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.