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.’