Damascus: City of Freaks

So it's been quite an eventful weekend. I turned down a date with a friend (because "I'm just not ready to date now") on Thursday evening and on Friday evening the whole family and a few of the girls went up into the mountains to have iftar with some of Um Zahir's family. They were up in a village in the mountains about 30 minutes away. The family was happy because they had two engaged girls, sixteen and fourteen. "Do you think that's young?" we foreigners were asked, and replied in the affirmative. "It's common in ar-reef (the country)". The "older" one is getting married not long after Ramadan, the younger one in about a year. We oohed and ahhed over the pictures from their engagement parties, but the older one had about 30 professional pictures, with classic wedding and senior pic poses, in which she had professional hair and makeup and a massive dress. The younger one had 3 dark, crappy pictures. We're not sure why the disparity. Both girls are cute, and their finances are, um, less so. They're both marrying cousins.

Back at home, we the foreign girls sat around talking about how young these girls are. Huda, Zahir's wife, is only 24 and has two kids, 6 and 4. She was engaged at 16, married at 17, gave birth at 18. Mindy has a theory that marrying cousins has caused a great rift between the attractive and nonattractive. "In America, most people are in the middle, from the top side of average to not that attractive, but still not horrible. Here is seems like people are either gorgeous or hideous."

"Plus, have you notices all the congenital diseases people have, or how many deformitites? You see lots of albinos, people with club feet, humps on their back..." She continued to list types, including types of short people "... some are perfectly proportioned, some have long arms, some have short legs, some have big heads. And this one time I was at Dar Musa (a Christian monastary) talking to this monk you was young and looked normal, but then I looked down at his feet and he had a sixth toe growing out the top of his little toe." Lindsey burst out: "You make it sound like Damascus is a city of freaks!" which is just a hilarious mental image. See the postcards: Visit Damascus, City of Freaks.

The Fulbright orientation starts tomorrow and I'm not very happy because it means I have to miss two full days of class! That's eight hours, and the midterm at the end of this week. And soon I promise to write about the shit that's been going down here: nuclear Syria? and bombs in Beirut.