Recap on the Last Few Days.

So, I last left off when we went to Lattakia, I suppose. Since then has been a little hectic, as we've been trying to find an apartment outside of the Old City (preferably as far from it as possible). We have succeeded in this, and our new apartment is much, much cheaper in a less expensive neighborhood. I have finished being tutored because it is too expensive, and I'm going to start tutoring for English soon to make some money. We have to be out of our apartment by the end of the month, but we can't move into our new one until the 5th of next month, so we're going to the Christian Villages of the north for a few days with Nebras, which is where his family is from. Then we're coming back and moving in (me, Leo, Alex, and Nebras).

In the meantime, we have:
- Attended and participated in a Syrian wedding
- Been fed so much food we want to die
- Seen more Christian stuff in Christian houses than any American house in existence
- Witnessed a sword fight/play/dance (captured on video for all to see later)
- Gotten drunk and stumbled valiantly through the Old City during the call to prayer
- Met some pretty rad people, Syrians and Iraqis and foreign students alike
- Discovered that everything costs half as much in the Old City if you have a Syrian with you
- Discovered that everything costs half as much in the Old City if you yell at them in Arabic enough
- Discovered that this doesn't always work
- Had "hello!" called out to us by little kids who wish to practice the one word in English they know
- Found out that there is indeed a Persian restaurant in Damascus
- Found out that the Persian restaurant is indeed closed
- Played Twisted Metal 2
- Honed our senses enough to be able to clap flies out of existence in the courtyard
- Observed that jeem is indeed an Arabic sun letter, contrary to our teaching (disregard this, non-Arabic students)
- Found loads of incredible Middle Eastern music, traditional and non-traditional
- Gotten straight-razor shaves from the barber down the street
- Run out of things to put on this list

To Lattakia, and the Mediterranean.

So we (me, Leo, Alex, and Alex's friend Clarissa) took a trip this weekend to Lattakia, which was a four and a half hour bus ride north of Damascus, past the mountains to the left and the desert to the right until you can go west to the coast, where it basically just looks like Ohio except there's a Mediterranean Sea with crabs and pelicans and stuff. We had a good time, made some friends (pictured), went to their chalet, and pretty much partied all afternoon. Multiple (more than six) cups of tea, five cups of coffee, two cups of Pepsi, two sandwiches, two hookahs, and three debke dances later, we finally made our way home, salty and tired.

Desert. This picture faces east through the broad part of Syria. On the left were big mountains that we were driving right next to but I wasn't on that side of the bus and on the way back it was night.



This is where we got lost in Ohio for a couple of hours.



Nice.



Hotel for the night. We got there late and went swimming the next morning. This is Alex and Clarissa, obviously.



Lattakia is nice. This is the view from our balcony that night.



On our way to the beach, we met these guys. I thought they were fake until one of them tried to bite me.



This is another one of those pictures that don't need a description, in my opinion.



Alex, contemplating? I think that's Italy in the distance (not really).



Relatively pointless picture.



Also relatively pointless except you can see a woman veiled in the beach with her naked toddler daughter. Talk about extremes.



We first meet The Dudes.



More of The Dudes. Note that these guys probably knew about three words in English put together. We left them very happy yet sad to leave, but also extremely exhausted mentally.



Yeah.



I have one video of us trying to debke, one of us successfully doing debke, and one of Waleed, the guy on the right in the first Dudes picture, waving his hands in the air with the hookah in his mouth yelling "Arabs, Arabs!" (in Arabic, obviously) to a song that he likes. You'll have to specially request those when I get back.

Music.

So there's a pretty good jazz scene here, and I recently managed to find some Lebanese hip-hop. First few tracks are jazz, first with Abado and Co., and then the amazing Lina Shamamian who is from Syria and is having a concert here soon. Then Aksser (I can loosely translate this Against the Grain), a rap group from Lebanon, a song from Rayess Bek, their frontman, and then another by Aksser. Enjoy.

Some Like It Hot.

So, it's pretty hot here. It's not humid at all, so it's really not that bad, but the sun is pretty brutal. Luckily they knew what they were doing when they built these houses, so the courtyards always have at least 1/4 in the shade during the middle part of the day, and they're nice and cool compared to outside the house doors during the morning and the evening. You can really feel the difference when you're walking down the alley to the house and then walk in the courtyard. You're still more or less outside, but it's much cooler. And we have seen people pouring water on the ground outside their shops and Alex eventually asked someone why, and they said it cools it down and creates a small breeze if you leave the door open. This is totally true, and we now throw water all over the place when it gets particularly hot.

How hot does it get exactly? Case in point: If you leave a lighter out in the sun, it'll explode after about an hour. This has happened before. And yesterday. Two lighters exploded yesterday, in fact.

Some pictures in the morning, bros just straight chillaxing. The Yemeni girl has been gone for the week so we can deveil and be cool.





I disappear. I'm not sure at all who took these pictures... I just found them on my camera.



A bottlecap with the same thing written on it is the prize for anyone who can guess what this bottle says.



Me in my room, in my basic Syrian outfit. I have to actually try to look cool here to appear normal. Where are all the slackers who don't bother to shave here? Just us Americans?

Fridays are for wandering.

So on Friday, God Day, basically Sunday in the US, pretty much every shop is closed, except for some of the Christian shops. So we usually take this day to walk around and see what's going on.

This is Leo basking in the glory of God.



This is him doing a similar thing. He's pretty into metal, and the Syrian alternative scene consists of metal-heads, so this is a pretty perfect picture for the person and the situation.



Alex is afraid of the mountain Qasiyyoun that looms in the background wherever you are in Syria.



He really can't get over it.



A happy park scene. Lots of people are out because very few people are working. Friday is the first day of the weekend.



Two little kids holding hands. Lots of people of the same sex hold hands here. Especially kids and old people. We were told by our insider Nebras that if two shabaab are holding hands in the Old City, it means they're more than friends. Given that I've never seen anyone under the age of 50 and over the age of 10 holding hands outside of the Old City, I believe this is probably true.



What?



Seriously, what?



Explosion Shoes. I'm not even going to touch this one.



Nice little pond in the park. A brass band was playing such things as a Beatles cover in the background past the pond.



People enjoying the park. Little kids on the playground. Remind me again why the US government wants to bomb this country?

السهر

Translation: Stayin' up late having fun. Yeah, they have one word for that.

So yesterday was Alex's birthday! That was fun. Leo and I went with Nebras and Manuel to Moulaya for some tea while Alex was asleep. This is Nebras. He might live with us next month just for fun in a different neighborhood. Like any average Syrian in their 20's, he lives with his parents. It's pretty standard and they think it's pretty crappy that most of us move out at 18 in the US.



This is Manuel. He was born in Venezuela but he's Syrian. His family moved back here a while ago, or at least long enough for him to seem like the same as any Syrian yet happens to also know Spanish.



After that, Manuel left us to go get ready to go to Switzerland for the rest of the summer and Nebras, Leo, and I went in search of a cake. The guy at the shop asked who the cake was for and at first we said Alex, then Iskander, then we settled on the Arabic name that Nebras had given him. So it ended up saying عيد ميلاد سعيد رامي (Happy Birthday, Rami). We took it home and Leo woke up Alex and told him to come downstairs, and we lit the sparklers on the cake as fast as we could, only for Alex to take so long putting pants on that he came down just in time to see the last sparkler die. But we had an extra one, plus I took pictures and video of the whole occasion. He then drank Arak (a very strong middle eastern liquor) out of a chocolate cup that was on the cake and almost died. More or less a good time had by all.





A little later on, Fernando came over with some junkacheros (I don't think I'm getting that right, much less spelled right, but it's supposed to be Spanish for tall boys), and we got plenty drunk to end Alex's birth anniversary. Needless to say, I slept in today.

Some more pictures.

Study session at Moulaya. Well, Alex and Fernando were studying, and I was just sort of being amused at them trying to figure things out.



Fernando is from Spain. He's pretty... great.



Zaylan works at Moulaya and is our hook-up there. He makes sure our hookahs are good and gives us free popcorn and we teach him English words. He told me that he bragged to his son that he had made friends with an American. That kind of depressed me.



Zaylan insisted we give him time to strike a pose before we snap a shot of him.



Alex, walking home from Moulaya (it's a two minute walk away).



Me, standing home from Moulaya. As this guy passed, he said, "hello!" I said hello back but was sort of confused. This was the first time this has happened. At least he didn't ask me for directions to somewhere I have never been.



This picture pretty much exists independent of any necessary description.



This place, Moulaya, is super close to our house. As you can see from the picture, we're already making friends with the employees and getting free stuff, and it's got a very nice atmosphere. You can probably tell a little from the pictures. Just near to where we're sitting, there's a big television where they play music videos, and every night they play this Turkish show that's dubbed in Syrian Arabic called Nuur. I feel like it's basically the Lost of Syria. Everyone was watching it intensely and we were just sort of sitting behind the television looking like a bunch of jackasses because we weren't watching this amazing show. We decided to start watching it so if we meet someone and can't think of anything to talk about, we can just talk about Nuur. Last night's episode was quite dramatic, as I could only tell by the dialogue and everyone's faces as they watched it.

صور إن شاء الله

All right, I made the pictures much smaller so they should actually upload now. Let's see if it works.

This is the front door of the house.



Lookin' west, the way to the huge mosque and the rest of the city.



Lookin' east. The way to Bab Touma and this internet cafe in which I am now sitting.



Our courtyard/living room. Leo is the mutawwa7sh on the side. The open door is the door to my room. It's all very open and I can hear when people wake up or stay up late, but it's also the coolest room in the house because the sun never directly hits it. The whole open thing is important in the Old City so you can hear the call to prayer blaring, no matter what room you're in. Or little kids playing and yelling and the neighbor cooking breakfast.



The north-east corner of the courtyard. Nice plants. And Alex.



The top of the courtyard, looking south. I am standing in the middle of the courtyard pointing up here. The place where the clothes are hanging is the terrace where we have a nice table and a little bed for hanging out/sleeping. It hasn't rained for a month and won't rain for another couple, so no problems with that. Plus it's much cooler on the roof.



The courtyard and front door, looking north, from my room. You can see a little of my doorway there.



My room, before books and things invaded it. Everything was in my bags at this point. I get a nice couch and coffee table in there.



My bed, before a pillowcase and a sheet. And also before I put all my stuff everywhere.



No pictures of me yet, but I'll get around to that. Maybe even a video? That would be hell to upload but you can see them when I get back. I'll definitely at least have videos.

Peace out ya jamaa3.

OH I FORGOT.

The hummus here is so fucking delicious. I just had to get that out. And the fruit is somehow like 50% sweeter. Apparently the oasis is good for the watermelons and the peaches.

العادي

So since I've been able to update there are some things that have been requested that I address:

Firstly, Vernell's question about fashion in Damascus. Everyone here is a hell of a lot cooler than me, and I'm actually trying to reach the standard of cool 'round these parts. I bought two t-shirts and two very nice long-sleeved collared shirts that actually fit me, which I'm still having trouble believing. It was much easier to find nice clothes here than in the US, at least in Columbus. If I had to guess, I would say about 1/3 of all the ladies are covered in some way, and maybe 1/3 of that 1/3 have the black full-cover business going on, but even most of the covered ones are wearing nice clothes and jeans with their headscarves, and 2/3 of women have their hair all jazzed up and wear dresses, jeans, nice shirts, t-shirts, the usual. So some people are wearing traditional dress, but most look a hell of a lot more stylish than we do (or at least I do). The dudes all got their hair slicked back and wearing tight t-shirts with Dolce and Gabbana or whatever fashion companies I don't know about, or dress shirts, and tight jeans. Old people wear dressier clothes, and older people still wear traditional robes and kuffiyeh scarves, but they're not much around. Vernell, I will bring you back a fashion magazine, but most of them are just like ours, so they're not actually real people. I'll try to find one with fashion modeled by Syrians on the street or something like that. I saw one magazine that was sort of a fashion magazine but just consisted of nicely dressed people they found at dinners and exhibitions and stuff, with their names underneath them. That had a lot of local Syrian fashion in it, so I'll try to find it again.

As for Joe's comment:

Alex is doing really well. He's taking classes and meeting with colleagues' of his mother, and meeting a lot of students at the university it seems. He loves Syria as much as I do and is seriously considering taking a quarter off of school at OSU to stay here longer. I for one am not taking university classes here, but getting a tutor, so any interaction I have consists of going outside and meeting roommates' friends. My two first promising Syrian friends I met last night, who are rad as hell. We listened to the Deftones and talked about the majesty of Mike Patton. They were sort of depressed when I told them I only know about five people who appreciate Mike Patton as much as I do, not to mention how psyched I was to find two Syrians who do. It is good to see that Caglar finally made it back to Turkey without getting anything else broken or sprained, and I'm still giving heavy thought to whether I want to go to Lebanon or Turkey, seeing as how my visa is only good for one more entry into the country. There's Caglar in Turkey, or Beirut in Lebanon, which is the city that people keep telling us to go to if we want to leave Syria to visit a different country. Maybe I will eventually flip a five-lira coin to decide.

The internet cafes here are actually pretty great. The one I'm in now has about twenty computers and a couple spots for laptops, though the connection is only 24 Mbps. I thought it was higher last time I checked, but usually the place is pretty packed and right now I'm here in the very early afternoon when all you western hemispherites are asleep, and there are only three people here, so not much of a connection is needed. Maybe they turn up the juice when more people are here? Is that even possible? But yeah, most people come here to chat/talk/email with relatives in the US. They have microphones here at every computer for just that kind of thing, so it really picks up in the late afternoon and evening when relatives aren't asleep. The occasional Syrian comes in to play Counter Strike, but it's pretty much all foreign students. The first time I came I spoke Arabic to the guy at the counter and he gave me kind of a weird look, and spoke perfect English back at me, so I've just given up on using Arabic here. The fee for using the internet starts at 15 Syrian pounds and goes up slowly, so when I was here last time I spent about 45 minutes online and paid 60 pounds, which is a little over a dollar, so it's hella cheap here, even compared to the prices of everything else. I can be on the internet for half an hour for the price of a cup of tea, which is a dollar. I thought that should be cheaper. People who have been here for more than a few years say everything went up significantly in price since about a year and a half ago, which sucks. But it's still not bad at all to get a meal, and smoking a hookah is always 100 pounds, which is two bucks. And they're very good and use natural wooden coal (فحم خشب تبيعي) as the boxes say.

Something else you all might be interested to know: The television here is about 1/3 American shows and movie channels, which include Powerpuff Girls and Oprah, and old-school cartoons like Tom and Jerry and old Hannah-Barbera. All of the other channels are from all around the Arab world, including Egypt, the Emirates, Iraq, etc. Most of these channels are for sexy music videos (seriously, really sexy), television shows, and Arab movies (new and old). A few of them have talk shows and religious shows where an old guy in traditional garb talks about the Qur'an. One of them featured an albino Arab kid singing/reciting the Qur'an, which was sort of freaky. Maybe he is considered blessed?

Also, in very recent news, I was given a laqab, or a nickname, by my Syrian friends. I have no idea how these work, but they considered Abu Al-3ayn (Father of the Eye) because of my tattoo, and random other Arabic names, but discarded them all eventually until they settled on Tameem. These Arabic names are a mystery to anyone who doesn't speak Arabic. They would suggest seemingly random names and then say something like, "Ehhh... But his hair's not dark," or, "Yeah, that would be good, but he's not very tall." When I asked them what the names "mean" they tried to think about it and got really confused and said they couldn't really explain it, but that this one didn't work because my hair wasn't dark enough. So these names just have like... ideas associated with them, and when they give each other a nickname, it's representative of how they look and their personalities, but it doesn't necessarily describe them. It's just same hazy idea of what the name should represent. It's sweet. But when they came to Tameem, they were positive. There were no doubts that I'm a Tameem. I'm not sure what it signifies other than me, but I asked one of them to explain it and he said, "Tameem, tamaam," but he was just joking (tamaam means perfect/exact). So I'm trying to upload pictures again, but I just keep getting errors and network disconnections. Sorry. I'll try again at Alex's mom's colleague's workplace, where he said we can use the internet for free. Also an aside, this string of names leading to us getting free internet is an example of us having Vitamin Waaw (Wow), which is more or less the letter W in Arabic. It stands for wust.a in Arabic, which means a connection that gets you something (like a job or free internet). Apparently lots of people are successful here only because of a steady dose of Vitamin Wow (or veetameen wow, as pronounced in Damascus). Fortunately, we have some.

How is Sarah doing? Do we know? Apparently her internet sucks and she can barely read this blog because the computers are so bad. I'll try to make the text bigger but everything is in Arabic and they use weird words for computers.

Also, last night my friend Nebras (like Nebraska without the ka, as he explains it) and I were waiting for a delivery from what is basically Cluck U in the middle of Damascus (Syrians appreciate the importance of drunk food), and I told him about how Syrians keep asking me for directions. Five seconds later, count them, literally 1 2 3 4 5 seconds later, some old dude in a robe and his ninja (everything covered in black but the eyes) come right up to me, don't even look at him, and ask me where the Souq Hamidiyya is. I point east and tell them "Hayk" ("thattaway") and they leave. Nebras now knows that I do not lie.

اخيرا

Dang. I have no idea why this is working now, but it is. So, the trip to Damascus proper was pretty boring and uneventful yet at the same time full of things to talk about that I really don't feel like going into (the endless plane rides, airplane food, waiting in terminals, going through lines), but it's over now and I've been here roughly a week.




Everything is good. Na3eem, Alex's mom's colleague, picked us up at the airport and took us to Bab Touma, where we found Leo who took us to our place which had been all set up very nicely. They had two rooms open for us to move into, which was pretty convenient, and we all live more or less harmoniously.



Me, Alex, Leo (other American studying here who set us up with everything), Til (German), Johanna (also German), and Mai (half Yemeniyya, half Somaliyya). This whole week has basically been figuring out how to navigate the maze that is the Old City. We now know how to go to the market behind our house, get to Bab Touma, go to the Umayyad Mosque (one of the oldest/most important mosques in the world and loved by both Muslims and Christians, allegedly containing the heads of both John the Baptist and Ali), through the Souq al-Hamidiyya (biggest market in the world where you can buy anything anything ANYTHING), and to emerge from the Old City into the (new?) city.

So, a relatively day-by-day account: the first day we arrived, it was late. We went out walking around and everything is dead. It's like it's not a city at night. Abandoned, almost. More about this in a second. We wandered around and I told Leo I wanted something to drink, so he went up to this guy and asked him if they had some water. My reaction (keep in mind I had been in Damascus for about two hours at this point) was, "Dude, don't talk to someone! What if they say something you don't understand!? This is scary!" One must get over this quick to ask for directions. I'm definitely over it now. The sink-or-swim approach to Arabic is going very well so far. Then we went back to the house and got drunk. Day two, I sleep almost all day because I hardly slept at all on the plane. I wake up in the afternoon and we all go to a party and sit in the corner. We get drunk again. Any Arab country stereotype you might have should be shattered by now. Living in the Christian quarter of a huge city just leads to alcohol. But that was more or less a fluke and we're living more like students abroad now and less like OH-IO bros on a home-game weekend. The next few days were just kind of getting used to everything. The house, using a bidet instead of toilet paper, inevitably getting sick for a couple days from the bacteria we're not used to. Now I know where the computer labs are, etc.

So, some initial thoughts/experiences. When they do the call to prayer, it is incredible. Every mosque in the whole city starts singing out "Allahu akbar" from the minarets and they all start at different times, are different volumes, have different recordings, and are varying distances away, and the effect is basically a punch in the face of Welcome to Damascus. The whole place reverberates and you more or less have to stop what you're doing or what you're talking about for about three minutes, which is the point. You're supposed to reckanize that God is greater than whatever it is you're doing and you should go pray. We once experienced the call to prayer while we were walking back from the souq past the Umayyad Mosque (literally right alongside it, is our route to the rest of the city) and the effect was particularly notable.

Everyone thinks I'm Syrian. Syrians are all different colors. I'm keeping a running tally of the burnt-red from the sun redhead Syrians, and it's up to seven now, which is practically one a day. So, it was pretty cool when some Syrian dude asked me where the bath-house was and I understood and responded accordingly. I pointed in the direction I thought it was and told him he should probably ask someone else because I really didn't know very well, and I pointed him in the exact opposite direction, but I was still pretty proud of myself. Also, a cop pulled up in his car while I was walking far away from home in the city and called out to me, which sort of freaked me out, only to ask me where a good restaurant was.

Another thing: everyone drives like teenagers, but they're very perceptive and careful at the same time. You can more or less just walk across the street with your eyes closed and everyone will speed around you or slow down and you'll feel the woosh from the car as it goes by you, but they don't hit you. I think a common foreigner mistake is to make eye contact and hesitate, because then they can't figure out where you're going to go. If you go in a predictable direction at a predictable speed, they more or less dodge you. It's pretty exhilarating and while they drive like maniacs, I haven't seen anyone hit by a car or a bus or a car accident or anything yet.

So currently I have pretty much no responsibilities. I start being tutored this week, so then I will have stuff to do, but for now all practice has been memorizing vocabulary with Leo and Alex and actually using what we do know.

That is all I can think of for now. Fariba just pointed out to me on googletalk that I should probably upload pictures of myself, which is true, but whenever I've taken pictures I've been behind the camera, so I didn't think to turn it around. Also, most of the pictures are from night one when we had just arrived. The pictures of my room are before unpacking, and now the tables and everything are covered in books and random stuff. The day-time photos were taken the afternoon after we arrived. I haven't taken any pictures since then. They're a real hassle to upload and I'm only on 2 of 10 right now, and probably won't get to them all today. Plus I've been busy actually observing stuff instead of hauling around a little camera, but I will take note now to take pictures of the markets and the mosque and whatever daily life activities might be interesting.

الله يسلمكم يا شباب

P.S. Okay, I only managed to upload one photo, and it isn't even in Damascus. Connections Interrupted all over the place. I will work on this.