Brief Interlude

So I am writing these posts from Jordan, as I visit a friend (Rachel) who graduated from Georgetown a few years before me and just moved to Amman last week to start classes at an Arabic institute here. More on that later, once I catch up to present time in the blog, but also let it be known that I posted some more photos (from SY and LB) to Picasa and Dad, when you finish your photo albums, I'll post that link here too. I also have more photos on film, undeveloped, so there are some holes to be filled in and you will just have to wait, perhaps for a few months when I return home, until they can be converted to digital form.

Now we are three!

The next morning after a hotel breakfast of breads, cheeses, jams, labneh and zaatar, we walked out of the hotel and headed for the National Museum, just a few blocks away. On the way we found a row of artisan shops called Handicrafts Lane that ended in a khan housing more merchants and workshops. We wandered in and out of shops, looking in at painters, weavers and metalworkers, and spent about 20 minutes looking at the gold embroidered tablecloths.

Eventually we made it to the museum and my mom managed to get us in for the local price (15 lira vs. 150) though the second guard who checked our tickets did a doubletake when he saw me and my dad. We decided to hire a guide to take us through the museum on a brief tour, though once we walked with him through a few rooms and realized the depth and breadth of his knowledge, we ended up staying for the full hour and a half. The museum is supposed to offer good background to the historical sites that one might visit while in the country (particularly Palmyra) so our guide, Bachar, tailored his information to some of the specific sites on our itinerary. By the end of the tour our heads were swirling with the overlapping dynasties, religions, cultures, histories and languages of which Syria is bursting at the seams. Each question we had was answered by “Well, you know, there is a story about that…” and so he added legends and jokes into the mix.

From the museum we walked to the old city, stopping to taste some sweets on the way (important side note: my dad did in fact indulge in dessert before lunch). In general, sweets (variations on filo dough, nuts, cream, cheese and syrup) are sold by the kilo/half-kilo, so to buy just one baklava is completely unnecessary and most will not accept money for it anyway. Still, it is difficult not to feel guilty for tasting with no intention of buying a large quantity, so we picked out two huge pieces of kenafeh for less than a dollar, each cut into eight bites, and quickly devoured the plate amongst the three of us.

We proceeded to walk it off for the next few hours, wandering in the markets from one shop to the next (you would think we would run out of shops to look at, but it hasn’t happened yet) until we took a break for lunch in one of the old Damascene houses. The menu was written in terrible English with unappealing Westernized dishes but we asked the waiter for Arabic foods instead and so they appeared and were surprisingly delicious.

After lunch we found the Azem Palace, supposedly the best existing example of Damascene architecture, but it had just closed for the day so we continued on to the Ummayyad Mosque. Again in the mosque it was necessary that my mom and I wear gray-hooded cloaks and we walked around, carrying our shoes in our hands. The mosque is the second largest mosque in the world and a site of religious pilgrimage for Muslims from all over the world so it is always filled with tourists: Arabs, Iranians and Westerners in funny cloaks, and of course there are the genuine locals praying. For Friday noon-prayer, when the mosque’s imam gives the Muslim equivalent of a sermon, the mosque’s prayer room can hold up to 10,000 Muslims, men in the front and women separated in the back. The room also hosts a huge shrine to St John the Baptist and it is supposedly the resting place of his remains.

The interior courtyard of the mosque is lined around the upper walls with golden mosaics depicting Damascus as the city of Paradise, situated along the Barada river surrounded by leafy trees and flying birds. The mosque was first a Roman temple to the god Jupiter, and later a church; elements of the previous two structures are still evident in the mosque and its foundations. There are three minarets in the mosque, one of which is called the White Minaret and is thought to be the same white minaret that Mohammed prophesied Jesus would return to.

The courtyard was surprisingly alive with families: children playing, sliding in their socks on the white marble floor, eating date breads, taking pictures and videos of their visit. Inside the prayer room, similar to the Great Mosque, there were people relaxing. studying together and praying. We had a friendly tour guide take us around and when he was finished he took us to see the ‘best view of the moque,’ conveniently located in the stairway of his friend’s giftshop.

Leaving the mosque, I realized that I really had no idea how many people in Damascus were tourists. Before I was only focusing on the obvious Western tourists, but after seeing the draw of the mosque it was clear that people came from all over the Muslim world to see the holy city of Damascus and how was I to tell one veiled woman from the next? Once I started paying attention though, I could at least tell the difference with the large Iranian tour groups who come to the city, because for one, they aren’t Arab so they look a little different, secondly they are more conservative Shi’ia Muslims and veil themselves differently, and third they don’t speak Arabic so I can at least hear the difference in the language.

From there, we continued in the markets, this time in the spice souq, until our legs and eyes could take no more and headed north to leave the old city and return to my house. Only Farah was home, studying, as his parents had gone to Leila’s village to celebrate Mother’s Day with her mother.

For dinner, we decided to go off a friend’s recommendation and visit the restaurant on the top of the mountain (that’s literally all that we knew about it) for dinner with a spectacular view of the city by night. In order to do this, we had to hire a taxi for the evening, but the view was worth it. We could pick out landmarks from all over the city but most of all you could see the minarets lit up in green for peace.

Part Three: Syria with the Parents: Damascus

Thursday morning we went to the train station to take the train back to Damascus. The train system is fairly new and the country is clearly very proud of it because the whole time that we were sitting and waiting for our train there were floor sweepers and trash collectors walking in circles around the station, keeping it meticulous. On the train itself there were the same service men, handing out earphones and candies and coming around to collect trash. Our first class tickets were only 80 cents more expensive than second class and a total of $5 each.

The train ride was again through the agricultural landscape and was worth the ticket fare, just for the views. Moving south past Hama and Homs the environment turned more to desert, with scattered irrigated blocks of green land, but mostly just shepherds and their flocks and kids in villages running after the train. We arrived in Damascus in the mid-afternoon and made it to my house just as my host-mom was leaving. We promised to meet up later in the evening so I showed my mom around the house, she unloaded some of her bags and we walked so I could show her around my neighborhood on the way to the old city. We hadn’t eaten lunch that day so we were both starving and unfortunately we got lost in the souqs walking in circles trying to find a particular restaurant. Having traveled all day and running low on blood sugar, I was not in the mood to be overwhelmed by the sounds, people, lights and narrow alleys of the old markets and it seemed to me that in the week and a half that I was gone, tourist season had come into full swing as we saw tourist groups around every corner (now I am definitely grateful that I don’t live in the old city). Finally we found a restaurant to sit and eat and luckily it happened to serve my mom the best arugula (rocca) salad she’d had yet, so all was not lost and after doing more shopping-without-buying, investigating the quality and choices of gold-embroidered tablecloths, we walked back to the house for some mom-bonding time over tea and falafel ordered from a nearby restaurant.

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Friday we had a full day waiting for my dad to arrive. We had slept at my house, with my mom in my bed and me on the floor (breaking in my new GoLite sleeping bag, indoor camping!), and the next morning we set our priorities: laundry, a hair appointment for my mom and more laundry in the morning (slightly complicated by the morning rain, makes it difficult to use a clothesline). After we had a goal of checking out Damascus’s contemporary art galleries, though I forgot it was Friday aka prayer day and after finding the first one (eventually) in a distant part of the city in a swanky hotel, we realized that all the others would be closed. This pretty much killed the rest of our day, so we went back to the old city to eat lunch and walk in the markets, snacking on street sweets as we walked (one particularly memorable street had us walking almost in the pathway of a worker shoveling human waste into the back of a pickup truck from a manhole in the ground before we realized what he was doing). Buying sweets to taste is not as easy at it may seem.

Earlier in the day my mom had invited Leila, my host mom, out to dinner with us as a thankyou for taking good care of me (and my stomach); it also conveniently happened to be the Middle East’s Mother’s day on Saturday. We returned to the house to co-ordinate plans with her for the night and finish the laundry and while we waited for her to come home I fell asleep and took a much-needed nap.

After eating meal after meal in the restored 400 year old houses-turned-restaurants of Aleppo and the old city in Damascus, we opted for a more ‘contemporary’ restaurant, where they featured sushi on the menu (though considering how far we are from the sea and any Japanese chef we passed on the opportunity) as well as Western dishes. The food wasn’t particularly exciting and by far the most expensive we’ve paid yet (around $50 for the three of us) but it was nice that we could take her out for a meal since I don’t think my host-family ever goes out to restaurants.

We walked back to the house from there, passing by my host-family’s church, where Farah was hanging out with some friends (he opted out of joining us for dinner). Once we got back to the house, my mom and I repacked for the next few days and took a cab to our hotel, conveniently located between the center of the city and the old city. At the reception desk, however, we were turned away because I had left my passport in my room and there was no other option but to return back to the house. 2 cab rides, $2 and 30 minutes later, we were in our room, lying on our beds, exhausted, waiting for my dad to get in from his midnight flight.

Part Three: Syria with the Parents: Aleppo

Tuesday morning my mom and I were on a bus headed to Aleppo. Thus far I had only crossed the border between Beirut and Damascus so the northern route was new to me. The bus was estimated to take six hours (930-330) with a stop in Tripoli. However, as we made our way north, it was clear we would be lucky to make it to the city before dark. Beyond the scheduled stops in Tripoli and of course at the border, the bus stopped numerous times on the way accumulating who-knows-what and stowing it in the luggage compartments; it reminded me a little of Chinatown bus rides from NY to DC. It was almost a joke, stopping every ten minutes, and just as we thought we were on our way we would be pulled over at some roadside shop again. The driver’s assistant/negotiator had his office in the front of the bus hidden under a prayer rug, piles of money, forms, papers and rubber bands.

Once we got through Tripoli it was a little smoother and not far from the northern border with Syria, but getting through the border itself was a madhouse. There were crowds of people in the streets, cars parked randomly across the lanes—I wouldn’t call the Beirut/Damascus border orderly but this was like herding cows. On top of it all, my mom didn’t have a Syrian visa since the policy is that if your father is Syrian your nationality is automatically Syrian (for once patriarchal systems come in handy!). The consulate assured her it shouldn’t be a problem as long as she brings proof of her father’s nationality (which she did with her birth certificate and his death certificate) but once we saw the state of the border we were a little nervous. Plus the border officials didn’t read or speak English, so the certificates meant nothing to them; luckily they took my mom’s word for it that she was reading the papers aloud correctly and after several trips to different officials and such she was stamped and we were (almost) on our way again. First we had to make more stops, including one with a conspicuously parked customs official, where the guy got off our bus with a wad of money in his hand in his pocket, got into the backseat of the car, then got out 30 seconds later. It was pretty entertaining at first but once we saw the hours fall away it started to become increasingly frustrating.

Thankfully the scenery was beautiful and we were sitting in the first two seats of the coach bus so we were high up and could see out the front window (which also gave my mom a prime seat for watching the goings on of the guy in front, as well as the crazy Syrian traffic and the number of times we narrowly escaped an accident). Leaving Lebanon it was snow-capped mountains with rolling green agricultural fields and small villages in the foreground, then driving north into Syria it became increasingly rural. We saw shepherds, wearing long robes and the keffiyeh wrapped around their heads, with their flocks of sheep or goats (sometimes the shepherd was a seven-year old child), the road lined with tall trees to protect the fields and every so often a village of crumbling concrete houses and a mosque, or small groups of tents (unclear if they are for the animals or the people, I think it depends on the region), or even in one region beehive-shaped houses.

Seven and a half hours later we arrived in Aleppo. Our hotel was in a renovated old Syrian house (they are all about 2-400 years old) with the picturesque courtyard, hanging vines and the rooms around the perimeter. Unfortunately most of the attention is given to the shared spaces and the rooms themselves aren’t that exciting, plus they usually don’t have windows to the outside because the traditional Syrian houses are focused inwards, to the courtyard. The outsides of the houses, which you notice as you walk through older areas of the cities, are uninviting and gray with no big windows or anything to hint of the beauty on the inside. We were surprised to find ourselves living in the ‘new’ part of Aleppo, which is distinguished from the old Aleppo in that it is only 400 years old, and not 1000+.

We spent the evening walking around the city amongst the throngs of Aleppans shopping. Everybody was out on the streets, and it was only a Tuesday night! The stores themselves weren’t very exciting, mostly inexpensive shoes and clothing, but it made for great people-watching. We ate dinner in one of the nicest restaurants in Aleppo, also in a renovated traditional house that was beautifully decorated, and were pleasantly surprised to find the bill to be about $26, and it was to be our most expensive meal for the rest of our time in Syria (minus a few special meals in Damascus).

From there we wandered into different shops, first looking at ‘oriental’ shops with collections of antiques and silverwork, then we were drawn to the windows of the gold jewelers. My parents had intended to pick out my 22nd birthday present while we were in Syria together—ideally we had thought of a set of gold bangles that matched ones my mom was given at my age—but as soon as we set foot inside the shops and learned that each bangle cost over $300, that was the end of that idea. Apparently the global economic crisis = cost of gold skyrocketing and alas not everything can be a bargain in Syria.

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The next morning we set out for a day of sightseeing, starting at the 13th century Mamluk Great Mosque (the site's first mosque was built in the 8th century but was rebuilt many times, then finally destroyed completely by the Mongols and resurrected to its current form) where we took a tour wearing gray-hooded cloaks. One of the main draws of the mosque is that it supposedly houses the ruins of Zachariah (father of St John the Baptist, whose remains we will see in due time), who is considered one of the prophets of Islam. The interior of the mosque has a big courtyard with rooms around the sides with one large room for the group prayer. In-between the main 5 prayers of the day you can see people reading on their own, studying in groups or just hanging out and socializing. We felt a little self-conscious walking around, not exactly sure if certain rooms were for men only or women only, but we could see that some of the rooms were set aside for men and women to clean themselves before praying (having originated in the desert, one of the major foundations of Islam is hygiene and even if there is no water to be found one must go through the motions of cleansing oneself before beginning to pray).

From the mosque we walked to the citadel, which was not difficult to spot as it sits atop a huge green hill, surrounded by a moat and set apart from the rest of the city. The scale of it is enormous and on the inside it truly is a city on a hill. The director of the citadel himself gave us a tour of the interior houses, palaces, mosques, hammams (complete with mannequins wrapped in towels demonstrating the functions of the various rooms). From the top of the citadel you could see a great panorama of the city in all of its limestone glory. It is the second largest city in Syria but the scale of it is much nicer than that of Damascus and it is also much cleaner, with fewer towering buildings and if there was a modern district we avoided it.

My mom began a conversation with our guide about the Armenians in Aleppo and by then end of our tour he was taking us to his brother’s shop to have a look. I can’t remember if he was Armenian or if his goods were or what the connection was exactly, mostly I think he just wanted to lure tourists to the shop. The shop was in an unmarked building, we walked through a textiles workshop and found ourselves in the midst of shelves and shelves of rugs, tablecloths, scarves and jewelry. We thought we might have stumbled on a bargain, perhaps having been taken directly to a source where most people don’t come to shop, but unfortunately everything in his shop was exorbitantly expensive—at least for us, the unwitting tourists. He did have beautiful and seemingly original designs with his jewelry, but it was only our first day in Aleppo and had no way of knowing if anything was what it appeared to be.

Eventually it became increasingly uncomfortable as it became increasingly obvious that we weren’t ready to buy any of his merchandise. They had put forth a lot of effort into showing us cloth after cloth after cloth and earring after earring after earring, but we backed out of the store, taking his card and promising to come back another time. But there are so many stores and so much of the same or even better merchandise to be found that most shopkeepers know you won’t be coming back. For us, shopping in the markets became a journey with no destination; with every store we visited we learned more about the quality of the goods and the range of choices and the impossibility of knowing if what you are buying is worth your money. Neither myself nor my mom enjoy bargaining, particularly when we have no personal knowledge of the value of anything in the stores and when you know that if the same item was in the US we would pay much more for it, but your mind gets trapped in the exchange of US and Syrian currencies and nobody likes to pay ten times more than necessary. We spent the rest of the day going in and out of stores and each time we were glad we hadn’t given in to whatever it was that we were admiring in the previous store.

We left Aleppo with just a few choice purchases, mostly made of a richly colored striped silk fabric that is used in scarves, cushions, make-up bags, clothing…just about anything. We also left with two boxes of Aleppan sweets for my host family to balance out the Easter candies my mom brought them from the states.

Part 2: Lebanon, the Abridged version.

Lebanon was a week of late nights, leisurely lunches (preferrably with a view of the Mediterranean), long car rides and lots and lots o’ family time. Coming back for my third visit in two months to stay with family once more, I realized how familiar the area had become to me so much so that I almost forgot it was a foreign country (I am spoiled). I found it easy to navigate my way back to the house using strategically located advertisements and I suddenly became the person of experience and knowledge in the group, acting as guide to my aunt Marilyn and cousin Marisa as we visited the various sites that I had seen in my first 2 ½ weeks in the Middle East. My aunt hadn’t been to visit the family in 30-ish years, and Marisa (17) had never been before, so it was good for me to see them go through some of the same adjustments that I had to make when I had first arrived, and to appreciate my new level of comfort getting around Lebanon and Syria (only to be further appreciated when my parents arrived).

That week we went back to Beiteddine in the mountains, to the ancient site of Byblos on the northern coast (Nagibe joined us that day for a seafood feast at a restaurant with a prime seaside location), and to Saida and Tyre on the southern coast. Marisa, who is starting next year at UPenn’s Nursing School, was able to fit in a half-day working with Chantal at AUB Hospital while the aunts and I fit in a hair appointment (much needed and I was not going to do it in Syria). There were several trips to the huge ABC mall included, where we learned that a mall is a mall is a mall but at least now I have actually been shopping in Beirut. In the past the shopping was in downtown Beirut on Hamra Street, but after the damage caused by the war it has been unfortunately centralized to ABC.

Throughout the week there were the familiar proddings from the older generation—don’t you and Marisa want to get out and see Beirut nightlife? Don’t you want to call up so-and-so? Marisa was on her spring break from second semester senior year of high school so all she wanted to do was sleep a lot and not think about homework. I was just happy to be hanging out with my aunts and cousins for the week and didn’t really care about maintaining my Beiruti social life, but either way it was arranged for us in the end. Friday night Eli made a dinner reservation for 10 pm at an Italian restaurant with live music for the three of us, himself and Josyan, Chantal Nagibe and Michel, and his close friend/tennis partner his wife and 19 year-old son. It was clear that the only reason that the son was present was to escort us out for the night after dinner so despite our polite “nothankyous” and “youreallydon’thavetos,” our fate was already decided for us. Luckily he was a very nice guy and easy to talk to (not that we had a choice because we were relegated to the kids’ end of the table) and he promised us Oh it’s not a nightclub, it’s just a pub and it’s just around the corner and I’ll bring you home whenever you are ready to go. In my mind I pictured a regular bar with long tables and music in the background and figured it would be worth it just to go and meet his friends, talk to them for a bit, then get our own taxi ride home so he wouldn’t have to leave if we wanted to go home before 3 am, and it would be fun for Marisa to see a bit of the bar scene before heading off to college.

We left around midnight, the music scene at our restaurant was just heating up. The female singer, accompanied by a keyboardist and signing popular ballads of the West, was going around to each table getting people (including a few at our table) to sing for her (unabashedly and with enthusiasm!), which soon led to diners banging on the table with cups and plates, then leaping to their feet and filling the floor space with dancers. Eli’s friends were the most active of them all and brought their son up to dance with them. Marisa and I were shocked to see that he actually danced with them, rather than scowling and running the other way, as we would have done if our parents were accepting vocal solos and tearing up the dance floor.

The so-called ‘pub’ was just down the street—the whole neighborhood was filled with younge people hanging out in atmospheric bars and to be sure the night was just getting started—but as we descended into the dark smoky techno-throbbing room and saw people dancing on tables and found barely enough room to stand still without getting knocked over by others, we realized that ‘pub’ just means that there are tables one could hypothetically sit at, but it is better served to hold coats/purses/drinks or better yet, as the dance floor itself.

Apparently we were there to celebrate someone’s birthday, and we soon joined a large group of our escort’s (I can’t remember his name but he is named after a saint in the Maronite church) friends from his university. It was impossible to see or speak to anyone properly so we nodded and smiled and danced and had a good time (though one of his friends thought we were 16/younger) and eventually we looked at the time and decided to head home as we wanted to get up early for the Saturday morning farmer’s market. I communicated that we were going to head out but that we would take a taxi home. Of course that was not an option so he left his friends and we went out into the rain. Walking by the restaurant that we had eaten at that night, we ran into noneother than Josyan, Eli and their friends who were just leaving. They looked at us in astonishment and we at them. So I remembered that I am in fact in a foreign country, and not only that but also a parallel universe, where the parents stay out later than the kids and the old stay forever young. At least we could get a ride home with Josyan and Eli and our host could go back with his parents so in that sense our meeting was fortuitous. But then Marisa and I had to endure a carride home of “Why did you leave so early? You didn’t have fun?”

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The next morning it was still raining which dampened our hopes of making it to the farmer’s market. I woke up early, showered, dressed and ate breakfast and was greeted by a sleepy Eli who emerged from his room to get his morning coffee. Oh you know the market will not be open in the rain, don’t bother going, there will be no one there. Even if they have tents? Yes it’s not worth it. I called Chantal who had taken me the first time to ask her opinion, she had no idea, so I called Nagibe’s house and spoke to my aunt Marilyn who had just woken up and we decided to let Marisa sleep and forgo the morning excursion. Around 1030 Chantal called back, said she had just driven by the square and saw tents up, so clearly it was in fact open. Josyan and Eli agreed we should go. I called Marisa, woke her up and said I would be there in half an hour to pick her up. But then came the complications of logistics: calling a cab to pick me up, take me to get Marisa, take us to the market, wait for us, take us back to Nagibe’s in time to leave for lunch (we had all been invited out to lunch by Eli’s brother). By now it was getting late, J & E now said we wouldn’t have time, but the taxi was already called, and by the way it’s going to cost $25 just for the car and don’t be late for lunch!

By the time the taxi arrived (1130) I felt like the morning was snowballing into a disaster that couldn’t be stopped. We would spend a ridiculous amount of money getting to the market, have about 10 minutes to spend there and then have to come back or else make everyone late to the big family lunch. But the car was there, Marisa was waiting and whatever. It was, of course, completely worth it. The rain stopped, we bought fresh maneesh with zaatar cheese and vegetables, tasted sweets olives breads from the different stalls, bought meringues, fresh squeezed orange juices…most of the shoppers were students and if I lived in Beirut I would spend all my food money there—it reminded me of a smaller version of the market in Dupont.

We even made it home again without making anyone wait for us. Lunch, in honor of Josyan’s birthday, was at a country club in Jounieh, a big port city 15 minutes north of Beirut, with views of the mountainside behind the marina filled with yachts and sailboats. By the time we rolled ourselves out of the restaurant, I began to feel the cumulated effects of a week spent eating in restaurants and sitting in cars…

That night my mom arrived at the airport and we went to pick her up with Chantal. Unfortunately Chantal was leaving the next morning for Berlin and was in a frenzy to pack and organize her life before she left, so my mom saw her for a total of about an hour. Even still, how lucky we were that the four of us all ended up in Beirut with the family at the same place at the same time, given how long it had taken us Americans to get there in the first place (Marilyn, 30 years, my mom 12, Marisa, her life). And how lucky that I was living only a few hours away when this all came together, and was the reason that my mom came through Beirut in the first place.

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The next day we had hoped that we would make it to the Mazara’a, the family’s summer house in the mountains, even though it was not yet the season for visiting. Unfortunately Chantal was leaving, the roads were muddy or snowy and not fit for driving, there was no one to show us the way, and the house was too much connected to Sr Agnes for Nagibe to want to visit it so soon after her death (Sr Agnes was the main caretaker of the house and the family’s farms). Instead we made a day trip to Tripoli and spent the day eating sweets and walking around the city’s old markets and back up to the citadel on a hill.

Monday Marisa and Marilyn left for Paris, where they spent a few days before returning to the US, and my mom and I went to visit the archbishop and Sr Julienne. We took them out to lunch and tried to learn more about our family’s Armenian history. I had met a few Armenians at Georgetown who were shocked to know that my family was Armenian Catholic but we didn’t know if we actually had Armenian heritage. To them, being from a nation that has survived an attempt to be wiped off the face of the earth, being connected to one’s history language and culture is vital to keeping it alive in the next generation. So we asked and were surprised to get a fairly straightforward answer (at least in the beginning). Yes, my grandfather’s mother was Armenian, her name meaning “prince” in Armenian, but the family had emigrated a few centuries before so there was no direct connection. So what about my grandfather’s father? Coussa is not an Armenian name. And where does the Armenian Catholic come from—the mother or the father? And why has no one ever talked about this before?

The most surprising thing to me about my grandfather’s family is that 1) there is no one left living in Syria and 2) my grandfather was the only one of 9 ? kids to have children. 3 became nuns, 1 became an archbishop, 2 married without children, and 2 died young. My grandfather was born in 1903 and didn’t marry and have children until his mid-forties, after he had emigrated to New York (alone, at the age of 17 and without speaking English) and built up a successful import-export business, American Pistachio Corporation. What a life he must have left behind, compared to the one he built for himself and his family—Syria at the turn of the century!

So from Lebanon, my mom and I travelled to northern Syria to Aleppo, to visit the birthplace of the Coussas.

Part One: School’s Out for Six Weeks

After being out of the house on Thursday from 830 to 130 am, I made up for it by sleeping in for the next two days, catching up on laundry, studying, and making plans for the next few weeks of travel. I had been searching for a hotel for my parents when they arrived, but even though I thought they would beat the high tourist season, all the hotels I found were either reasonable but in the wrong part of the city, charming and nearby but too expensive, inexpensive and relatively close but depressing, reasonable but available for one night only, or just plain full. In the end I made reservations in three different hotels to keep the options open so we wouldn’t have to take my host family up on their offer to have my parents sleep in the sons’ room and have Farah sleep with his parents.

In the afternoon I left the house to walk a few blocks to the café where I spent several hours catching up on emails and such. I ran into Ibrahim and he transferred his videos from the concert and dinner the night before from his cellphone via bluetooth onto my computer and in turn I sent him some new music to sample. Unfortunately only one of his videos worked (though you can’t really see anything) and I haven’t seen him since so I have no videos to upload for you, nor do I have any feedback about what he thinks about my own taste in music.

Sunday I decided I needed to do a little bit more hands-on research for my parents’ visit so I left the house in the morning to walk around the souqs in the old city in order to have a better idea of how to get around the markets and what we should shop for (handmade scarves, tablecloths, gold and silver jewelry, ceramics, wood carved mother-of-pearl inlaid backgammon sets and furniture, art, etc etc etc). The stores didn’t open until after 10, though many didn’t open at all because it was a national holiday, marking the day of the Ba’athist party revolution that put the current political party into power. After a few hours of walking I decided to rest in a café and after decoding the menu with the help of the friendly waiter (who later gave me his email address so we could practice English-Arabic together) ordered a grilled marinated chicken sandwich (shish tawouk) that was unfortunately covered in coleslaw (‘Swiss’ salad).

By the time I returned home, mid-day, the sun was blazing and it was at least in the mid-70s. My host brothers were outside frying kibbe for lunch, wearing t-shirts and sunglasses for the first time. It seemed that summer was coming early, though it had been rainy and 50s just the week before.

I skipped lunch with the family and walked to my yoga class, taking a new route that looked shorter on my map, and if I hadn’t gotten slightly lost it probably would have been. Frank and I were the only ones in the class again and I am pretty sure he will be skipping the next few classes until I return from travelling.

I walked back to the house after class and called Katherine, who had offered to lend me her LP on Jordan so I could make a plan for my travels after my parents leave. When I called her she was on her way home after making visiting a Crusader’s castle a few hours north with a friend in town for the weekend from Jordan, so she invited me to join them that evening at a café in the old city that features a nightly storyteller (the last one in Damascus and definitely something that was top on my list of things to do). We agreed to meet around 730, so after eating dinner from the lunch my host mother had laid out for me (kibbe and tabbouleh) my tired legs and I headed out again on the 15 minute walk back to the old city. On my way, Katherine’s friend texted me to say Katherine’s phone was broken but they were exhausted and running late, so we should change our meeting place and time. Unfortunately I was already halfway there and since her phone is Jordanian the messages were delayed by about 7 minutes, so there was a lot of waiting around and being in the wrong place at the wrong time and confusion and being tired involved. Just before I reached Bab Sharqi, the eastern gate of the old city where we planned to meet, I found a drum corps rehearsing in the courtyard of an old church. A crowd had gathered outside of the fence and was watching the group of young men and women (mostly men) marching in place, with a young male baton thrower in the back.

Eventually the three of us found each other and since we were too late for the storyteller we decided to find a regular café in a restored Damascene house and just sit and talk for a while. Katherine’s friend, Bryana, is American but grew up in Egypt and spent the last 2 years at the Naval Academy but is now living in Jordan for the year as she takes time off to apply to transfer to another university in the states. I think she is working for an organization that works with Palestinian refugees, she talked about travelling around Lebanon and Jordan and visiting all the refugee camps, and she and Katherine were planning to see one in Damascus the next day. I had seen one while driving on the way to Baalbek in Lebanon, and was surprised to see that the camp was a whole complex of apartments. I had read that Palestinian refugees chose not to integrate into their new cities, despite living in one place for many years, because they didn’t want to settle in to a "better life" and lose the desire to return to their homeland. Therefore, in my head I had envisioned that they would literally be in camps, with tents or something equally impermanent, and though I am sure these living conditions are nothing to brag about, seeing concrete buildings dispelled images of dusty tents from my mind. Either way, I don't know very much about their living situations but I wonder what that means for their opportunities for employment and sustaining themselves.

While we sat in the cafe, my aunt called me from Beirut to say that she and my cousin had arrived from the US and we confirmed our plans that I would arrive Tuesday afternoon to see them.

--

Monday morning, I woke up looking forward to our family outing to the countryside. Unfortunately, the father was nowhere to be found and no one else in the house seemed to be getting ready to leave by 11. I asked Oubai, who was hanging out in the TV room with a friend, if our plans had changed and he looked at me funny and said, oh, did my father tell you that? I don’t think we are going today. He did tell me, however, that he was going to look for a backgammon set to bring back to Saudi Arabia (he was planning to leave in a few days) and I asked if I could go with him to the market. We took a cab to the old city and walked to the souvenir shops outside of the Ummayyad Mosque. I asked him if there was a better place to buy the sets, perhaps directly from a workshop, since everything would be overpriced in that area. He didn’t know anywhere else and didn’t feel like searching in a different neighborhood so he bought one and afterwards as we sat in a café and admired his purchase and the old man next to us laughed at the price he paid, at least I felt a little better that it is not only foreigners that get ripped off in the markets. In the street next to us, there was a large crowd watching as periodically men on horses would ride by, waving large green flags with white Arabic calligraphy on them, in celebration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday.

While we sat, Frank texted me to see if I wanted to join him and friends at a documentary film festival. I had seen posters for the festival around the city, but like all posters for galleries and exhibits and films and events, they are of course in Arabic (i.e. it takes more than a few minutes to decode) and there was only the name of the theater with no address or phone number. There is definitely an existing contemporary arts scene in Damascus (though it struggles to find support within the local community), with young artists, filmmakers, dancers and photographers, but unless you know someone who is part of the scene and knows where these theaters and galleries are, it is a little difficult to figure it out on your own. Frank’s roommate is a young Algerian playwright so he finds out about a lot of different events through her.

I invited Oubai to join us and we returned to the house to drop off his purchases and then left to meet the others. We were a pretty large group—I knew Frank and Nanju and their friend Oliver, and then Nanju invited his friend who brought a friend, and I brought Oubai. Oubai felt a little awkward being the only local but it was good to switch it around a little bit. The theater was 95% foreigners which we decided demonstrated either the foreign student’s determination to find social/cultural events in the city or the Syrian youth’s lack of exposure/interest in these kinds of events. The film (“There are no more Pomegranates in Tehran”) was a young Iranian filmmaker’s attempt to encapsulate Tehran in all its complexities. He used clips from old films about the city to compare (lightheartedly) the fashions, customs and environment of Tehran across the centuries until the modern era.

His film reminded me of my own attempt at blogging, or rather, any effort to portray a culture/city/people to the outside world. He picked little snippets of life and wrote his own narrative, which he claimed from the beginning might be nothing more than fiction. But in the end the film was incomplete—he found it impossible to capture a whole city in just one film, tying moments together to create an overarching picture worthy of representing a complex and multi-faceted culture. Inevitably one will fabricate and skew a history in an effort to tell a story; it was clear from the clips that he chose that he was not trying to be balanced and objective in his filmmaking. So in the end he decided next time he will make a film about pomegranates instead.

After the film we decided to return home to rest our feet and get something to eat. Leila had left us soup, potato salad with parsley, tomato, olive oil and garlic, and greens sauteed with garlic and oil and sprinkled with lemon juice. Oubai found that in the evening the same theater was showing a Syrian film, so we returned for the 715 show. Katherine and Bryana had invited me to join them for another attempt to see the storyteller, but I chose to cancel on them since I figured the storyteller was there every night but the film festival for only one week.

This time the theater was packed with Syrians, so I felt somewhat reassured about their interest in local arts. The filmmaker was present in the theater too, apparently he is well-known in the documentary world, and his documentary was on the dreams of Palestinian refugees. He interviewed refugee families living in different countries and they spoke about their nightly dreams of returning to their homeland, of martyred family members returning home, of religious and political figures speaking to them, of rebuilding their lives back in Palestine. The film was well-done and helped to put a face to the refugees who knew only conflict and displacement in their lives.

That night I stayed up late spending more time with the family, eating fruit and talking. I was planning to leave for Beirut the next morning and felt a little guilty that I had been so busy the past week or so and would be travelling for the weeks to come. Oubai was planning to leave for Saudi a few days after I left, so I was particularly grateful that we had the chance to spend the day together and promised to keep up our English and Arabic via Skype once I returned to the states.

There was a movie on TV about the Prophet Muhammad in honor of his birthday and that started a round of conversations. The movie depicted Arabs at the time of the Prophet, aka 7th century CE, and Philip made a point to distinguish between the Arabs' history pre- and post-Islam and pointed to their position in high civilization during the time of Roman colonization, commenting that “Islam has now ruined the image of the Arabs.” He also distinguished between the history of Arabs in the desert (the nomads) aka Arabia where Islam began, and the more 'civilized' Arabs of the Levant. It was interesting to think about it from the perspective of an Arab Christian, living in a country that is predominantly Muslim at a time when the word "Arab" is used synonymously with "Muslim" (though the majority of Muslims live in South East Asia) and not necessarily in a flattering way, and the kind of resentment that might build.

That night I went to bed undecided about if I should go to Lebanon or not the next morning. I had been so busy the past few days that I didn’t want to rush off and leave, considering that I wouldn’t have time to relax at home for a few weeks. At the same time I didn’t have anything specific to stay home for and I was looking forward to seeing Marilyn and Marisa in Beirut. Nevertheless I said goodbye and goodnight to the family just in case and put off packing til I made up my mind.

The next morning I woke up ready to leave. I wanted to go to the university on the way to the bus station so I hurriedly packed my backpack, ate breakfast, and tried to think about what I would need for the next week and a half until returning to Damascus with my mom. Unfortunately I had to bring my bags with me to the university so I resigned myself to looking like a tourist and walked through campus with my big red backpack and smaller bag hanging off my arm. I wanted to check my final grade to make sure I passed the class and then ask the administration questions about their policies for taking the next classes, obtaining documents for Georgetown and such. Nishkrallah I passed the class and it seems I will be able to get the papers for Georgetown to get some amount of credit, TBD.

From there, the bus station, and after $20 taxi rides across the border I was relieved to be without a schedule and this time chose to take the bus for $8. The bus left the station less than half full and as we were pulling out of the station I received a phone call from the university. It was the same woman I spoke to in the office before so at first I was worried something had changed or I had left something at the office, but I soon realized she didn’t know who I was. Rather, she was inviting me, as an American student, to have dinner that night with the president of the university and a group of visiting Arabic professors from the US. I regretfully told her I was on a bus heading out of the country and debated for a few minutes whether I could just take my bags home again and leave tomorrow instead. It would have been interesting to go to an official dinner, meet other American students, talk to the professors, meet the president………. But I was on a bus and it was too late and it was pretty short notice anyway so instead I put on my headphones and tried to let Wuthering Heights (thank you Lauren!) block out my ‘whatifs’ and ‘ifonlys.’

Prelogue

Ok it's officially been 2 weeks, aka an impossible amount of time to catch up on, while still traveling. Therefore the last few weeks will have to be condensed a bit but I invite others to help me to fill in the blanks (Auntie Marilyn, Marisa, Mom and Dad). And pictures will be a bit delayed as well. Life is tough.

After a brief hiatus,

Ahhh too much to catch up on.

A teaser for what is to come, as I try and organize my thoughts for the next few updates:

Vacation! The end of of my first class and the beginning of the (soon to be) epic six-week break:

Part 1: a few days rest at home in Damascus, getting to know the city and its people a little better

Part 2: heading back to Beirut to see my aunt Marilyn and cousin Marisa, visiting from "Amreeka" / Connecticut.

Part 3: the arrival of my mom in Beirut and the beginning of our two week travels (at which point we reach current time)

Part 4: the arrival of my dad in Damascus in our second week (now we are looking to the future)

Part 5: the departure of my parents from Amman, the beginning of That Which Remains To Be Seen.


But for now, it is time to live in the present and so you will have to wait until I have time to reflect on the past.

From Megadeath to Mega-Dinner! And then more music.

After the concert, we loitered, waiting to gather the 9 of us back again. Ibrahim found us with a poster in his hand and told us we could go back inside and get free posters, then suggested we find the band and get autographs, which we obviously couldn't refuse--though it was a little awkward, since we are no longer in the prime groupie years of 14-16. Then came the inevitable question of, what next? I felt right back at school, my AmeriEuro friends pulled out their cellphones, looking for the next party or whatever, but we settled on finding a nearby restaurant to sit and get something to eat. Ibrahim's friend suggested one with a live singer, so after shedding a few from our group, we walked around the block into the old city.

The restaurant was called "Narcissus Palace" and was in a renovated old Damascene house, with a large courtyard (the ceiling was covered for the winter) filled with long tables of families. We sat in the back, with the groups of men, where apparently they put all the 'rowdy' folks who might not be family-appropriate (I was the only female back there, not that it was weird but still.) The waiter informed us that it's necessary to order the full mezze menu, and then if we wanted to add anything else, we could. Our table was soon filled with small dishes of hummus, labne, muhammara, tabbouleh, fattoush, arugula salad, kibbe, chicken, etc etc and so on and so forth. I tried a drink made from fresh lemon juice and mint (it came out green and delicccccious) I think it was called something like popo.

Dinner conversation morphed from one topic to the next, though I won't record them here. Suffice it to say it was very interesting and thought-provoking. By the end of the meal, a few of our friends were anxious to move on and continue celebrating the end of class at a friend's house, but Paolo and I decided to stay for the music with Ibrahim and his friend.

The music was the same kind of music that the band performed at that cafe in Lebanon-- the traditional Arabic songs that everyone in the restaurant knew all the words to. It wasn't quite the same dancing spectacle as in Beirut, though by the end small children were dancing on tables and people were up in the aisles dancing with friends. Behind us was a long table of men and a few of them got up, twisting their hips and shaking their chests, and were met with a lot of cheers and laughter. Though it may not be common for men to dance like women, it certainly wasn't their first time.

But the best part of it all was seeing Ibrahim and his friend waving napkins in the air, dancing in their seats, singing along and wearing their Megadeath t-shirts, the same two who had been jumping around and banging their heads to rock songs just a few hours earlier.

What Rocks? Syrian Punk.

A week or so ago I met Ibrahim at the coffeehouse of unreliable-wireless and overpriced-drinks where I like to study. He was wearing a Harley-Davidson t-shirt and one of his first questions for me, after asking if I could charge his phone on my computer, was if I liked Harleys/owned one in the US. He is studying medicine to be a plastic surgeon, because they actually make money, and wants to work in the US because you can have tattoos and piercings without losing all your clients.

Somehow we got onto the topic of metal music, which is forbidden here because it encourages devil-worship and unproductive behavior, as is rap, which encourages an equally immoral lifestyle, albeit in a completely different direction. He told me that if you have a band and want to put on a concert here you have to register it, and if you register it as a metal concert of course it won’t be approved and you might be asked a few questions. (It is not, however, forbidden in other places in the ME and he told me that Metallica and Megadeath were on their way to play Dubai, and he had been to two metal concerts while living in Saudi Arabia—the first was men-only but the second was on the American compound.) But rock and roll is an unknown here and so he told me about his friends who were putting on a punk concert the following weekend. I had actually seen posters for it around the university campus and had been curious to know more.

So yesterday, after my leisurely lunch with Katherine and Jack, I met my friend Frank and a few of his friends who live in the center of the city (conveniently located to our restaurant) to hang out for a bit before the 6 pm concert. We went to the house of Nanju, who I had met a few weeks ago when we went salsa dancing together. He lives in a house with other foreigners, the rooms are on the outskirts of a nice garden/fountain with tables and chairs and they pay about the same as me for their rooms with shared bathrooms and kitchen.

Just before 530 we made our way out the door, collecting a few more friends on the way—Traviss, from Michigan, and Paolo, from Italy. We were all curious to see what the music/crowd/scene would be like. We met Ibrahim and four of his friends and then found a near-empty mini-bus to take all 9 of us to our destination.

The concert was in a venue called Dar al-Fanoun “House of the Arts,” which we found, as per usual with concerts in unknown locations, by following those who looked most likely to be going to the same place we were headed—the two guys with shoulder-length black hair. The crowd had filled the street outside the door and was waiting to be let in. Ibrahim knew the band and said it was their first concert ever, and that rock concerts only come around once or twice a year, as large congregations of people are considered a little suspicious. By the time we made it inside, there were probably about 200 people inside, from mid-twenties and older down to the young teens. Based on the crowd response, it definitely seems like a scene waiting to happen, and the absence of alcohol or drugs from the venue made it authority-friendly as well.

The kids were appropriately dressed with Vans and Cons, jeans, red black and white checked belts and sweatshirts, black wristbands, neon graffitied t-shirts, black mesh gloves—even a girl in a white headscarf with a skull and crossbones necklace, and the same pattern repeated on her shirt. In addition, there were plenty of people dressed like any other Syrian youth just off the street; in Ibrahim’s opinion this sign of mainstream appeal bode well for the argument that not all rockers/metal-heads are devil-worshippers and depressed drug addicts. They jumped around, cheered and screamed, waved their fists and devil-horns, tried to crowd-surf but were held back by security… just a good old-fashioned rock show.

The band had passed out sheets with their lyrics printed on them while the fans waited outside the door, so some held them up to sing along to the unfamiliar songs. In between their original material, (written in Arabic and including songs about the pressures of graduating high school, girls getting married too young, fathers, unemployment/lack of money/lack of future, general discontent) they played songs from AC DC, Metallica and the Offspring. It was particularly entertaining to hear the lead singer call out “I don’t want to be an American idiot” followed up later with the lyric “I’m not part of your redneck agenda” in a surprisingly accurate American accent. And then later, the last song (played twice, to the crowd’s delight) which had everyone singing along, “We’re on a Highway to Hell.”

It’s interesting to see how rock and metal seem to have caught on here, a few decades late but without the influence of drugs or devils, inspired only by good-old discontent, concern for the future and a need to have fun.

You Georgetown Kids May Have Just Had Your Midterms, But It’s Finals Time In Damascus

Thursday morning, bright and early, our exam began at 9 am. 1 ½ hours of writing/reading/grammar with a 30 minute break of a listening exam thrown in the middle. The exam wasn’t that bad—it included an article about obesity in America, another about addiction to smoking that was read aloud for the listening section and an essay question on whether the Internet would/already has replaced the need for books—though you wouldn’t know it as every time the professor left the room half the class would turn to their neighbor, their notes or their textbooks for the answers. The attitude of the other students in my class throughout the month had surprised me and it was probably the only downside of my experience thus far at the language institute.

Before I came other students that I talked to who had studied at the institute warned me it was the professor who was the determining factor in how successful your class was, but in this case the students definitely brought it down. Some of them genuinely wanted to learn and had many valid questions, but overall we probably did about 1 ½ hours of actual work every day with the other hours tied up in answering endless repeated questions for each of the 16 other students in the class and addressing their repeated complaints about the exam and how difficult everything was and blah blah blah. So although it would be nice to go on to the next level in a week or so and have some familiar faces in my class, perhaps its not such a bad thing that I will be taking the next month off and getting a little off track.

After the written exam we waited around for the conversation section. Students went in two at a time and had to pick a random topic, then debate it between the two of them. The topics were based on our class discussions with Hassan and included: What is the most important relationship between men and women and why (mine)? Is the Internet good or bad and why? Is the study and preservation of ancient sites good or bad and why (maybe the worst question of them all)? I was towards the end of the list, so by the time it reached my and Wan-Jin’s turn to be tested, Hassan was completely bored and let us go after about five minutes of discussing why its important for men and women to have friendships.

With the exam and level 5 behind us, I went with Katherine and Jack (20 year-old taking a semester off from university in Australia) to find a book for Katherine in a particular neighborhood based on a handdrawn map. One of her Syrian friends had recommended the book to her, it is a collection of stories aimed towards children written in fus’ha and about the lives of the 16 prophets (of which Muhammad is the last). The map led us to a back-roads street with two Islamic bookshops on it. It seemed a little random that her friend would direct us to this exact spot, especially once Katherine asked for the book at both shops and neither one had it, though one told her to wait for 10 minutes and someone would bring it. While we waited we walked a little in the area to see if we had missed another more obvious street of bookshops but there was none. When we returned the book still wasn’t there so we sat on the steps and ate from a bag of mixed nuts and decided that someone was probably frantically biking around the city trying to buy this book for her for a third of the price she will be charged.

Book in hand, we walked in the general direction of Katherine’s gym, where she gladly pays $100 a month to work out 2-3 hours a day, including shower (the house that she lives in doesn’t have a shower, only bucket baths), and she said it’s the only gym that she visited where the men didn’t stop working out to stare at her when she walked inside. On the way we got into a discussion about Islam, about various aspects of the religion and particularly how it is expressed here. Katherine met a student in her level 4 class who is British and lives here with his Pakistani-British wife, and who converted to Islam for their marriage. Somehow she feigned enough interest in being converted herself to get invited to their daily Qu’ran lessons and so she sits and listens (not exactly a discussion-based lesson) to the lectures geared towards Western converts. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me and definitely great insight into the basic teachings of Islam.

Still, I don’t know if it is best to study Islam from the perspective of your average local Muslim, considering the fact that there seem to be infinite ways (probably as many as there are in other religions) to interpret and internalize the religion—from perspectives on heaven and hell, relationships with nonbelievers, family life, wearing the headscarf, gender roles, perspectives on other religions, ideas about the origins of Islam and its current form, etc. Maybe it is better to study it from an outsider-academic-historic-comparative religion-perspective, trying to make sense of all these seemingly contradictory interpretations and what they have to do with the rest of the world. Obviously a combination of both is best, but these personal Qu’ran lessons seem to be pretty exclusive and besides, listening to one teacher doesn’t tell you anything about all the other ways people understand their religion. And perhaps, neither does sitting in a class at Georgetown on Islamic Studies, 1000s of miles away from the Muslim world, listening to a professor who would probably be condemned if s/he taught this way here. Or what about the g’town counterpart to Katherine’s lessons in the Ummayad Mosque, studying the Qu’ran with the Muslim Students Association?

Anyway, of course none of us really know anything about the topic in reality, but we stood for about 20 minutes talking on a street corner between her gym and the direction of where Jack and I live, before we decided to just sit in a restaurant and get some lunch instead. We walked to a nearby restaurant (the first actual restaurant I’ve been to in Damascus!) on the upper floor of a building at a table that overlooked a busy central square in the city and ordered a few small dishes, sitting for a while longer and enjoying the end of our class and the beginning of our weekend.

We just got a letter, We just got a letter…

In the book of favorite people of the moment, Lauren is number one! Hooray for the postal service working (apparently with the advent of the internet, home delivery ceased, hence my address being my host-father’s office; also letters with suspicious content can take a few extra weeks/months to reach their destination, so keep it clean!) and for homemade birthday cards and everything of the sort. So now you know, world, and you can put all those envelopes you’ve been waiting to send into the mail.

Listening sessions with Hassan

Since this is the last week of class for level 5, yesterday we had our last day of listening with our listening teacher, Hassan. He meets with us 4 hours a week and we have discussions and listen to texts and such. In general it is for many students their least favorite part of the week and will conveniently come to class at 11 if we have him in the morning. I didn’t like him at first but then I realized what bothered me about him was that he speaks like the religious preachers on the TV and radio (which I hear every morning on the bus on my way to school). I don’t know if this is because he personally emulates them, or this is what he associates fus’ha with or what else, but once I recognized this assocation I got over it and I enjoyed the class discussions and some of the cultural nuances that it is possible to glean from them.

They can sometimes be very painful because the discussions are framed in black and white terms and usually directed towards a certain resolution; we discussed things like: The Internet, good or bad? Today’s Youth with too much Free Time. Drug Addiction, why? Immigration and the Brain Drain, good or bad? The function of Dance in a society. Relationships between men and women: what kinds and what do they look like? (This led to an interesting question of whether it was better to have multiple wives and be faithful to all of them or have only one but multiple girlfriends. Polygamy is not accepted in cities but is not uncommon in the countryside and therefore is considered (by some) an unfortunate but inevitable part of the culture.)

One particularly awkward moment was during one of our first sessions about the origin of the alphabet (apparently originated in a coastal town in Syria) and we were discussing the development of written language from hieroglyphics to characters to distinct letters/alphabet. We were all a little confused what he meant by the Arabic term for characters and he tried to explain by writing something resembling Chinese or Japanese on the board, but of course he didn’t know any of it so instead he pointed to the one Asian student in the room, Wan Jin from Korea, and asked him to demonstrate for the class. Besides being incredibly awkward and embarrassing for Wan Jin to be singled out, it was also fruitless because Korean language is possibly closer to Turkic languages than it is to the languages of the Far East (we talked about this in class a little and I just fact-checked it on Wikipedia, uncensored by the gov't in just the past week!).

Exchange; Yoga pt. 3

I met with Manhal again on Sunday and this time we discussed the differences in the university systems in Syria and in the US. It was a conversation I had begun with Oubai, as he was explaining to me a few days ago over lunch about his law studies. He is home for one month to study law and take 5 tests, then he will return to Saudi to his job. As I learned, this is his 3rd year at the university (out of 4 years) and there are 12 tests a year but the classes are not mandatory. Therefore he takes his books and does the readings/studies on his own and comes home only to take the tests. However his university is new and private, so it is on a different system than the government universities. This is what I learned/understood from my two conversations with Manhal and Oubai:

In high school you study all the subjects, as per usual, then at the end of your 4th year you take a series of tests. Depending on your test scores, you will be told what your career options are. For example, if your overall scores are 235 out of 240, you can go to the university to be a doctor. If they are 230 you can be a dentist, if they are 225 you can be a lesser-form-of-doctor and so on and so forth. Basically the ‘smartest’ students can take the best jobs and such. Manhal said he wanted to be an economist but that required a score of 201 and he scored 200, aka an agricultural engineer. Oubai’s scores directed him towards mechanical engineering. Additionally you have your scores from your individual subjects. If you scored 29 out of 30 in English you can study English literature. If you only got a 25, you can be a translator, etc. So you have “choices” based on your individual scores and then a choice in a broader career path (like engineering or medicine that is not confined to one subject) based on your overall score. You write down your preferences and then you are told which you can pursue and which you cannot. Then you have, I think, two years to enter a government university or else you lose the opportunity. University is free and you take classes only in the subject of your specialization.

If you don’t want to follow this system, you can attend one of the newer private universities which obviously cost money but allow you to choose your own concentration. Oubai left his university after two years of studies, worked for a while, then began studying law in a private university. Manhal decided instead to attend a virtual university and study computer science, which he couldn’t do in a public university because his scores weren’t high enough. Knowing Manhal and his lack of interest in anything outside of computers and the internet, the idea of him working as a farmer is a little ridiculous. He takes English classes at the University of Damascus, the same school as me, because some of his classes in the higher levels of computer science will be in English.

So as you might imagine, this system creates a few problems with the young people of Syria. As Oubai explained, it creates spiritual problems because you are not able to choose your own career and goals in life. As I talked about with Manhal, students enroll in university only because it is free, then they use it as a social base to meet people and hang out but never need to go to class. More importantly, you can delay your compulsory military service (for men) if you are studying, working abroad, have serious physical problems (ex. bad eyesight) or if you pay a certain amount after a certain number of years (Oubai has all of these excuses).

In return I explained the American process for applying to college and what stress and trauma it causes for our high school youth, though it seemed a little trivial after hearing about the situation here. At the same time, we have some of the same issues about choosing your own path in life, though our pressures come from society rather than the government. And regardless of how much money you pay to go to college, students will always be skipping class for parties and social joys and to delay the inevitable onset of responsibility and adulthood.

--

After talking with Manhal, I went on to my yoga class. This time there were 4 ! mats laid out on the floor, all facing the middle of the room with a candle at the center. A few minutes into our lesson Sandy and I were joined by another woman, and for the rest of the class Sandy switched between Arabic and English, which was good practice for me as much as it was for her. We did fewer stretches overall, instead we took some time to sit and talk (while Sandy translated) about why we practice yoga and what ‘positive thinking’ means. I explained that I don’t think that yoga directly affects my life and makes me a better person, rather I practice it because it fits into my lifestyle and the way I look at myself and the rest of the world. I prefer it to working out and like the fact that it stretches your whole body instead of just certain muscles and it encourages awareness of simple things like breathing and movement and your own physical needs. And for me positive thinking is not so much thinking that everyday is going to be perfect and beautiful but instead it is more about accepting my lack of flexibility or lack of strength in some areas and working to improve it slowly through practice.

[If I felt like turning this blog into something more introspective I might discuss the connection between accepting my physical body for what it is while working with it to the best of my abilities and my situation living here, in a strange and unfamiliar country and culture, confronted with new sources of self-doubt and self-consciousness. But alas it is not.]

So then Monday in class Hajer went around and asked everyone what they did the day before, and I said I had been to my yoga class. Immediately several of the people in class asked “where” and “when” and “how much” and such. So much for my private lessons! Another friend of mine, Frank, the one who saw the ad for the yoga class in the first place, decided to join the class too, so yesterday he came with me. The studio is called “Me and Mommy” so it is definitely geared toward a target audience. It has a mini spa with sauna, jacuzzi, massage tables, manicure room etc. The walls are purple, the stairs are white and sparkly, the curtains are sheer white with purple tassles and the mood lighting is purple, including the purple candles. Needless to say, after our class was over and Frank decided he would come again, he asked me worriedly why there was no one else in the class and said he didn’t know if he could handle being the only (male) student in this overly-feminine environment. I reassured him that two more students from my Arabic class would be coming next Sunday and hopefully they will stick around while I am travelling so Frank will not be alone.

So I’m going to be travelling for the next few weeks! Next Tuesday I think I will be going back to Beirut to visit because 1) my aunt Marilyn and cousin Marisa from home are coming Sunday for vacation to see the fam and 2) the weekend after my mom is flying in. Then my mom and I will travel to Aleppo I think for a few days, then back down to Damascus where my dad is flying in on Friday the 20th. We’ll be in Damascus for a few days, making day trips to nearby sites and exploring the city, maybe visit Palmyra in the East for an overnight, then down to Jordan to stay in Amman for a few nights and see Petra, Wadi Rum and such. Then they leave from Amman on the 28th and I don’t have class until April 20th…so what to do? Stay in Jordan and travel alone? (Actually I do know some students from Georgetown studying there this semester, maybe I can visit them, though I don’t know if they are free to travel). Come back to Syria and see more of the country on my own? (Not necessarily recommended for young female travellers, yet when else will I be able to do it?) Stay in Damascus and study independently with a private tutor? Go back to Lebanon and do something new, like hike on the Lebanese Mountain Trail (but still, alone)? I vote we make this like a “make-your-own-adventure” story and you can decide for me.

Family Matters

I wore a t-shirt in the house, for the first time since I arrived, the other day after walking home from yoga and for the next 24 hours, every time I saw Philip, the father, he made a comment on either a) how if I have any problems I can ask him for help or b) how great it was to see me eating (and I was only eating a carrot at the time). When he saw me eating breakfast the next morning he put his arm on my shoulder and said “It is necessary that you put flesh here and here and here” pointing to various parts of my back. I don’t know exactly what he was hinting at, but never fear, I eat very well here.

This past week for lunch we have had okra/parsley/tomato/lemon/garlic over rice pilaf; carrots/onions/artichokes stewed in lemon/garlic/olive oil with lentil soup; rice with ground meat (like hasweh) and green fool & tabbouleh; stuffed grape leaves; football shaped kibbe made from potato but stuffed with lamb and walnuts; football shaped kibbe made from potato, stuffed with diced potatoes in a sour-ish sauce eaten with more of the same potato sauce; fool bi-tabbouleh; radish salad (grated radish in lemon and garlic dressing) and so on and so forth. Sunday night we even had cheesecake! for Philip’s birthday. Leila had never made (or eaten) cheesecake before and they certainly don’t have it (or cream cheese) here but she made an interesting version of it with Laughing Cow cheese (they call it Qui Rit, “keeree” cheese) and a cookie bottom with strawberry jam on top.

In general, my only complaint about the food here is that there is not always dinner—generally it is leftovers/eat what you like, but if there are no leftovers and I don’t want to eat bread and cheese or lubneh for two meals a day, there is always my fallback plan of a peanut butter and honey sandwich. Since I pay them for food I don’t want to have to go out to buy something else, yet I don’t know exactly how to ask, so…what’s for dinner? if there is nothing prepared in the fridge. One of the other students in my class said she has a similar problem living with a family, though hers is more drastic because she really only gets one meal a day (lunch). The family she lives with is poorer (the 3 kids sleep in one room and the parents on the living room floor) and though she pays more than I do she feels guilty asking them to prepare her extra food. Therefore she supplements the food they give her with extra snacks and breakfast foods and fruit and such.

Today I came home after class and for the first time in a long time the whole family was home together for lunch. We had baked spaghetti and luban and for dessert something made from tahini-lemon-sugar-vanilla-pistachios that I forget the name of. The father told me that they were planning to go to the mother’s home village this weekend to visit her mother and go out to a local restaurant where they make food from the time “before Noah.” Noah’s Ark, that is. And of course I should join them because the whole family is going and I am part of the family! I am definitely looking forward to 1) my first outing with the family 2) the food 3) seeing another town in Syria.

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Other moments of note with the fam this week:

- The father asking me if I believed in Jesus. He was very concerned with my response and told me it is important that young women like myself have high morals and that he hopes I am very happy in life with a good man and many babies. The conversation lightened a bit when he told me another one of his proverbs, which is something like “At 20 a woman is the most beautiful to look at, at 30 is the best time for her to have babies, at 40 and 50 something something and then at 60, the knife!”

- Debate with the family about whether the Qu’ran was originally written without the dots above and below letters that distinguish one from another (for instance the same shape with one dot above is an “n”, with two dots it is a “t,” with three it is the sound “th”). This led to the argument that Muslims don’t know the true meaning of the Qu’ran because someone filled in the dots and who knows if its actually correct. I asked if there was a form of Arabic that existed before the Qu’ran without dots, they responded, yes, I think so. So maybe they understood how to read it without dots, even though we cannot today, and it was translated into text with dots when that style developed?

- Home alone with Farah, the youngest son (13), whom I haven’t spoken to that much since he doesn’t speak English well and I don’t volunteer to speak Arabic. We were doing homework in the TV room and I turned on the news to practice listening. There was a news story from Iraq about 9 children who were kidnapped and held for ransom and there was an interview with one of the parents whose child was returned and Farah and I were both at a loss to understand the Iraqi dialect. It made me feel a little better about myself. Then I changed the channel to the Fox Movie Channel which was playing The Punisher (with Arabic subtitles) and Farah warned me that it wouldn’t be good for me (he meant because it was unnecessarily graphic in its depiction of violence) and so we bonded over his teenager-delight in the movie and my inability to watch someone get tortured by having his lip rings being pulled out.