Weekend Update

Let’s start with last weekend. Thursday evening I went with my host mom, Leila, to a classical music concert in an old Greek church called Church Zeitoon (Olive Church) in the old city. The orchestra performing was visiting from a church in London and played a mixture of classical ‘spiritually-themed’ music and contemporary Christian music, which was overall much more bearable/enjoyable than the previous week’s performance. Some of the songs included audience sing-alongs, for which there was a program on every seat with lyrics in English and Arabic. The crowd was mostly Syrians but there were also a few foreigners scattered, many of whom Leila knew from church.

There was a local Syrian pastor acting as translator for the British pastor, who worked at a local church and was hosting the event, and the British conductor, who was a little crazy and invariably tried to make his speech more welcoming to the foreign/local audience but at the same time made it impossible for the other pastor to translate. I could understand enough of what the translator said to see how much he condensed and simplified the speech of the conductor, and there were times when the conductor would list off foreign cities and composers and the translator would stop mid-sentence and ask how to pronounce something, or try to keep up but then trail off and disregard the rest.

Translation was also a problem when the Greek Patriarch stood up to make a speech and made it in Arabic, and the poor translator was so confused that he began condensing it into Arabic instead of English. Also, when it came time for the audience sing-along, the conductor invited up a man from Leila’s church to lead the Arabic singing while he himself led the English singing, at the same time. Of course the English was drowned out and it sounded terrible. Also I could read enough of the Arabic to know that it did not say anything of the original English lyrics and that they had been completely rewritten into contemporary Christian verse, which was something of a crime for traditional hymns such as Ode to Joy.

The whole event lasted nearly 2 ½ hours, with maybe 17 songs and an intermission, and a lot of prayers and announcements at the end. Afterwards I went with Leila to visit one of her friends that we met at the concert, who lived nearby and invited us over for tea. They lived near the hotel that my parents and I stayed in in the old city, in one of the apartments of an old Damascene house on the upper floor above a courtyard of lemon and orange trees. We stayed for about 20 minutes, until about 11 pm, and it was my first typical house visit for tea, Easter sweets and awkward conversation. Afterwards I walked to my friend’s house in another part of the old city to switch gears and go to a student party in another old Damascene house. When I arrived, the party had already split into the British faction and the American faction. The Americans were greatly outnumbered, there were only about four of us (myself, my friend from class and 2 kids from Princeton, who were exactly what I expected two guys studying Arabic at Princeton to be like). The foreign student social scene is pretty much exactly like it is, well, in America and Britain, except that everyone goes to the same one bar with bad music, lured in by weekly “specials” of free entry and one free drink. However it manages to be a good time regardless.