”
Easter Weekend Part Three: Al-Messih qam, haqqan qam. (“The Messiah has risen, truly he has risen.”)
Easter Sunday was another late start, breakfast was a 2 pm lunch at Nagibe’s house. The guest of honor was Pare Antoine, a priest in an order called the Lebanese Monks, though he didn’t look very monkish in his snazzy clothes, gold watch and cellphone that rang every ten minutes during dinner (unfortunately since I can’t understand what people are saying I am forced to judge them on appearance alone). As I learned, the LM are a very wealthy and powerful religious order and though they do live of a live of celibacy, poverty and whatever the third defining principle is, they enjoy a strong presence in Lebanese politics. According to what was translated to myself and Jean Paul, he was predicting the end of Christianity in Lebanon, that as a shrinking minority they would soon be forced out of their position of political power (the law dictates that the president has to be Christian) and would become second-class citizens (dhimmis) under Muslim rule. Apparently Kissinger had previously tried to convince all the Christians to leave the country with copious monetary compensation, in order that the Palestinians could have a place to live (because he was a Jew! I was reminded). Ohhh how fear breeds prejudice.
[The priest did gain some street cred, however, with his story about how during the civil war a group Palestinians tried to assassinate him and other priests in his order. They succeeded in beheading a few and hanging a few others by their belt strap (unfortunately my aunt Renee’s uncle was one of them) but he was sick in a hospital and thus survived.]
Lunch was delicious. Swiss chard (which we were told to ignore because better things awaited us), the usual kibbe stuffed with lamb but somehow better than any other kibbe I had eaten, stuffed grape leaves, both eaten with fresh labne, chicken that nobody touched, and raw veggies. Dessert was all the usual fruits and sweets, plus an extra towering platter of ma’amoul, fattening cookies stuffed with dates, pistachios or walnuts.
After the meal I returned to the house with J&E while JP went with his parents to do last minute errands before he had to pack and leave on his own 3 am flight. Around 7 I went with Eli to meet them at church for Easter mass and was surprised to see that except for a few baby girls in flouncy floral dresses, the crowd was very casually dressed. On the way to the mass Eli gave me a short lecture on the importance of Easter in the Christian faith, since he knows I am a heathen and likes to keep me educated—it is the most important holiday of the year (because without the resurrection of Christ there would be no religion) and in addition to being called Eid al-Fis’h (Feast of Easter) it is also called Eid Kabiri (the Great Feast). Great Feast indeed. That night was dinner at 11 pm, leftovers from Good Friday’s lunch. My aunt and uncle refused food, as they were full from lunch, and I actually ate some of the meal, yet my uncle still told me I ate like a bird. I can’t win.
[The priest did gain some street cred, however, with his story about how during the civil war a group Palestinians tried to assassinate him and other priests in his order. They succeeded in beheading a few and hanging a few others by their belt strap (unfortunately my aunt Renee’s uncle was one of them) but he was sick in a hospital and thus survived.]
Lunch was delicious. Swiss chard (which we were told to ignore because better things awaited us), the usual kibbe stuffed with lamb but somehow better than any other kibbe I had eaten, stuffed grape leaves, both eaten with fresh labne, chicken that nobody touched, and raw veggies. Dessert was all the usual fruits and sweets, plus an extra towering platter of ma’amoul, fattening cookies stuffed with dates, pistachios or walnuts.
After the meal I returned to the house with J&E while JP went with his parents to do last minute errands before he had to pack and leave on his own 3 am flight. Around 7 I went with Eli to meet them at church for Easter mass and was surprised to see that except for a few baby girls in flouncy floral dresses, the crowd was very casually dressed. On the way to the mass Eli gave me a short lecture on the importance of Easter in the Christian faith, since he knows I am a heathen and likes to keep me educated—it is the most important holiday of the year (because without the resurrection of Christ there would be no religion) and in addition to being called Eid al-Fis’h (Feast of Easter) it is also called Eid Kabiri (the Great Feast). Great Feast indeed. That night was dinner at 11 pm, leftovers from Good Friday’s lunch. My aunt and uncle refused food, as they were full from lunch, and I actually ate some of the meal, yet my uncle still told me I ate like a bird. I can’t win.
Easter Weekend, Part Two: It may be my Third Visit in Four Months, but this kind of History never gets Old
For Good Friday, we had a big lunch planned at Josyan’s with the whole family. First, however, we had to visit Byblos 1) for the ruins but importantly 2) for the hand-made embroidered tablecloths and also 3) so Jean Paul and Uncle Henri could drive the 30 minutes north to Tripoli to check on chocolates they had ordered and to buy sweets for lunch (from the same place I went to with my mom, aunt and Marisa when we were in Tripoli, I remembered it well).
Before we left, Henricitocito fought with his parents so he could wear his brand new bright green soccer cleats that he had bought at the mall two days earlier (refused as he would ruin them on the cobblestones) and Juan Andres fought with his parents as he didn’t want to go to a library for the day (Byblos-bibliotecha). However, they were both placated by their handheld PSPs and played their Star Wars and FIFA soccer games all the way there and back.
The ruins were just as I remembered them; not too much had changed in the last month, only more wildflowers and more visitors. Still, it is difficult to get tired of such a picturesque place, ruins on the edge of the sea, overgrown with yellow, white, purple and red flowers.
We made it back to Josyan’s by 430, more than a few hours late to lunch. Still, Nagibe and Chantal didn’t arrive til an hour later and our lunch became dinner—the food was well worth the wait. Nagibe had made the traditional Good Friday foods: makhlouta (a mix of beans in a soup that the cousins referred to as ‘automatic boomboom’) and kibbe b-zjlunt (which I thought meant pumpkin kibbe but it was just vegetarian, stuffed with spinach and leeks, aka one of the best things I have ever eaten), along with a spread of artichokes with a lemon garlic sauce, avocadoes with hearts of palm and olives with a mustard balsamic sauce, eggplant dip, hummus, mashed potatoes with coriander, french fries, fresh vegetables….For desssert we had the sweets Uncle Henri had bought from Tripoli—kenafe and cylindrical crispy pastries stuffed with cream whose name (znood sitt ?) translated to “ladies’ arms,” aka hairless on the outside and soft on the inside. How appetizing, to think of old women’s flabby arms while eating your sweets! Also the usual fruits: strawberries, pineapple, grapefruit, a hybrid between grapefruit and oranges, green unripened almonds, kumquats, and a new fruit called akademi, which came from the trees in their garden. Nilda had also made chocolate chip cookies (!) and an orange cake. Thankfully I had my appetite back from the day before.
Mealtime conversation always required a bit of linguistic gymnastics (aka code-switching for all you linguists); in addition to the usual French and Arabic with English for my sake, now Spanish was added to the mix. There was also no common language between our group: the kids only spoke Spanish (though they soon left the table for their PSPs and to play soccer outside), Andreina, Uncle Henri, Tante Nagibe speak limited English; Henricito, Jean Paul and I don’t speak French; Eli, Nagibe and I don’t know Spanish; Jean Paul, Henricito and Andreina don’t know Arabic…Only my aunt Renee could speak all four languages fluently.
Still, that didn’t keep the family from communicating. For the most part, conversation revolved around comparing life in Venezuela under a ‘united’ Chavez to life in Lebanon with their fractured political scene. My uncle Henri has been in Venezuela for 51 years, moving there soon after studying electrical engineering and finding no jobs in Lebanon, later starting his own company which has grown to a family business with his three sons (Jean Paul started his branch of the business when he was 19 and had 11 employees by the time he graduated from college).
Jean Paul characterized life in VZ with the following joke: a family awakens in the night to hear someone breaking into their house downstairs. They call out, “Who’s there?” The people downstairs respond, “The thieves!” From upstairs, “Oh thank god, I thought it was the police!” And this joke was further expounded upon by the story of his friend who lost his car and went to the police station to file a claim for his missing car. While he was at the station, his friend saw his car drive past the window, so he chased it down and saw the car crash into a taxi, then the thieves got out of the car and ran away, abandoning it on the road. The friend returned the car and said ok, nevermind, I got my car back! The police told him that he had already filed a claim and would have to pay $2000 to retract it, otherwise let the police complete their investigation, thereby dismantling the car.
Jean Paul had his own story, where several years ago he was driving with a friend and they were kidnapped in his own car. He was forced out of the car and abandoned in a dangerous neighborhood and his friend was taken further and later left somewhere else. Jean Paul walked and walked (at 2 or 3 in the morning) til he found a military compound and tried to explain to the guard on duty what happened and that he needed help to find his friend. The guard told him to leave military property. Three months later his car was spotted on the military compound in an officer’s driveway. That was the old kind of kidnapping. Now they take you to the bank, force you to withdraw money, threaten your family, etc etc. Needless to say, the family works hard and travels a lot. Luckily they are in the upper-class and can afford to find ways to enjoy life, even if it isn’t safe to leave the house at night or pick the kids up late from school for fear that they might get kidnapped.
That night Henricito and his family had a 4 am flight out of Beirut for Rome, where they were going to spend Easter weekend, so we stayed up with them after dinner until they left for the airport. I pulled out my laptop to check my email and Juan Andres talked to me voluntarily for the first time—apparently I became much more desirable with a computer in my hands, then he proceeded to type the word “luser” in the middle of my emails. Kids are so cute.
--
Saturday was sleeping late, eating breakfast late, having lunch around 3 with Jean Paul, Josyan and Eli where the topic of the day was finding Jean Paul a Lebanese wife, with a little bit of the usual “Maggie don’t you want to meet my friend’s son/daughter so you can go out this weekend?” thrown in there as well.
We left Josyan and Eli at the house, working, and Jean Paul and I went to meet his parents for a trip to the mall to find him an extra suitcase for the ten pounds/kilos? of nuts they bought to bring home to friends. I was just happy that we could walk for a while instead of sitting in a car or eating. While we were at the mall, Chantal, who had been working all day (and would continue working throughout the holiday weekend), called to see if we wanted to meet for dinner. We responded with a unanimous no but compromised to meet for drinks in the mall instead. We met her and Michel in a bookstore on the top level and ordered teas, juices and beers, while they got into a heated discussion about Lebanese politics and the upcoming election in June, which was further encouraged by the arrival of Josyan and Eli. When the bookstore closed for the evening, Josyan and Eli invited us to join them for a movie at another mall, so all of us except Michel left to go see The Wrestler.
I never would have seen the movie voluntarily, and it was full of the gratuitous violence that gives me reason enough to not watch wrestling in the first place, even if/particularly because you know it is all staged. Still, there was a moving story behind it all, if a little predictable, plus Marisa Tomei, so I lasted the movie and after it was over I was surprised how much everyone else enjoyed the movie. At this point, it was after midnight, and J & E pushed to continue the evening and go get dinner. And by pushed I mean required. Chantal managed to get out of it since she actually was working the next day, but the rest of us continued on to a Mexican restaurant called Havana. We made it there just 15 minutes before the kitchen closed so we ordered what food that we could and a round of margaritas and stayed until 2 am—and by we, remember, I mean my great-aunt and uncle, in their 70s (?), my cousins, in their (early) 60s, and the ‘younger generation,’ myself and Jean Paul. As my aunt Renee put it, they were making up for all the times they couldn’t go out to restaurants or cinemas back in VZ. Originally I think we were planning to go to midnight mass, but instead we ended up celebrating the end of Lent and the end of fasting (for everyone else, at least) from drinking and eating bread, meat, and sweets.
Before we left, Henricitocito fought with his parents so he could wear his brand new bright green soccer cleats that he had bought at the mall two days earlier (refused as he would ruin them on the cobblestones) and Juan Andres fought with his parents as he didn’t want to go to a library for the day (Byblos-bibliotecha). However, they were both placated by their handheld PSPs and played their Star Wars and FIFA soccer games all the way there and back.
The ruins were just as I remembered them; not too much had changed in the last month, only more wildflowers and more visitors. Still, it is difficult to get tired of such a picturesque place, ruins on the edge of the sea, overgrown with yellow, white, purple and red flowers.
We made it back to Josyan’s by 430, more than a few hours late to lunch. Still, Nagibe and Chantal didn’t arrive til an hour later and our lunch became dinner—the food was well worth the wait. Nagibe had made the traditional Good Friday foods: makhlouta (a mix of beans in a soup that the cousins referred to as ‘automatic boomboom’) and kibbe b-zjlunt (which I thought meant pumpkin kibbe but it was just vegetarian, stuffed with spinach and leeks, aka one of the best things I have ever eaten), along with a spread of artichokes with a lemon garlic sauce, avocadoes with hearts of palm and olives with a mustard balsamic sauce, eggplant dip, hummus, mashed potatoes with coriander, french fries, fresh vegetables….For desssert we had the sweets Uncle Henri had bought from Tripoli—kenafe and cylindrical crispy pastries stuffed with cream whose name (znood sitt ?) translated to “ladies’ arms,” aka hairless on the outside and soft on the inside. How appetizing, to think of old women’s flabby arms while eating your sweets! Also the usual fruits: strawberries, pineapple, grapefruit, a hybrid between grapefruit and oranges, green unripened almonds, kumquats, and a new fruit called akademi, which came from the trees in their garden. Nilda had also made chocolate chip cookies (!) and an orange cake. Thankfully I had my appetite back from the day before.
Mealtime conversation always required a bit of linguistic gymnastics (aka code-switching for all you linguists); in addition to the usual French and Arabic with English for my sake, now Spanish was added to the mix. There was also no common language between our group: the kids only spoke Spanish (though they soon left the table for their PSPs and to play soccer outside), Andreina, Uncle Henri, Tante Nagibe speak limited English; Henricito, Jean Paul and I don’t speak French; Eli, Nagibe and I don’t know Spanish; Jean Paul, Henricito and Andreina don’t know Arabic…Only my aunt Renee could speak all four languages fluently.
Still, that didn’t keep the family from communicating. For the most part, conversation revolved around comparing life in Venezuela under a ‘united’ Chavez to life in Lebanon with their fractured political scene. My uncle Henri has been in Venezuela for 51 years, moving there soon after studying electrical engineering and finding no jobs in Lebanon, later starting his own company which has grown to a family business with his three sons (Jean Paul started his branch of the business when he was 19 and had 11 employees by the time he graduated from college).
Jean Paul characterized life in VZ with the following joke: a family awakens in the night to hear someone breaking into their house downstairs. They call out, “Who’s there?” The people downstairs respond, “The thieves!” From upstairs, “Oh thank god, I thought it was the police!” And this joke was further expounded upon by the story of his friend who lost his car and went to the police station to file a claim for his missing car. While he was at the station, his friend saw his car drive past the window, so he chased it down and saw the car crash into a taxi, then the thieves got out of the car and ran away, abandoning it on the road. The friend returned the car and said ok, nevermind, I got my car back! The police told him that he had already filed a claim and would have to pay $2000 to retract it, otherwise let the police complete their investigation, thereby dismantling the car.
Jean Paul had his own story, where several years ago he was driving with a friend and they were kidnapped in his own car. He was forced out of the car and abandoned in a dangerous neighborhood and his friend was taken further and later left somewhere else. Jean Paul walked and walked (at 2 or 3 in the morning) til he found a military compound and tried to explain to the guard on duty what happened and that he needed help to find his friend. The guard told him to leave military property. Three months later his car was spotted on the military compound in an officer’s driveway. That was the old kind of kidnapping. Now they take you to the bank, force you to withdraw money, threaten your family, etc etc. Needless to say, the family works hard and travels a lot. Luckily they are in the upper-class and can afford to find ways to enjoy life, even if it isn’t safe to leave the house at night or pick the kids up late from school for fear that they might get kidnapped.
That night Henricito and his family had a 4 am flight out of Beirut for Rome, where they were going to spend Easter weekend, so we stayed up with them after dinner until they left for the airport. I pulled out my laptop to check my email and Juan Andres talked to me voluntarily for the first time—apparently I became much more desirable with a computer in my hands, then he proceeded to type the word “luser” in the middle of my emails. Kids are so cute.
--
Saturday was sleeping late, eating breakfast late, having lunch around 3 with Jean Paul, Josyan and Eli where the topic of the day was finding Jean Paul a Lebanese wife, with a little bit of the usual “Maggie don’t you want to meet my friend’s son/daughter so you can go out this weekend?” thrown in there as well.
We left Josyan and Eli at the house, working, and Jean Paul and I went to meet his parents for a trip to the mall to find him an extra suitcase for the ten pounds/kilos? of nuts they bought to bring home to friends. I was just happy that we could walk for a while instead of sitting in a car or eating. While we were at the mall, Chantal, who had been working all day (and would continue working throughout the holiday weekend), called to see if we wanted to meet for dinner. We responded with a unanimous no but compromised to meet for drinks in the mall instead. We met her and Michel in a bookstore on the top level and ordered teas, juices and beers, while they got into a heated discussion about Lebanese politics and the upcoming election in June, which was further encouraged by the arrival of Josyan and Eli. When the bookstore closed for the evening, Josyan and Eli invited us to join them for a movie at another mall, so all of us except Michel left to go see The Wrestler.
I never would have seen the movie voluntarily, and it was full of the gratuitous violence that gives me reason enough to not watch wrestling in the first place, even if/particularly because you know it is all staged. Still, there was a moving story behind it all, if a little predictable, plus Marisa Tomei, so I lasted the movie and after it was over I was surprised how much everyone else enjoyed the movie. At this point, it was after midnight, and J & E pushed to continue the evening and go get dinner. And by pushed I mean required. Chantal managed to get out of it since she actually was working the next day, but the rest of us continued on to a Mexican restaurant called Havana. We made it there just 15 minutes before the kitchen closed so we ordered what food that we could and a round of margaritas and stayed until 2 am—and by we, remember, I mean my great-aunt and uncle, in their 70s (?), my cousins, in their (early) 60s, and the ‘younger generation,’ myself and Jean Paul. As my aunt Renee put it, they were making up for all the times they couldn’t go out to restaurants or cinemas back in VZ. Originally I think we were planning to go to midnight mass, but instead we ended up celebrating the end of Lent and the end of fasting (for everyone else, at least) from drinking and eating bread, meat, and sweets.
Easter Weekend, Part One: Making a Great First Impression
I left on Wednesday to visit Beirut for the Easter holiday. My great-aunt and uncle had come from Venezuela for their annual two month visit, and two of their sons (plus one wife and two kids) also came from Venezuela for Easter, so I was anxious to get there before the holiday in order to have to some time with my cousins that I hardly know. When I told my host family that I was leaving, yet again, to travel to Lebanon, my hostmother seemed sincerely disappointed that I would miss out on their own Easter celebrations. I was a little confused by it, as Syria celebrates Easter on April 19th with the Orthodox Church and the rest of the Eastern world (which Lebanon is apparently not a part of) (even though their own church is Protestant), but it seemed that I would be missing out on a church pageant with my hostmother’s Sunday school class, and all kinds of special foods. In order to make up for it, she invited me to see a street parade celebrating Palm Sunday on Sunday the 5th (again I don’t understand if their Easter is the 19th…) but I ended up disappointing her again when I missed it as I was distracted by the aforementioned Doha Debates that were broadcasted from Georgetown on BBC and the subsuquent speech by Obama from Prague where he pledged to end nuclear warfare.
I made it out to their church in time to see the streets filled with families, dressed in their Sunday best. The weather was pushing upwards into the 80s and I was relieved to see that with the first signs of spring also came the first signs of bare skin! Sleeveless tops, knee-length skirts (albeit with stockings underneath)—perhaps I won’t have to spend May and June in jeans and long-sleeved sweaters as I feared (although as soon as I left the Christian neighborhood it was back to floorlength coats and wool sweaters). The best part, though, was the little girls in princess dresses. Literally. I saw a 5 or 6 year-old wearing a pink costume dress with a tiara.
My hostfather, when he heard about my plans to travel again, called me “a sister of men” (meaning I was competent enough to travel without a male companion—it was a compliment—I quieted the roaring feminist within) and was only worried that by leaving on Wednesday I would miss the big lunch Leila was preparing for our Finnish neighbors. I promised to leave in the late afternoon and considering the fact that I got to help make the food (to some extent) and then later enjoy the fruits of our labor, it was completely worth it; still, the guests didn’t arrive til quarter to 3 and so I nervously checked the time throughout the meal, finally leaving before dessert. It was the latest I had ever crossed the border and I didn’t want to arrive too late in the night, plus the bus station was 30 minutes from my house, the bus left 20 minutes late (as we were pulling out a woman stopped the bus and tried to get on with her cargo of rugs), it took twice as long to cross the border with all of our passengers… thankfully the bus dropped me off somewhere where I could get a taxi to my aunt’s house without having to go all the way to the bus station outside of Beirut and then back across town to her house, so in the end I arrived before 930.
The door was answered by my eight year-old cousin, Juan Andres, who I have only met once before (a few years ago at a family reunion in Mexico) and he didn’t speak to me then (he hates girls, plus I don’t know Spanish) and when he saw me at the door his face dropped and he walked away in disappointment. He had decided to stay home while the rest of his family went shopping so I think he was expecting his parents. Eventually the rest of the group arrived back to the house and by 11 pm I was squeezed into a rental car with my cousins (technically my mom’s cousins, aka my first-cousins once-removed) Jean Paul (40, unmarried), Henricito (42) and his wife Andreina and their two kids Henricitocito (9) and Juan Andres. We were all staying at Josyan and Eli’s house since my great-aunt and uncle (aka my grandmother’s brother and his wife, aka Henricito and Jean Paul’s parents) Henri and Renee were staying at my great-aunt Nagibe’s house. So.
The next morning Henricito and Jean Paul had to leave early in the morning to go with their father to go to the passport office (they were applying for Lebanese passports), so they told us to sleep in and whenever we were ready we would go for the day to Byblos. So after a long and leisurely breakfast around 1130, we piled back in the car to pick up Tio Henri and Tia Renee and go out for the day. However, as soon as we met them at Nagibe’s house, we were told we were in fact going to Renee’s cousin’s house for lunch, regardless of the fact that we had just finished eating breakfast (it was, after all, almost 130).
It turned out that I actually knew her cousin, Agnes, as I had met her two months earlier at Sr Agnes’s funeral. She is Renee’s only relative still living in Lebanon and she lives alone (with her maid) in the same apartment that she has lived in for decades, through the civil war and beyond. She showed us photos of the damage to her apartment from the war, with the missile-sized hole in her library wall, broken furniture, destroyed heirlooms and walls torn down (she was lucky that no one was in the house when it was bombarded; she was staying with family in the mountains and since she was from the same town as some politician they were looking for, she would have been tortured for information (like her sister was) if she had been found); today of course her house is restored back to its original state and looks perfectly untouched. She also showed us pictures of parties that they had in the bomb shelter, which is to say you would never know they were hiding from a war by the looks of the ‘guests’ happily stuffing their faces and the size of the buffet table.
There was a huge spread awaiting us in the dining room and we all sucked it up and made room for the lentil soup, fattoush, spinach and meat pies, green beans, fish with tahini sauce, breads and veggies that covered the table. I was sitting next to Agnes, our hostess, and she assured me that I wouldn’t have to eat anything I didn’t like, that she always hated when she was forced to eat. Despite the fact that I was still full from breakfast, I told her I never have a problem with Lebanese food, but after the first course of soup I began to feel sick (aka chills, nauseous, dizzy, stomach pains) and couldn’t even look at the food on my plate. My hostess, of course, despite her early assurances of democracy at the dinner table, did not accept that I wasn’t feeling well and worried that I didn’t like any of what she had offered and so I was forced to continue picking all the way through the dessert course to appease her. I didn’t want to worry everyone else by telling them I wasn’t feeling well, but I had already risked offending the cook by not eating anything, so finally I excused myself from the table and tried to rest on the couch, politely refused Agnes’ offer to lie in her bed, tried walking around the living room but the pacing just made me dizzier, so I resigned myself to the bathroom and eventually returned my entire meal, from soup to nuts (I am only going into the gory details in order to emphasize the awkwardness and perhaps irony of my situation as a victim of the Lebanese excessive hospitality and how great it was that my first day spent with my distant family was them worrying about me and me being really sick). So I spent the rest of our visit lying on Agnes’s bed with my feet elevated and a cup of hot anise tea on the bedside table. At least I could assure her that it wasn’t her food that did me in, just unfortunate timing and the fact that I had left my medicine at the house.
After lunch we went to the mall so Henri and Andreina could go grocery shopping. The supermarket looked like any other American grocery store, but was impeccably clean, with entire aisles just for yogurt or cheese, olives or fresh spices. Still, looking at all the food churned my stomach a little so I left with my aunt and uncle to go back to Nagibe’s house and rest up for our next big meal. Jean Paul and Henricito showed off their Lebanese passports and we celebrated their new citizenship and official membership in the evergrowing Lebanese diaspora.
I made it out to their church in time to see the streets filled with families, dressed in their Sunday best. The weather was pushing upwards into the 80s and I was relieved to see that with the first signs of spring also came the first signs of bare skin! Sleeveless tops, knee-length skirts (albeit with stockings underneath)—perhaps I won’t have to spend May and June in jeans and long-sleeved sweaters as I feared (although as soon as I left the Christian neighborhood it was back to floorlength coats and wool sweaters). The best part, though, was the little girls in princess dresses. Literally. I saw a 5 or 6 year-old wearing a pink costume dress with a tiara.
My hostfather, when he heard about my plans to travel again, called me “a sister of men” (meaning I was competent enough to travel without a male companion—it was a compliment—I quieted the roaring feminist within) and was only worried that by leaving on Wednesday I would miss the big lunch Leila was preparing for our Finnish neighbors. I promised to leave in the late afternoon and considering the fact that I got to help make the food (to some extent) and then later enjoy the fruits of our labor, it was completely worth it; still, the guests didn’t arrive til quarter to 3 and so I nervously checked the time throughout the meal, finally leaving before dessert. It was the latest I had ever crossed the border and I didn’t want to arrive too late in the night, plus the bus station was 30 minutes from my house, the bus left 20 minutes late (as we were pulling out a woman stopped the bus and tried to get on with her cargo of rugs), it took twice as long to cross the border with all of our passengers… thankfully the bus dropped me off somewhere where I could get a taxi to my aunt’s house without having to go all the way to the bus station outside of Beirut and then back across town to her house, so in the end I arrived before 930.
The door was answered by my eight year-old cousin, Juan Andres, who I have only met once before (a few years ago at a family reunion in Mexico) and he didn’t speak to me then (he hates girls, plus I don’t know Spanish) and when he saw me at the door his face dropped and he walked away in disappointment. He had decided to stay home while the rest of his family went shopping so I think he was expecting his parents. Eventually the rest of the group arrived back to the house and by 11 pm I was squeezed into a rental car with my cousins (technically my mom’s cousins, aka my first-cousins once-removed) Jean Paul (40, unmarried), Henricito (42) and his wife Andreina and their two kids Henricitocito (9) and Juan Andres. We were all staying at Josyan and Eli’s house since my great-aunt and uncle (aka my grandmother’s brother and his wife, aka Henricito and Jean Paul’s parents) Henri and Renee were staying at my great-aunt Nagibe’s house. So.
The next morning Henricito and Jean Paul had to leave early in the morning to go with their father to go to the passport office (they were applying for Lebanese passports), so they told us to sleep in and whenever we were ready we would go for the day to Byblos. So after a long and leisurely breakfast around 1130, we piled back in the car to pick up Tio Henri and Tia Renee and go out for the day. However, as soon as we met them at Nagibe’s house, we were told we were in fact going to Renee’s cousin’s house for lunch, regardless of the fact that we had just finished eating breakfast (it was, after all, almost 130).
It turned out that I actually knew her cousin, Agnes, as I had met her two months earlier at Sr Agnes’s funeral. She is Renee’s only relative still living in Lebanon and she lives alone (with her maid) in the same apartment that she has lived in for decades, through the civil war and beyond. She showed us photos of the damage to her apartment from the war, with the missile-sized hole in her library wall, broken furniture, destroyed heirlooms and walls torn down (she was lucky that no one was in the house when it was bombarded; she was staying with family in the mountains and since she was from the same town as some politician they were looking for, she would have been tortured for information (like her sister was) if she had been found); today of course her house is restored back to its original state and looks perfectly untouched. She also showed us pictures of parties that they had in the bomb shelter, which is to say you would never know they were hiding from a war by the looks of the ‘guests’ happily stuffing their faces and the size of the buffet table.
There was a huge spread awaiting us in the dining room and we all sucked it up and made room for the lentil soup, fattoush, spinach and meat pies, green beans, fish with tahini sauce, breads and veggies that covered the table. I was sitting next to Agnes, our hostess, and she assured me that I wouldn’t have to eat anything I didn’t like, that she always hated when she was forced to eat. Despite the fact that I was still full from breakfast, I told her I never have a problem with Lebanese food, but after the first course of soup I began to feel sick (aka chills, nauseous, dizzy, stomach pains) and couldn’t even look at the food on my plate. My hostess, of course, despite her early assurances of democracy at the dinner table, did not accept that I wasn’t feeling well and worried that I didn’t like any of what she had offered and so I was forced to continue picking all the way through the dessert course to appease her. I didn’t want to worry everyone else by telling them I wasn’t feeling well, but I had already risked offending the cook by not eating anything, so finally I excused myself from the table and tried to rest on the couch, politely refused Agnes’ offer to lie in her bed, tried walking around the living room but the pacing just made me dizzier, so I resigned myself to the bathroom and eventually returned my entire meal, from soup to nuts (I am only going into the gory details in order to emphasize the awkwardness and perhaps irony of my situation as a victim of the Lebanese excessive hospitality and how great it was that my first day spent with my distant family was them worrying about me and me being really sick). So I spent the rest of our visit lying on Agnes’s bed with my feet elevated and a cup of hot anise tea on the bedside table. At least I could assure her that it wasn’t her food that did me in, just unfortunate timing and the fact that I had left my medicine at the house.
After lunch we went to the mall so Henri and Andreina could go grocery shopping. The supermarket looked like any other American grocery store, but was impeccably clean, with entire aisles just for yogurt or cheese, olives or fresh spices. Still, looking at all the food churned my stomach a little so I left with my aunt and uncle to go back to Nagibe’s house and rest up for our next big meal. Jean Paul and Henricito showed off their Lebanese passports and we celebrated their new citizenship and official membership in the evergrowing Lebanese diaspora.
Monday, April 13, 2009
This Is So Unfair
Georgetown University
Office of the President
Invites you to attend a speech on the Economy
by
The Honorable Barack Obama,
President of the United States
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
11:30 a.m.
Gaston Hall
This event will be broadcast live at webcast.georgetown.edu/live
Let it Be Known
Saturday, April 11, 2009
On Second Thought,
There were a few events of note from my last week spent in Damascus:
- a new yoga class! My old teacher, Sandy, unfortunately broke her foot. As a result, the 3 pm class (i.e. myself and Frank) has been merged with the 7 pm class led by a Western woman. And there are actually people in the evening class! We are now a class of six. It is strange, but the yoga is good and offers a little more of a workout.
- after yoga class, around 9 pm, walking back with Frank to see his new house. He is living in a boarding house of sorts in Souq Saroujah [a popular neighborhood for students of old and decrepit buildings in winding streets and sidewalk cafes making it a good mix of 'authentic' damascus flavor and also a social hub for foreign students] with seven or so bedrooms of varying size surrounding a courtyard, sharing a tiny dirty kitchen and a few bathrooms. The best part of the house, however, is the rooftop. Everything outside of the rooms is open air and the upstairs has a terrace which literally opens up into the nightsky, emphasized by the fact that the walls are unfinished and the edges look like the roof was ripped off and then thrown into the pile of rubble in the corner. We sat upstairs drinking tea and were later joined by a few of his roommates (Irish, American (VT) and Syrian), the three of them are most likely in their thirties, and they brought out a guitar and began singing folk songs in English and German. The weather was perfect at 70 degrees, but eventually clouds covered the sky and rain drops fell, so we broke up and I walked home. The rain never came, so I walked the 40 minutes or so back to my house, arriving just before midnight. Even on a Sunday night, there were still people out walking on the streets and I figured if families with small children can walk at this hour then so can I.
- walking back from yoga on Tuesday night, hearing drums in the distance and coming upon a wedding celebration in the street. A white strech SUV limo covered in flowers and bows, a crowd of cars and people in a packed side street with another crowd of bystanders watching from the sidewalk (and their balconies above, and the cafe next door). Two lines of musicians dressed in traditional costume facing each other playing drums, tambourine, horn, one singer walking inbetween the two lines calling out to the musicians who responded in song, the bride and groom at the head of the two lines with two swords crossed in front of them. Then the end of the celebration, they get into their limo, something along the lines of rice-throwing occurs, a procession of cars takes off honking their horns down the street, the musicians pack themselves into a microbus and the crowd disappears.
- visiting Ihab and his wife, Wafa, with my hostmom. They live in a rented apartment in Germana, a suburb of Damascus, so we took a bus out to see them for 10 lira (20 cents), the same fare as anywhere else within the city. The bus we took is called a hubhub or something, they are ridiculous looking-- huge, old and rickety, painted on the outside with stripes of bright colors and decorated on the inside with fringe and hanging grapes and I don't know what else. Basically MTV would have a difficult time pimping the public transportation options of Syria (camel, motorcycle, taxi, bus). Wafa was sick and also pregnant (!) as I learned that day-- they have been married for one year and now she is six weeks pregnant. Before we left, Ihab told me he would like to have a conversation about Jesus Christ with me, at somepoint in the future.
- my friend Ibrahim gave me a burnt cd with hours and hours and hours of videos of debates and discussions concerning some of the controversies of Islam, which he found while exploring his faith. He told me to start with the debates of Ahmed Deedat, an Indian-South African Muslim lecturer who is best known for his debates with crazy evangelical Christians. I watched one of them, entitled "Is the Bible God's Word?", which led to a response lecture by AD entitled "Is Muhammad mentioned in the Bible?" but unfortunately since I have no patience for evangelical ministers, especially this particular televangelist Jimmy Swaggart of the 80s (and unfortunately my hostfamily loves televangelists and watches them on TV alllllll the time), most of the issues that they picked over were not the ones I am most interested in.
- lunch on Wednesday with our Finnish neighbors, whose eldest daughter and Swedish son-in-law were visiting: potato kibbe stuffed with lamb and walnuts, fattoush, rice with chicken and mystery greens (maloukhiyi? or baloukhiyi?), pickled vegetables, and so on. That morning my hostmom actually asked me if I was planning to go out that day, or if I could help her in the house and cook (!) which I gladly did, in a minor way, chopping cucumbers and tomatoes and onions. She also tried to teach me how to form the kibbe kubkubies (football shapes which are then stuffed with the meat mixture) but I failed and was shown up by Ihab who was in the house at the time.
So this is what I understood from the cooking instructions that she gave me:
Boil the chicken, adding spices directly to the water: cinnamon, black pepper, salt, green pods of cardamom (?), ginger, brown spices that was likely paprika, brown balls that I don't know the name of.
Prepare the meat (hashwe) for kibbe-- sautee onions in butter and oil, add the same brown spice that is likely paprika, then later add a huge chunk of meat to be broken up and cooked, then walnuts.
The kibbe kubkubie itself (the football shaped exterior) was made from boiled potatoes mixed with burghul, salt, black pepper and corn flour, kneaded into a dough and formed with delicate and expert hands (again I failed at this task). Fry in hot oil.
The greens (maloukhiyi or whatever) are washed and dried in the sun (?), chopped into small pieces, cooked in butter or oil over a low fire with a little meat (lahme mafroomi), garlic and parsley (kizbara). Add water from the chicken broth, a little at a time.
Serve the chicken and greens with rice and an apple vinegar (khal a-tufaah) and onion sauce. Also with extra chicken broth to make your plate a soup.
The fattoush was tomatoes, cucumbers, ba'ley, wild thyme, maybe mint, another herb with long thin leaves that tasted like licorice, toasted flatbread and a dressing with sumac.
- a new yoga class! My old teacher, Sandy, unfortunately broke her foot. As a result, the 3 pm class (i.e. myself and Frank) has been merged with the 7 pm class led by a Western woman. And there are actually people in the evening class! We are now a class of six. It is strange, but the yoga is good and offers a little more of a workout.
- after yoga class, around 9 pm, walking back with Frank to see his new house. He is living in a boarding house of sorts in Souq Saroujah [a popular neighborhood for students of old and decrepit buildings in winding streets and sidewalk cafes making it a good mix of 'authentic' damascus flavor and also a social hub for foreign students] with seven or so bedrooms of varying size surrounding a courtyard, sharing a tiny dirty kitchen and a few bathrooms. The best part of the house, however, is the rooftop. Everything outside of the rooms is open air and the upstairs has a terrace which literally opens up into the nightsky, emphasized by the fact that the walls are unfinished and the edges look like the roof was ripped off and then thrown into the pile of rubble in the corner. We sat upstairs drinking tea and were later joined by a few of his roommates (Irish, American (VT) and Syrian), the three of them are most likely in their thirties, and they brought out a guitar and began singing folk songs in English and German. The weather was perfect at 70 degrees, but eventually clouds covered the sky and rain drops fell, so we broke up and I walked home. The rain never came, so I walked the 40 minutes or so back to my house, arriving just before midnight. Even on a Sunday night, there were still people out walking on the streets and I figured if families with small children can walk at this hour then so can I.
- walking back from yoga on Tuesday night, hearing drums in the distance and coming upon a wedding celebration in the street. A white strech SUV limo covered in flowers and bows, a crowd of cars and people in a packed side street with another crowd of bystanders watching from the sidewalk (and their balconies above, and the cafe next door). Two lines of musicians dressed in traditional costume facing each other playing drums, tambourine, horn, one singer walking inbetween the two lines calling out to the musicians who responded in song, the bride and groom at the head of the two lines with two swords crossed in front of them. Then the end of the celebration, they get into their limo, something along the lines of rice-throwing occurs, a procession of cars takes off honking their horns down the street, the musicians pack themselves into a microbus and the crowd disappears.
- visiting Ihab and his wife, Wafa, with my hostmom. They live in a rented apartment in Germana, a suburb of Damascus, so we took a bus out to see them for 10 lira (20 cents), the same fare as anywhere else within the city. The bus we took is called a hubhub or something, they are ridiculous looking-- huge, old and rickety, painted on the outside with stripes of bright colors and decorated on the inside with fringe and hanging grapes and I don't know what else. Basically MTV would have a difficult time pimping the public transportation options of Syria (camel, motorcycle, taxi, bus). Wafa was sick and also pregnant (!) as I learned that day-- they have been married for one year and now she is six weeks pregnant. Before we left, Ihab told me he would like to have a conversation about Jesus Christ with me, at somepoint in the future.
- my friend Ibrahim gave me a burnt cd with hours and hours and hours of videos of debates and discussions concerning some of the controversies of Islam, which he found while exploring his faith. He told me to start with the debates of Ahmed Deedat, an Indian-South African Muslim lecturer who is best known for his debates with crazy evangelical Christians. I watched one of them, entitled "Is the Bible God's Word?", which led to a response lecture by AD entitled "Is Muhammad mentioned in the Bible?" but unfortunately since I have no patience for evangelical ministers, especially this particular televangelist Jimmy Swaggart of the 80s (and unfortunately my hostfamily loves televangelists and watches them on TV alllllll the time), most of the issues that they picked over were not the ones I am most interested in.
- lunch on Wednesday with our Finnish neighbors, whose eldest daughter and Swedish son-in-law were visiting: potato kibbe stuffed with lamb and walnuts, fattoush, rice with chicken and mystery greens (maloukhiyi? or baloukhiyi?), pickled vegetables, and so on. That morning my hostmom actually asked me if I was planning to go out that day, or if I could help her in the house and cook (!) which I gladly did, in a minor way, chopping cucumbers and tomatoes and onions. She also tried to teach me how to form the kibbe kubkubies (football shapes which are then stuffed with the meat mixture) but I failed and was shown up by Ihab who was in the house at the time.
So this is what I understood from the cooking instructions that she gave me:
Boil the chicken, adding spices directly to the water: cinnamon, black pepper, salt, green pods of cardamom (?), ginger, brown spices that was likely paprika, brown balls that I don't know the name of.
Prepare the meat (hashwe) for kibbe-- sautee onions in butter and oil, add the same brown spice that is likely paprika, then later add a huge chunk of meat to be broken up and cooked, then walnuts.
The kibbe kubkubie itself (the football shaped exterior) was made from boiled potatoes mixed with burghul, salt, black pepper and corn flour, kneaded into a dough and formed with delicate and expert hands (again I failed at this task). Fry in hot oil.
The greens (maloukhiyi or whatever) are washed and dried in the sun (?), chopped into small pieces, cooked in butter or oil over a low fire with a little meat (lahme mafroomi), garlic and parsley (kizbara). Add water from the chicken broth, a little at a time.
Serve the chicken and greens with rice and an apple vinegar (khal a-tufaah) and onion sauce. Also with extra chicken broth to make your plate a soup.
The fattoush was tomatoes, cucumbers, ba'ley, wild thyme, maybe mint, another herb with long thin leaves that tasted like licorice, toasted flatbread and a dressing with sumac.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Back in Damascus
So I've been here since Thursday, and don't worry I've made a conscious effort not to do anything interesting in order that I could catch up on updating you on the past few weeks. Instead of being interesting, however, I was actually fairly productive, and not just in the blogging sense. I renewed my Iqama (residency permit) for the next two months, registered for classes (remember? I am a student here) beginning on the 20th, registered for Georgetown classes for the fall, did three loads of laundry, got full nights of sleep, started doing yoga again, made plans for this weekend to visit family for Easter, found a summer subletter, began working through summer plans....
The other thing I have been doing is catching up on some world news. Unfortunately all of it has been fairly depressing: suicide attacks in Pakistan and Baghdad, shooting in NY, earthquake in Italy, ice shelves melting in Antarctica, THIS, North Korea attempting a missile launch, the world economy, a supposed assassination attempt on Obama by a Syrian man (later proved false)... One thing that was less depressing and more surprising was flipping between CNN and BBC and finding a lecture from Georgetown's own Gaston Hall broadcasted on BBC. It was part of a series of debates called "The Doha Debates" and this particular episode was about the topic of whether the US should begin playing "tough" with Israel. Defending the "yes" position was a former CIA unit head (I don't remember anyone's name) and a former member of Knesset, and against them was a Jewish Harvard Law professor and a former Israeli politician. I won't get into the politics of the debate, but it was a bit of a mindtrip to be watching this on BBC and seeing familiar faces in the audience and seeing some of those familiar faces get up and ask questions.
One thing that I did take away from all this news watching was a focus on America's role on the world stage, whether it was the Obamas wooing Europe or the former Knesset member arguing that America is the parent to the Middle East and needs to discipline its unruly children (his own country included), or the coverage of the G20 where every item of discussion was in the context of its relationship to Obama's position... It is amazing what a few charismatic speeches and a great J Crew outfit can do to reverse eight years of America-bashing. Now we are the "leader of the free world" again and people are waiting for when we are going to step in to play police/parent/savior for their troubles. I am grateful for and proud of our presidential couple, but shouldn't that (ideally) be the UN's job? How high can expectations get before they are inevitably disappointed?
The other thing I have been doing is catching up on some world news. Unfortunately all of it has been fairly depressing: suicide attacks in Pakistan and Baghdad, shooting in NY, earthquake in Italy, ice shelves melting in Antarctica, THIS, North Korea attempting a missile launch, the world economy, a supposed assassination attempt on Obama by a Syrian man (later proved false)... One thing that was less depressing and more surprising was flipping between CNN and BBC and finding a lecture from Georgetown's own Gaston Hall broadcasted on BBC. It was part of a series of debates called "The Doha Debates" and this particular episode was about the topic of whether the US should begin playing "tough" with Israel. Defending the "yes" position was a former CIA unit head (I don't remember anyone's name) and a former member of Knesset, and against them was a Jewish Harvard Law professor and a former Israeli politician. I won't get into the politics of the debate, but it was a bit of a mindtrip to be watching this on BBC and seeing familiar faces in the audience and seeing some of those familiar faces get up and ask questions.
One thing that I did take away from all this news watching was a focus on America's role on the world stage, whether it was the Obamas wooing Europe or the former Knesset member arguing that America is the parent to the Middle East and needs to discipline its unruly children (his own country included), or the coverage of the G20 where every item of discussion was in the context of its relationship to Obama's position... It is amazing what a few charismatic speeches and a great J Crew outfit can do to reverse eight years of America-bashing. Now we are the "leader of the free world" again and people are waiting for when we are going to step in to play police/parent/savior for their troubles. I am grateful for and proud of our presidential couple, but shouldn't that (ideally) be the UN's job? How high can expectations get before they are inevitably disappointed?
Roman Ruins and Ancient History? That was SO last month.
The only region in Jordan that is easily accessible by public transport is the north, and there are several sites with ruins and such just an hour or two outside of Amman. I decided to visit Jerash, 45 minutes north, one of the best-preserved Roman cities in the Middle East. Despite the hype about the city, I wasn’t particularly thrilled about visiting another Roman ruin (I know, I am spoiled), but it is the most accessible and the busride cost me less than a $1. If I had left early in the morning, I could have combined my trip with a visit to Ajlun’s Qal’at ar-Rabad (citadel with views) to the north, but by the time the bus was leaving the station it was already quarter to 11.
Back when Jerash was called Gerasa, Amman was Philadelphia and Damascus was Damascus, the cities were part of a collective of Roman commercial cities called the Decapolis; though the name suggests a group of ten, it actually included up to 18 cities across Jordan, Syria and Israel & Palestine.
So what does this best-preserved Roman city in the ME actually have? Generally the same things that other Roman sites have, they just all happen to be in the same place (except for the hippodrome [where you can watch chariot races!]—that was the first I’ve seen so far): arches, temples, plazas, a theater, colonnaded streets, baths, gates, and evidence from more recent centuries and empires including churches and houses. If I sound a little disinterested, that’s because I was. The main areas were overrun with school children, and though I was happy to see that local schools take their kids on such sweet field trips, it made photos difficult and meant that groups of giggling girls would walk around arm in arm going up to foreigners and saying “Hello! How are you?” and make comments on your appearance. It was actually the first time I saw girls harrassing tourists more than the boys—maybe it is the age group, but perhaps it proves that when teenage boys do it they aren’t necessarily trying to hit on you, only practice their English. Maybe.
Anyway. The real highlight of my trip to Jerash turned out to be the wildflowers. The ruins were set into small hills of purple, white and yellow flowers, which made walking around the site much more enjoyable, if you were able to tune out everything else. I didn’t have the patience for a tour guide, though one teenage boy who worked there followed me around for a while trying to give me an impromptu tour, and in the end I think I bypassed most of the significant buildings. I did enjoy a nice lunch buffet at the onsite restaurant, which I managed to bargain down to 4 JD from the manager’s offered “student discount.”
So my history/traveling-overload was the first sign that I should probably return back to Damascus. The second was reading The Savage Detectives, which I borrowed from Rachel, a Mexican novel about lost poets in the ‘70s and the bohemian lifestyle that they led, traveling with no money and perpetually mooching off of friends. When I started pushing back my departure date to accommodate my hosts’ social lives to go to this dinner or that performance or on this trip, I decided that while I’m not exactly on the verge of slipping into bohemianism (I still have my standards of hygiene, a good relationship with my family and haven’t yet joined an artistic/revolutionary movement), and my host had graciously invited me to stay indefinitely, I didn’t want to make a second home of their second living room. Plus, I reminded myself that I had been on the move for over three weeks now and it might be nice to back on my own schedule again, do some laundry, eat home-cooked meals, sleep regularly, maybe study, register for fall classes (!), find a summer subletter for my room in DC, think about my future, maybe even catch up on this, the blog. Really that was the main problem: falling into an unsustainable lifestyle of having too many adventures for weeks at a time and then trying to write about them all at once, with no time to reflect inbetween. So clearly I returned for your sake, blog-audience, because apparently my ability to keep up with the entries reflects my ability to maintain a healthy and balanced pace in life. Maybe.
The third thing was that remembering that Rachel had been in Amman for less than 2 weeks and probably would enjoy having time to figure things out on her own before having the responsibility of figuring it out for a guest as well.
But before I left, we went out that night to the Royal Cultural Center, which was hosting a performance festival. None of the events offered any kind of description as to whether it would be film, music, dance, or theater, so we picked one at random and hoped for the best. After a delicious dinner at another one of Amman’s hip café-restaurants, across the street from a Starbucks (we may as well have been in NYC), Rachel, Sonya and I headed to the RCC to buy tickets and figure out what exactly we were in for. The lobby offered no additional information so we bought our tickets anyway and went upstairs to where the event was just beginning. The room was already dark but I tried to tell if the audience was mostly foreigners, as I had seen in Damascus, or if Jordanians had more of an appreciation for cultural festivals. It soon became clear when the MC came on stage and introduced the performing group with a lot of Arabic that we couldn’t understand and then the words “stand-up comedy!” Of all the possible cultural performances it could have been, comedy was probably at the bottom of the list of things we could understand, particularly for Sonya, who had just begun studying Arabic, but really for any foreigner who wasn’t fluent in Jordanian dialect.
The group was called “Gaza Ramallah” or something along those lines, and obviously had a particular focus on Palestinian issues. We could figure out the general idea of each skit or stand-up routine based on a few keywords (a lot of talk about ard, “land”) and a lot of body language, though the most obvious one for us was when one of the performers made a phone call to the White House to speak to Obama, pleading for attention to the Palestinian cause, and ended the skit cursing at America (we were almost ready to go before the skit and then after that we decided it was really time to leave).
The next day I was in a shared taxi headed north, and made it back home without too much drama.
Back when Jerash was called Gerasa, Amman was Philadelphia and Damascus was Damascus, the cities were part of a collective of Roman commercial cities called the Decapolis; though the name suggests a group of ten, it actually included up to 18 cities across Jordan, Syria and Israel & Palestine.
So what does this best-preserved Roman city in the ME actually have? Generally the same things that other Roman sites have, they just all happen to be in the same place (except for the hippodrome [where you can watch chariot races!]—that was the first I’ve seen so far): arches, temples, plazas, a theater, colonnaded streets, baths, gates, and evidence from more recent centuries and empires including churches and houses. If I sound a little disinterested, that’s because I was. The main areas were overrun with school children, and though I was happy to see that local schools take their kids on such sweet field trips, it made photos difficult and meant that groups of giggling girls would walk around arm in arm going up to foreigners and saying “Hello! How are you?” and make comments on your appearance. It was actually the first time I saw girls harrassing tourists more than the boys—maybe it is the age group, but perhaps it proves that when teenage boys do it they aren’t necessarily trying to hit on you, only practice their English. Maybe.
Anyway. The real highlight of my trip to Jerash turned out to be the wildflowers. The ruins were set into small hills of purple, white and yellow flowers, which made walking around the site much more enjoyable, if you were able to tune out everything else. I didn’t have the patience for a tour guide, though one teenage boy who worked there followed me around for a while trying to give me an impromptu tour, and in the end I think I bypassed most of the significant buildings. I did enjoy a nice lunch buffet at the onsite restaurant, which I managed to bargain down to 4 JD from the manager’s offered “student discount.”
So my history/traveling-overload was the first sign that I should probably return back to Damascus. The second was reading The Savage Detectives, which I borrowed from Rachel, a Mexican novel about lost poets in the ‘70s and the bohemian lifestyle that they led, traveling with no money and perpetually mooching off of friends. When I started pushing back my departure date to accommodate my hosts’ social lives to go to this dinner or that performance or on this trip, I decided that while I’m not exactly on the verge of slipping into bohemianism (I still have my standards of hygiene, a good relationship with my family and haven’t yet joined an artistic/revolutionary movement), and my host had graciously invited me to stay indefinitely, I didn’t want to make a second home of their second living room. Plus, I reminded myself that I had been on the move for over three weeks now and it might be nice to back on my own schedule again, do some laundry, eat home-cooked meals, sleep regularly, maybe study, register for fall classes (!), find a summer subletter for my room in DC, think about my future, maybe even catch up on this, the blog. Really that was the main problem: falling into an unsustainable lifestyle of having too many adventures for weeks at a time and then trying to write about them all at once, with no time to reflect inbetween. So clearly I returned for your sake, blog-audience, because apparently my ability to keep up with the entries reflects my ability to maintain a healthy and balanced pace in life. Maybe.
The third thing was that remembering that Rachel had been in Amman for less than 2 weeks and probably would enjoy having time to figure things out on her own before having the responsibility of figuring it out for a guest as well.
But before I left, we went out that night to the Royal Cultural Center, which was hosting a performance festival. None of the events offered any kind of description as to whether it would be film, music, dance, or theater, so we picked one at random and hoped for the best. After a delicious dinner at another one of Amman’s hip café-restaurants, across the street from a Starbucks (we may as well have been in NYC), Rachel, Sonya and I headed to the RCC to buy tickets and figure out what exactly we were in for. The lobby offered no additional information so we bought our tickets anyway and went upstairs to where the event was just beginning. The room was already dark but I tried to tell if the audience was mostly foreigners, as I had seen in Damascus, or if Jordanians had more of an appreciation for cultural festivals. It soon became clear when the MC came on stage and introduced the performing group with a lot of Arabic that we couldn’t understand and then the words “stand-up comedy!” Of all the possible cultural performances it could have been, comedy was probably at the bottom of the list of things we could understand, particularly for Sonya, who had just begun studying Arabic, but really for any foreigner who wasn’t fluent in Jordanian dialect.
The group was called “Gaza Ramallah” or something along those lines, and obviously had a particular focus on Palestinian issues. We could figure out the general idea of each skit or stand-up routine based on a few keywords (a lot of talk about ard, “land”) and a lot of body language, though the most obvious one for us was when one of the performers made a phone call to the White House to speak to Obama, pleading for attention to the Palestinian cause, and ended the skit cursing at America (we were almost ready to go before the skit and then after that we decided it was really time to leave).
The next day I was in a shared taxi headed north, and made it back home without too much drama.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Travelling in the Eastern Desert (promised to no one)
The Desert Castles, as the name suggests, were very much in the desert. Jordan itself is very much desert, but driving and driving and driving and seeing nothing but signs for Iraq and Saudi Arabia brought home the desert-ness pretty well. However, unlike the name suggests, the buildings are not actually castles, but instead fortresses, hammams, farmhouses, or retreats for rulers from the Umayyad dynasty, centered in Damascus.
Our first stop was Qasr Kharana, which resembles both a fortress and a khan but LP suggests that it was probably a meeting place for Umayyad rulers and Bedouins. The many rooms were empty but well-restored and fun to explore, particularly the closed-off rooftop access, from which we enjoyed a good desert panorama. We figured that since whoever was in charge of the site didn’t bother to get out of their tent/souvenir shop to regulate entrance into the building, they probably wouldn’t pay attention to us checking out the rooftop views.
From there, we visited the 8th century Qusayr Amra, one of the best preserved of the many Umayyad desert dwellings. You can still see and (attempt to) appreciate the frescoes that cover the ceilings and walls, despite the fact that all of them have been ruined by graffiti and also appreciate how unusual it is to see paintings of topless women or any form of iconography in an Islamic building. The building contains a hammam and audience hall for hosting dinners, meetings, parties, exhibitions and entertainment and is generally considered as a “pleasure palace” for rulers who wanted to escape city-life in Damascus and reconnect with their Bedouin roots in the desert.
Our last stop was in the town/wetland reserve of Azraq, a hunting and military base that was occupied by the Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Ayyubids, Ottoman Turks, and of course Lawrence of Arabia (we visited the room where he lived/wrote parts of Seven Pillars of Wisdom). The building is much larger than the others that we had seen and built from black basalt stone and as our guide pointed out, only black basalt stone with no wood or any other materials used (this is probably why most of the building collapsed in a 1927 earthquake).
One of the reasons for the fortress was probably that the Azraq (it means “blue” in Arabic) Basin used to span an area of wetlands larger than Lebanon. Today, LP calls the site an “ecological disaster” which is not a hyperbole, considering the fact that water has been drained from the basin since the late 60s to feed the growing cities of Jordan and by 1991 managed to dry up the area completely. This included fossil water (over 10,000 years old) and the lifesource for the area’s wildlife and vegetation, which has virtually dried up along with the water. The government now pumps 1.5 million cu m of fresh water each year, hoping to restore the wetlands to 10% of its original volume. (Jordan is one of the Top 10 Water-Deprived countries in the world.)
--
We returned to Rachel's apartment in the city exhausted and famished from not eating for the last nine or so hours (there are few pit stops in the desert).
Luckily we came back just in time to go out for dinner. One of her classmates, Kitty, was hosting a fus'ha-only dinner at her house, with herself and her two roommates (both American), Rachel, Amy and myself, and her two Iraqi friends who served as moderators of sort / keepers of the Arabic language. The dinner was pretty successful and it was a relief to have a "safe" environment where we could all pretend like fus'ha was a language that we could ever learn/need to know how to speak.
Our first stop was Qasr Kharana, which resembles both a fortress and a khan but LP suggests that it was probably a meeting place for Umayyad rulers and Bedouins. The many rooms were empty but well-restored and fun to explore, particularly the closed-off rooftop access, from which we enjoyed a good desert panorama. We figured that since whoever was in charge of the site didn’t bother to get out of their tent/souvenir shop to regulate entrance into the building, they probably wouldn’t pay attention to us checking out the rooftop views.
From there, we visited the 8th century Qusayr Amra, one of the best preserved of the many Umayyad desert dwellings. You can still see and (attempt to) appreciate the frescoes that cover the ceilings and walls, despite the fact that all of them have been ruined by graffiti and also appreciate how unusual it is to see paintings of topless women or any form of iconography in an Islamic building. The building contains a hammam and audience hall for hosting dinners, meetings, parties, exhibitions and entertainment and is generally considered as a “pleasure palace” for rulers who wanted to escape city-life in Damascus and reconnect with their Bedouin roots in the desert.
Our last stop was in the town/wetland reserve of Azraq, a hunting and military base that was occupied by the Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Ayyubids, Ottoman Turks, and of course Lawrence of Arabia (we visited the room where he lived/wrote parts of Seven Pillars of Wisdom). The building is much larger than the others that we had seen and built from black basalt stone and as our guide pointed out, only black basalt stone with no wood or any other materials used (this is probably why most of the building collapsed in a 1927 earthquake).
One of the reasons for the fortress was probably that the Azraq (it means “blue” in Arabic) Basin used to span an area of wetlands larger than Lebanon. Today, LP calls the site an “ecological disaster” which is not a hyperbole, considering the fact that water has been drained from the basin since the late 60s to feed the growing cities of Jordan and by 1991 managed to dry up the area completely. This included fossil water (over 10,000 years old) and the lifesource for the area’s wildlife and vegetation, which has virtually dried up along with the water. The government now pumps 1.5 million cu m of fresh water each year, hoping to restore the wetlands to 10% of its original volume. (Jordan is one of the Top 10 Water-Deprived countries in the world.)
--
We returned to Rachel's apartment in the city exhausted and famished from not eating for the last nine or so hours (there are few pit stops in the desert).
Luckily we came back just in time to go out for dinner. One of her classmates, Kitty, was hosting a fus'ha-only dinner at her house, with herself and her two roommates (both American), Rachel, Amy and myself, and her two Iraqi friends who served as moderators of sort / keepers of the Arabic language. The dinner was pretty successful and it was a relief to have a "safe" environment where we could all pretend like fus'ha was a language that we could ever learn/need to know how to speak.
Travelling in the Promised Land
Monday was one of Qasid’s days off (they give Mondays and Fridays off) so I went with Rachel, Sonya, Amy and their German student-friend to visit the Dead Sea, only an hour from Amman. The Sea is the lowest and saltiest place on Earth—and it gets a little lower and saltier every year (already 422m below sea level and with a 33% salinity) due to irrigation, evaporation and potash production (I don’t know what that is either). Therefore, in an effort to keep the Dead Sea alive (and not dry up in the next 50 years, as predicted), the Jordanian government is planning the Red to Dead project, aka a canal between the two seas, to to restore water levels and provide hydroelectricity to JO and I & P.
There is one public beach at the Dead Sea, with an entrance fee of about $5, but my group opted for one of the private beaches at the luxury hotels lining the coast, which had a $20 beach access fee that pays for the bonus of being able to swim in a bathing suit without being harrassed. After a long float, a mud-facial for Amy, and a lot of discussion about how long it would take someone to float across to the West Bank (it is surprisingly close, but not being able to submerge yourself would keep you pretty inconspicuous), we ate lunch, enjoying the view, and then everyone else returned to Amman.
Rachel had decided to take the next day off from classes, so after checking the cost of a room at the hotel we were currently in (200 JD!) we opted to visit the town of Madaba, not too far from the sea or from Amman. Using our seasoned traveller’s skills, we managed to get one of the hotels in Madaba to send a taxi to pick us up for less than half the price of what the hotel offered (45 JD!). We read by the swimming pools, waiting for our taxi to come. Our driver was very friendly and ended up making a free stop for us so we could visit the Moses Memorial on Mt Nebo, where Moses looked out over the Promised Land and then died at the age of 120 (though the burial spot/bones are yet to be located).
Madaba is a nice small town, less than an hour from Amman, and is known for its millenia-old Byzantine mosaics. We walked around the city by night/as much of it as we could since most of the streets were being rebuilt with international funding (other things supported by international funding/USAID: local souvenir shops and shawarma shops; why?), and enjoyed a delicious dinner of things I can’t quite remember (stuffed mushrooms, something with tomatoes, lamb in tahini sauce?). When we got back to the hotel, we arranged for a taxi to take us the next day to visit the Desert Castels in the Eastern Desert, and then drop us in Amman. Considering that public transport doesn’t exist to these sites (even travelling between Madaba and the Dead Sea = 2 microbus rides and walking/hitchhiking) it was particularly unusual that the hotel arranged trips for fixed prices to most of the tourist sites in Jordan.
Tuesday we woke up early for a rooftop breakfast at the hotel, then walked the streets looking for various old churches and archaelogical sites that hosted these mosaics. Mosaics are not that exciting to write about, beyond the fact that the word for mosaic in Arabic is fissifissa’ and Rachel and I were discussing the root of the word (usually Arabic words only have 3 roots, this has at least 4) and she said she looked it up once and found instead the verb from which “fissy” is derived, and that hopefully is a joke only the Coussa family will understand.
We were a little late coming back to the hotel to meet our driver (the streets, being ripped up and replaced, did not exactly follow the map we had) but Rachel made it up to him by buying a taster’s plate of local sweets from a shop we passed on the way. How To Make Someone’s Day, for only $3!
There is one public beach at the Dead Sea, with an entrance fee of about $5, but my group opted for one of the private beaches at the luxury hotels lining the coast, which had a $20 beach access fee that pays for the bonus of being able to swim in a bathing suit without being harrassed. After a long float, a mud-facial for Amy, and a lot of discussion about how long it would take someone to float across to the West Bank (it is surprisingly close, but not being able to submerge yourself would keep you pretty inconspicuous), we ate lunch, enjoying the view, and then everyone else returned to Amman.
Rachel had decided to take the next day off from classes, so after checking the cost of a room at the hotel we were currently in (200 JD!) we opted to visit the town of Madaba, not too far from the sea or from Amman. Using our seasoned traveller’s skills, we managed to get one of the hotels in Madaba to send a taxi to pick us up for less than half the price of what the hotel offered (45 JD!). We read by the swimming pools, waiting for our taxi to come. Our driver was very friendly and ended up making a free stop for us so we could visit the Moses Memorial on Mt Nebo, where Moses looked out over the Promised Land and then died at the age of 120 (though the burial spot/bones are yet to be located).
Madaba is a nice small town, less than an hour from Amman, and is known for its millenia-old Byzantine mosaics. We walked around the city by night/as much of it as we could since most of the streets were being rebuilt with international funding (other things supported by international funding/USAID: local souvenir shops and shawarma shops; why?), and enjoyed a delicious dinner of things I can’t quite remember (stuffed mushrooms, something with tomatoes, lamb in tahini sauce?). When we got back to the hotel, we arranged for a taxi to take us the next day to visit the Desert Castels in the Eastern Desert, and then drop us in Amman. Considering that public transport doesn’t exist to these sites (even travelling between Madaba and the Dead Sea = 2 microbus rides and walking/hitchhiking) it was particularly unusual that the hotel arranged trips for fixed prices to most of the tourist sites in Jordan.
Tuesday we woke up early for a rooftop breakfast at the hotel, then walked the streets looking for various old churches and archaelogical sites that hosted these mosaics. Mosaics are not that exciting to write about, beyond the fact that the word for mosaic in Arabic is fissifissa’ and Rachel and I were discussing the root of the word (usually Arabic words only have 3 roots, this has at least 4) and she said she looked it up once and found instead the verb from which “fissy” is derived, and that hopefully is a joke only the Coussa family will understand.
We were a little late coming back to the hotel to meet our driver (the streets, being ripped up and replaced, did not exactly follow the map we had) but Rachel made it up to him by buying a taster’s plate of local sweets from a shop we passed on the way. How To Make Someone’s Day, for only $3!
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