Snow in Damascus

It snowed!! a while ago but I didn't post any pictures of this rare event until now:


Are we in Lebanon? Close!

Ashoura

Every year on the 10th of Muharram (first month in Islamic calendar), Shi'is mourn the death of Hussain, grandson of the prophet. While Karbala and the most important holy sites are in Iraq, Syria has Sayida Zeinab, his sister, and Sayida Ruqayia, ensuring a steady stream of Iranian pilgrims. Ashoura this year was on a Saturday (January 20), when I'm in Sitt Zeinab anyways, teaching English, so I walked down the road and watched a procession of what other viewers told me were Pakistanis, beating themselves in time, rising and falling intensity.
I followed them into the Sitt Zeinab mosque, quickly transforming my scarf into a hijab.

I missed the "hard core" stuff - the cutting themselves with swords - because it was at 6am, but my friend Miqdad (British) caught it, though he has very strong opinions about inflicting pain to one's self being un-Islamic and unsupported by text. But he also told me to look out for Arba'een, forty days after Ashoura, when Sitt Zeineb is supposed to see even more pilgrims.

Happy Very Late Christmas From Syria!

Hey, well, the lights are still up.

Mehndi Party

The night before the wedding, it was time for a Mehndi Party!


But of course, the best designs were for the bride:

Circus!

The last night of Eid I went with some friends to the Ukrainian Circus in Jerimana.It was a modest circus, a small tent in a usually empty field, filled with plastic chairs. Most the performers did double- or triple-duty, as clowns, contortionists, acrobats, tightrope walkers, jugglers, and animal handlers - they had a baboon.






It was enjoyed by the mostly all-child audience, except for the part where a magician turned a burning piece of paper into a kitten. The kitten jumped out of his hands and ran towards the crowd, causing women to scream and throw their chairs in their attempt to run away. Women are strangely scared of cats here. Some of the acts weren't bad, though my friends bitched about the quality.











But I did get to hold a snake!

2006: Damascus: Mosque Party!

I had finally made it to Damascus after a fun journey. I was dropped off at al-Haramein hotel on Sharia Bahsa, got a room, threw my shit down, brushed my teeth, and took a long-overdue shower. Despite having not slept since the ferry the previous day, I felt envigorated and went out into Damascus.

It was immediately apparent that I was in Syria: pictures of Bashar al-Assad everywhere. Not just on giant billboards, but on the backs of cars and in store windows, like a mustachioed icon, a saint in sunglasses. Some back car windows even had the trinity of the current president, his late father the former president, and his late brother the former heir to the Republic (all in sunglasses naturally).






I followed the copied pages from the Lonely Planet Middle East and went to Suq al-Hamidiyya. Since it was Friday the street was pretty empty and most of the shops were closed. But the Ummayad Mosque was sure open!

There are seperate entrances for tourists and the faithful, the former needing to give up about a dollar in entrance fees and don a black abaya. Once inside, you can wander and photograph to your heart's content, as I did. It was after Friday prayers so it wasn't stuffed, but still had a bit of activity. The Ummayyad Mosque was a Roman temple to Jupiter turned into a Christian church under the Byzantine Empire then turned into a mosque under the Ummayyad Empire. It's very cool because vestiges of the mosque's previous incarnations are visibile: the structure. The mosaics looked Byzantine to me.

Just outside the mosque are the bones of the gosh darn bestest Muslim in the world (at least according to every Crusader): Salah ad-Din. Without much fanfare or signage, twin sarcophogi are lit up by green florescent lights. Salah ad-Din was buried in a wooden sarcophagus in 1193, but in 1893 Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany donated a marble one. The body was never transferred so there remain the two.

Away from the Ummayyad mosque, I went to the Shi'i Sayyida Ruqayya Mosque, daughter of Hussein grandson of the Prophet. Built by Iran, Lonely Planet finds the mosque "quite alien, but very striking, Persian".Those with better standing to evaluate Persianity must judge. I once again was handed a temporary abaya (this time by a man, who also tried to help me secure it). Handing it back to him when leaving I discovered that he spoke English, and he discovered that I was an unsaved soul in need to proselytizing. "Meet me tomorrow. I will tell you all about Islam" he said, giving me a paper with his number. He was cute, and I wondered if he was trying to convert me, hit on me, or both.

I was mosqued out so I ate some falafel (delicious) and made for Azem Palace, residence of the wali (governor) of Damascus during the Ottoman Empire. I took a free tour in Arabic, of which I understood a surprisingly large amount (surprising to me). I even asked a couple of questions. The guide was very impressed, as many people are when a foreigner, especially an American, speaks Arabic. Sadly, the bar is set very low: I guess "Sabah al-gheer" is a welcome change from "EX-CUSE me, do YOU SPEAK ENGLISH? ENGLISH?", at least in Egypt. In Syria people were surprised that I was even in their country.

COMING UP: I explore the Christian Quarter which means Church Party!

2006: Cairo to Damascus by Bus Part I

Near the end of my semester at AUC in May 2006, I knew I still wanted to go to Syria, despite failing horribly on the first attempt. Nothing would keep me out. I decided to play it safe and get a visa beforehand the only way possible: mailing my visa to the Syrian embassy in Washington DC. For three anxious weeks I waited for my passport, which finally came back on the last Monday of classes. I moved my ticket home back two weeks. I spent Tuesday packing up all my shit (a suitcase, three shishas, a duffle bag, and various other shit stuffed into plastic bags and boxes that wouldn't fit) leaving myself only the essentials what would fit in a backpack. All my other shit was supposed to go in my friend Alex's apartment until I got back two weeks later.

Wednesday I bought my bus ticket to Nuweiba in the morning. In the afternoon I found out that Alex would still be in Sharm al-Shaykh with his girlfriend Joanna when I got back, thus I wouldn't be able to retrieve my shit before going to America. I called everyone I knew with an apartment in Cairo, but everyone was giving up their places to go home or travel. Shit. With darkness and the time of bus departure approaching, I ran down to the bowab (doorman). He didn't speak any English, so I had to make use of the Arabic I was supposed to be learning for 5 months. "I have a big problem. I need to put my stuff somewhere while I'm in Syria," I explained. He took me to an abandoned apartment in complete disrepair on the 8th floor (I lived on the 10th). We moved all my shit into a corner of the room and put a tarp over it. "Is that really going to be safe? For two weeks?" He assured me it was. Everything I had was there: my clothes, my souvenirs, my laptop and associated electronics. I offered to pay him to watch it. "No no no no" he told me. He'd watch it for me. So jumped in a taxi with my backpack, with only a few copied pages from Shadee's Lonely Planet: Middle East to guide me.

First Leg: Cairo to Nuweiba - Across the Sinai
At the bus station I struck up a conversation with a young muhagaba, complete with face niqab and gloves on her hands. She wondered how I could travel so far by myself, wished me luck and good health.

An hour outside of Cairo the bus broke down. We all piled outside, waiting in the sand by the side of the road. An hour later a new bus pulled up and we were off once again! During the wait I struck up conversation with an Iraqi man who was studying in Cairo, family in Amman. They had fled Falluja. We quickly got over that awkward "yeah, sorry about that war that forced you from your home and all." On the new bus he sat next to me and kept me entertained with video clips on his phone and we talked about various stuff. At some point I fell asleep. Thursday morning we rolled into Taba, my next destination point of Aqaba clearly visible past the sliver of Israel (Eilat) in between the two Arab nations. But I wanted to get into Syria, which meant as little Israel as possible - none. So the bus swung south to Nuweiba where there's a ferry to Aqaba. It was early, about 8am.

Second Leg: Nuweiba to Aqaba - Across the Gulf of Aqaba
The ferry leaves once a day to Aqaba. I wanted to buy a ticket but found out that I didn't have enough money. With buses, my residence visa got me the Egyptian rate, but it didn't work on the ferry. I wandered off to find a bank, waiting quite a bit for them to open. While waiting, I saw a lone camel walking down the road, no sign of an owner in sight.

After changing some money I had enough for the ferry. I fought the line and went into the large shaded waiting area, where I soon attracted the attention of a group of about 14 Palestinian guys and one half-Jordanian, half-Indonesian who went to school in Cairo. We started talked in half Arabic and half English. Bilal, tall and muscular, enjoyed talking to me, shutting out Ahmad, the half-Jordanian, half-Indonesian who had approached me originally. We waited for hours so we all had a lot of time to talk. We talked about the occupation, about Bilal's older brother shot dead by IDF during the intifada, about Cairo, about religion, about relations between men and women.

"You see," said Bilal, "if you were my wife, I wouldn't want you to go outside wearting that." That was big tied pants that reached mid-calf showing off my lower unshaved leg, a big t-shirt, and my short hair tucked under a baseball cap. Sexy. "Other men would look at you."

I replied, "If you were my husband, I wouldn't want you to wear that." I said about the tight t-shirt he wore, which showed off his well-defined upper body. It was, um, not bad looking. "Other women would look at you."

"It's different!" he replied. "No it isn't." I said.

Finally we could board the ferry. It was massive, but the crush of people rushing toward the small door out onto the dock was more massive. The Palestinian boys took it upon themselve to protect me, which was mutually beneficial. The boys protected me from the mass of men trying to board (I found out later there was a seperate entrance for women and families), and my presence in the group moved us all up quicker, as the ferry employees noticed the white, foreign woman and let her and her friends through.

We sat for forever and waiting for the ferry to fill. It took hours. We waited for the ferry to leave the dock. It took hours. It was a horrible purgatory, alleviated little by the conversation. Ahmad told me about his sister's wedding tomorrow in Amman and invited me along. Sorry, nothing was going to sway me from my mission: Syria. Besides, I imagined an awkward scene if Ahmad rolled into his sister's wedding with a random American whore (and we all are whores). Plus I had nothing nice to wear. Despite Bilal's insistance that my outfit made me quite the temptress, in truth I looked like just a grungy backpacker. At some point I dropped off. Ahmad woke me up once we docked in Aqaba, with the long shadows of afternoon. We waited to get off the ferry. We waited to get our visas. There was no ATM, and I had little money after the unfavorable exchange rate from Egyptian guinee to Jordanian dinars. It was sunset by the time I got off the dock to ground transportation.

"Ya Aneet! Habibi! Come with us!" yelled the Palestinian men by a 15-passenger van. "I was going to get on a bus..." I said. "Don't you guys have to go Palestine?" "The border's closed until tomorrow. Ahmad's going to Amman and then we'll take you all the way to the Syrian border." Well, fine then. So onto a van in Jordan with 15 young men at night...