Syrians Don't Try to Rip Me Off

I had a busy first day in Damascus. I woke up without knowing what time it was, so I just got up and went to breakfast in the hotel. Oh, 7:30 am. Awesome. I asked at the front desk about how to find a family to live with. "Wait for the manager, he knows a family." He'll be here 10.

So I went around looking for the other items on my to-do list: watch, Syrian SIM card, passport photos. At 8 everything was closed but I managed to buy a watch on the street. At 9 I bought a new charger for my Egyptian cell phone. The guy had to dig in the back to find something that worked with "such an old model". I bought it a year and half ago! He sold it to me for 100 lira, ($2) because of my eyes. I also bought a sim card off of him for 600 lira. I have a crap load of lira, and I was counting out when he stopped me, took one of my bills, and told me I was counting out thousands. Oops. I put them back in my bag, took my change. Now I have a friend, Khalid, albeit a friend that wants to marry me.

That's the problem with making guy friends here. First they want to get with you, then when you tell them you're married (I need to get a ring to make this believable), or otherwise taken, or not looking (this is not understood, after all I am old) they want to just be your friend. The taxi driver who took me to the Damascus University today (god that was hard) was singing my praises so I concocted a fake potential husband in New York, an Iranian-American named Amir (thank you Shadee for your brother). Why don't I have a ring? They are expensive in America, I said, and he's working to buy one. He'll visit me here and give me the ring. The driver, Muhammad, was particularly interested in knowing if we go out together. To restaurants? To movies? Sure we do. Do we live together? No, I live with a friend and he lives with his brother. We can't live together until we are married (I don't want the driver thinking I'm some libertine American whore)!

Back to yesterday I went back to the hotel and met the guy, Zahir, in whose house I am now living. He took me to the house, I saw the room (I get to move in September 25 - until then I am on a couch in a living room which is now off limits to everyone else). It's $150 a month - not too shabby. It's off the main street between Bab Touma and Suq al-Hammadiyya in the old city. By 2pm I had paid off the hotel and moved my stuff. There's Zahir, his mother, his wife Huda (24!) and two kids, Said 6 and Samar 4, who are Muslim, plus the foreign girls. It's an old house with an open courtyard in the center and 3 floors (plus two bedrooms on the roof). There's a Polish girl, German, British, and four Americans including myself. I met all of them, with varying degrees of better-than-my-Arabic, except the Brit who arrived five days ago. I don't think I heard her speak Arabic. There's a 33-year old American who is "miserable."

One of the Americans is my parent's worst fear: she arrive two months ago on a CLEO (what I'm on right now too). She met a half-Syrian, half-Pakistani, first language English, and they... got fucking married. She just returned from her honeymoon in Turkey. She's going to Kuwait on Fulbright and he's supposed to join her. At some point she's going to Pakistan for the traditional 400 hundred of his closest friends and family Pakistanti wedding. She's 22.

I did speak a lot of English with Mindy, the miserable American, but after a day of being really good, and speaking a lot of Arabic, I swear. I'm a bit frustrated with where my Arabic is, how much less I comprehend compared to a year ago right after Egypt. But I have to remind myself today is only my second day. Maybe I'll understand more at the dinner table tonight.