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.

Flights to Damascus

I got here Friday night after an overnight flight to Paris and an overday flight to Damascus. The Paris plane was filled with middle aged American couples going abroad for the first time (well, there were two of these next to me). One couple had won there trip from a furniture store drawing. The other had just decided to up and go. "Where are you going?" they asked when I said I was connecting. "Syria," naturally got a stunned reaction. I've been told to be careful.

The Damascus flight left midday Paris. At the gate there were two American women dragging kids. One woman had four, from sullen, angry teenager to chubby four-year-old. The other looked like Nancy on Weeds and had two small girls. They chatted about how the kids liked Syria, how the older ones were pissed off to be returning, how the younger ones where fine with it, how maids have such disloyalty.

"I brought mine to the State in May and she ran off within the first month!"

"Are you serious? Will you get in trouble?"

"No, no, I reported her as soon as it happened."

"Let me tell you, they are not loyal. I've had a maid in Damascus 5 years and she's looking for another job! She's signed on for another year with me but is looking for another job during the year! No loyalty!"

"I know. If mine was planning to run off she could have at least stayed for most the summer!"

Oh, don't I know it. We landed late, bags took forever, the embassy driver took me to Sultan Hotel where the embassy had booked me a room ($22) a night. It was nine so I went wandering off in the streets to find an internet cafe and email my parents that I was alright. I'm alright.

Last post from the U.S. of A.

After two days of driving around to do errands and crap I'm just about ready to go. Almost packed, I swear. I'll land in Damascus tomorrow night after a brief layover in Paris. Still no update on where I'll be staying - I called numerous times only to have it ring over and over, and emailing only prompted one response: full at AlHaramain. So this will be interesting!

Of course, it will be interesting anyways. Today there was a a fun little altercation between Syria and Israel. This is making my parents really thrilled to drop me off at the airport. Wish me luck!

Things I am Not Going to Miss About New York

Well now that I'm leaving, I'm also going to leave the pity party. So here's some shit I'm not going to miss about New York:

- prices: movies, drinks, food, every fucking thing

- dodging asshole cars who don't want to share the road with bikes; dodging asshole pedestrians who neglect to watch for bikes

- the ubiquitous creepy/voyeuristic/increasingly porny American Apparel ads: No thanks, I really don't want to see a 5-foot cooch.

- getting yelled at by construction workers on my bike - really, what reaction do they expect? Am I going to get off my bike, fuck them, and then continue on my way to work? I really don't budget that kind of time into my commute.

- the person who stole my bike seat

- the hotdog guy who was right next to my bike but apparently didn't say a word while a guy stole my fucking bike seat

- Flight of the Conchords - because the season actually ended so there is nothing to miss

- did I mention the price of shit in New York?

- if I have to hear "Umbrella ella ella" once more time the stabbing begins

- shitty clubs where the focus, instead of on the dancefloor, is on assholes with AmEx cards who reserve the privilege to drink Grey Goose for $300 a bottle

- I-bankers who have to make up for a 70 hour workweek by being the biggest douches at the bar

- handbags and shoes - why do people give a shit about this shit?

- hipsters

- those Sunday mornings when you think "I should go work out or go outside because it's so nice" but then its 3:00pm and the store is too far away and you're very hungry so you scrounge for leftover forgotten soup crackers from your roommate's takeout last month

- beauty standards - people in New York be so pretty!

But of course, I'm going to be about three times prettier when I step off the airplane in Damascus on Friday night. Ahh, for once my pasty skin is a blessing, not a burden.

Reservations

I don't think the American Embassy is very happy with me. They offer to pick Fulbrighters up from the airport, a service of which I plan to make use. They also offer to book a few nights in the Sultan Hotel for us, a service I declined. I'll be staying at al-Haramein, I told them (much cheaper). Then I packed and went to California and didn't go on the Internet for a few days.

Pandemonium! Well, not really. The woman at the embassy had sent me emails making sure I had reserved at al-Haramein because it's very busy now and lots of hotels are all booked up, then emailed my contact at IIE who emailed me asking the same thing. I told them no, told her she could go ahead and book me Sultan, to which she replied that Sultan is full!!! Holy crap!

I'm not very worried. Last time I went to Syria I rolled up in a bus and had no trouble finding a room. If al-Haramein is full I'll go next door. If that's full, go to another hostel. I'll find a bed. But apparently the embassy does not find this comforting, so I'm trying to call ahead and reserve.

So close to Thursday. Packing is a bitch.

Things I am Going to Miss About New York

I've left New York - only one week until I leave for Syria. Of course I already miss it: Specifically, I miss:

- anonymity on the street - this does not exist in Damascus, where I might as well wear a sign that says "FOREIGNER"

- PDAs - not exactly down with the culture in the Middle East

- Flight of the Conchords, Weeds, The Office

- free concerts all the time

- that I can see any movie on a big screen from mainstream to indie, the latest to something from 1936

- Baked (in Redhood)cakes and cookies

- everything that makes the red states cringe: on-demand abortions, abundant gays, and craploads of immigrants


- a city so liberal that Manhattan Mini Storage can put on a billboard "Your closet space is shrinking faster than her right to choose" with a picture of a coat hanger

- breakfast anytime, which means greek omlette anytime

- a variety of restaurants, from Indian to Ecuadorian

- biking daily through at least two, and often three boroughs

- the view from the Williamsburg bridge

- the view of all of Manhattan from my apartment in LIC

- bars with pool and kareoke

- all my lovely friends, of course

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!