We drink a lot of water as it is always hot- as in Lebanon and Egypt, there are a few different bottled water brands all competing for people’s hearts.  None of them are particularly spectacular, they all kind of taste like water.

Usually for lunch or dinner, we just order a bunch of “appetizers” and dip our bread in them.  None individually would make a meal, but when you have a little bit of 10 things, it begins to add up.  And it’s much cheaper.  A bowl of hummus is about $1 whereas a chicken dish would be about $5- so you can get 5 bowls of stuff and it would be about the same price.

Here, as in Lebanon they have a drink called the “Polo” (I think they only use that name here) which is fresh lemon juice, sugar, and mint blended together.  It really hits the spot.

I think I’ll be in Lebanon next week, so I’ll have time to put some pictures up, hopefully.

My neighborhood is ancient.  When my friend Bulos came to visit this weekend from Beirut, he told us a quote that he heard (I’m not sure where) that said, “there was no bit of news in human history that Damascus was not there to receive.”  Stuff’s really that old.  I would guess the structure of the house I live in is at least 400 years old, but there’s no real way to be sure. 

We have a lion skin hanging on our wall- it looks to be at least 100 years old or so.  Things are different here. 

Sleeping upstairs is no fun- it gets really hot during the day, and that hot air doesn’t really filter out at night.  My room’s on the Eastern wall of the building, too, which makes things worse in the morning when the sun rises.  [interesting side note: the arabic word for sunrise, Mashraq, means "place in the east"- its opposite, maghreb, "place in the west" is also the name of the country Morocco]. 

The construction of the house is quite interesting.  It is built in a square shape with the middle of the square being open to the sky.  I don’t think it’s going to rain this summer- it never did last summer in Beirut, and Beirut is closer to the sea.  The walls are sort of an eastern painted stucco, and the roof is bordered with clay shingles.  There are random bird cages strewn around the place, but I’m not sure why.  We also have a fountain- like a fountain fountain.  The kitchen is modest- gas grill, refrig., microwave, and washing machine (for laundry).  We have two western toilets and one turkish toilet [nothing more will be written about this].  Downstairs there are two bedrooms, the bathroom, the kitchen, and a very nice sitting area with foam seats.  This functions as meeting place, study place, and kitchen table.  It’s where I’m composing this right now.  Upstairs we have three bedrooms, a bathroom, a second (unused) kitchen, and another courtyard.  We have plants growing everywhere, although they aren’t very impressive looking.  Our house cleaner insists on watering even the dead ones.  “seeds”, he says.  No one believes him, but he does it every time.  On the wall downstairs here we have an inscription in Arabic, dating from the 1200s.  Its gist is that people of all creeds should live together in harmony without fear of their belongings being taken  or any other harm befalling them. 

Life is pretty lazy during the day here, and for good reason.  It’s in the mid-30′s celsius almost every day (high 80s-90s farenheit).  At night though, there’s lots of stuff to do- cafes, restaurants, bars and concerts.  Since Damascus is the cultural capital of the Arab world this year, they’ve had a few of these concerts.  I went and saw Faudel- an Algerian singer- put on a concert inside the Crusaders Citadel. 

I visited the Ummayyad mosque maybe five days ago.  It’s amazing in there.  I’ll try and put pictures up soon.  Since it’s 50 syrian pounds to get in (about $1.02)- i’m thinking of using it as a study spot sometimes- it’s cheaper than going to a cafe and buying coffee and stuff. 

Right now I’m living in the Bab Tuma (Thomas’ gate) neighborhood.  All the neighborhoods in the old city are named after the entrance gate they’re nearest too (Old Damascus is a walled city, after all).  I’m thinking of moving closer to bab sharqy (Eastern gate), though, because there’s a cheaper, air conditioned place there where my friend Tom lives. 

We had 6 people living here yesterday, but since Ross’ girlfriend Keeley left to go back to the states, we’re now 5.  I know 3 of the 4 others: Ryan from North Carolina, Ross from Texas, and Yusra from Minnesota.  Our fourth roommate is Ahmed from Saudi.  He seems to be a very nice guy who came to Damascus, it seems, for inspiration.  He’s an industrial and furniture designer cum artist extrordinare from what I can tell.  We’ve had some very interesting conversations about a lot of different things- he wears dread locks and lived in Brooklyn for a few years. 

Well that’s about what I have for now, so post comments and questions if you want.  Oh- and if you have any questions regarding our southern neighbors, don’t ask them.

Updated Daily!

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/00995357069888135949/label/Middle%20East

Since Syria has banned blogger (my previous host), I’ve decided to set up shop on WordPress.

I imagine that if I lived in a time before the internet, I would get a lot more done in a lot shorter time.

Lately, I have taken to studying in places called “ahwa”s. The word “ahwa” in Egyptian Arabic means coffee, although most people there don’t drink coffee. As far as studying goes, there is not much in the way of distractions. The clientele is exclusively middle aged-older Egyptian men who go there for what may be approximated as “male-bonding”. They play dominos, cards, and yell at each other a lot, making generous use of wild arm gestures unheard of outside of Italy. Lots of them are wearing the Galabeya- traditional Egyptian garb, and many are moustached, or at least scruffy.

Because I haven’t fallen in love with one ahwa or another, I have visited quite a few of them, and besides some having delicious teas, bad shiishas, unique smells, or eccentric staff, they’re all pretty similar.

They usually consist of 20 or 30 tables for one- portable little ones with indented aluminum tops, uncomfortable wooden chairs, fluorescent lighting, and linoleum tile.

Here is the best picture I could find, of a typical one.

You can order tea- sometimes chopped leaves as sort of a silt at the bottom of the glass, and sometimes lipton. The former is much tastier, until you get to the end when you inadvertently swallow some of the bitter sediment.

You can order coffee- mazbout (Arabic coffee with just a tad of sugar), tourkiyya- potent Turkish coffee, or Nescafe- A blend of coffee flavored crystals, sugar, and chocolate or something. I don’t know, but to me it tastes like dropping some Super America coffee into a glass of warm water and then adding some swiss miss.

My favorite is called einaab. Although einaab is related to the Arabic word for grape- einab- it is a sweet Hibiscus tea, chilled, and purple in color.

When the weather is cold, and you don’t feel like tea, you can have a hot, white drink called SaHlab. It’s made from the starch of ground orchid bulb, boiled with milk, and mixed in with cinnamon, chopped pistachios, and grated coconut. Quite a combination. My favorite part about saHlab is the milk skin that forms on the meniscus of the liquid after every sip.

And of course, there’s shiisha, the staple of the ahwa. Because I’m not Egyptian, and I don’t particularly like the “real” shiisha, which is over Mollassesized plain tobacco with hot coals put directly on top of it- with no tinfoil barrier. I instead smoke apple flavor- I think I get odd looks from the old Egyptian guys, because I’m smoking what the women do.

Speaking of that, there are never any women in these, ever. Although it’s mostly unconscious, to me, this provides a much more relaxed environment- no one is trying to impress anyone, and no one is worried about embarrassing themselves in front of a girl. The majority of play-fights between elderly men I have ever seen in my life have occurred in these ahwas.

Depending on if your waiter recognizes you from before, if he is a nice guy, or you impress him with your Arabic, the pricing is quite varied. It’s all subjective, really. Typically, if my waiter likes me (that is to say, approves of my presence there- usually has to do with my understanding and efficacy in Egyptian Arabic), I will spend 3 hours there, smoke two bowls of tobacco, drink a tea and a einaab or sahleb, and spend between 4 and 6 gineeh (pounds). At the current exchange rate of 5.65 gineeh/dollar, this doesn’t exactly leave me poor.

Especially if I have Arabic homework to do, just being around the white noise of hacking old men intermittently cursing at each other in their native tongue is theraputic, and possibly they’re making me smarter by osmosis. At the very least, I am forced to use my Arabic in ordering things, and talking with the inevitable regular who asks “anta minayn?”; “Where are you from?”, as if I’m out of place or something.

The men here, if they are not dressed in dapper suits, can be divided into two categories.

The first, mostly younger (but not necessarily) wear long sleeved (usually some shade of blue) collared and striped button-up shirts, tucked in and paired with dress pants or overly faded or acid-washed jeans. The shirts are either dirty or cleaned, (this is due to the high cost of washing clothes here) but the general sentiment is one intended to impress. Whereas in Lebanon most of the young guys wore tight jeans and even tighter shirts that spell out messages that don’t make much sense, such as “Heroes vs. Zeroes”, “Welcome Mr. Sexy” and “Thunder and Lightning” (I personally bought one that said “My friends, right or wrong.” as a half-joke), things are much humbler and simpler in Egypt. There is still that young population (particularly those who go to AUC) who dress decidedly “Lebanese”, but this trend dies out when people reach about 25 years old.

The second category is mostly older men who wear the full garb (I seem to have forgotten its name). Basically it is a long robe in either white, brown or blue that covers the entire body. These are reserved for those who have completed the pilgrimage to Mecca (The Hajj). They are usually older either because they are no longer (or never were) working in an office-type job, or they’ve spent their entire life savings (multiple decades) on the pilgrimage, and could only afford it in old age. The people who wear them are called Haajiis, or, in Egypt where j is pronounced like g, Haaggiies. You’ll frequently hear on the street someone yelling out “Ya Hag!”, which isn’t an insult, but a way to address someone dressed in this manner. They are generally nice and will most likely speak only in Arabic to you.

The women can similarly be put into two groups: Those who dress “western” and those who are veiled.

Especially within the “veiled” category, there is a lot of room for variation. For example, many of the girls at AUC who are veiled wear much tighter clothing than those who are uncovered. They seem just as fashion-conscious as those dressing in Gucci and Prada, they just express it by matching their scarf with their entire outfit and carrying an expensive (usually Louis Vuitton or Gucci) handbag. For all intents and purposes they act exactly the same, speak exactly the same, and look exactly the same. It really is a personal choice whether or not to wear the hijab that usually has more to do with tradition than it does orthodox religious belief.

The girl who is dressed in a “western” manner looks pretty much exactly like any rich young lady from the US or Europe who is extremely concerned about her looks. These girls mostly congregate on the Greek Campus stairs, and from what it looks like, they never go to class. Many have described these stairs as a “fashion show”, an assertion with which I agree. Remember, all of these students, guys and girls alike, covered or uncovered, religious or secular are the sons and daughters of the elites of the country- and they act as such, buying $2,000 handbags and valet parking their Mercedes’ and BMWs at school.

I really need to buy some long sleeved collared shirts. Not only because it’s turning into fall, but also because I feel perpetually underdressed.

It started with me listening exclusively to Bob Dylan and Atmosphere, and sometimes manifested itself in me exclaiming “Minnesota” whenever conversation turned to Keith Ellison or Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” came on at the bar. I told everyone about the bridge and explained how close my house at school was to it.

I would listen to A Prairie Home Companion on the plane flights, and have lately been shopping around online for I *Heart* MPLS and “612″ shirts. (I particularly like these Norwegian ones). I just found that this business was founded and run by a former classmate of mine.

I nearly died when I saw a Cinnabon store in the City Stars Mall.

It’s very strange because I have been trying to find a balance between going completely Oriental and looking like a Hajji, and being a pseudo-tourist, taking my massive Camera everywhere with me and eating at McDonald’s.

It’s tough because I’m here for such an intermediate period of time. In a sense, it’s either a long vacation, or a short citizenship, I feel I have to either choose, or find a balance.

My hypothesis is that it doesn’t have much to do with homesickness, but more to do with some little “truth” everyone has been told since childhood that forces me to seize on these things from home. The truths, something like “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone”, or maybe “in order to understand something, you have to look at it from without”, or something to that effect.

This reminds me of something that I wrote earlier this summer. I know it’s a little disjointed to put it in here, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. Excuse unfinished points and misspellings/punctuations, I wrote it all in a stream.:

I write these things with all sincerity and with a desire to express myself as organically as possible. I am sure of the purity of the ideas that I’m trying to explain, but the tragic limitations in the clarity of their explanation are mine.

At one point or another in my life, I have been told:
“Life is hard.”
“In order to understand something or someone, you must understand that thing in its own context.”
and
“You don’t truly appreciate something until it’s gone”

Statements like this have always resonated with me on some basic level. I understood them to mean certain things that were sane and pragmatic- and ultimately true. Now, however, I realize that my understanding of those (and evidently many other such statements) were rooted solely in faith masquerading as truth.

These sorts of things have all been said before- especially in the context of religion and the belief in god, but I’ve found, through practice, that faith can cut far simpler and smaller spheres of meaning.

It may be a sign that I’m growing up or getting old or something that I’m just now starting to experience these things. I am more frequently seizing their meaning through experience rather than anecdote. And it is through experience, I’ve found, that statements transform into truths. I draw parallels between these pseudo-revelations and the memorization of words in another language (both things I’ve been doing a lot lately). This analogy works for me in that one’s knowledge of these statements (as purported truths) are only notes on sheets of paper filed somewhere in the far corner of your brain- that is until you’re forced to take them out. Once you do use them, however, they becomes realities to your being. You’ll receive feedback, either positive or negative, and the impact of that moment, and of that feedback, in reality is difficult to erase.

I realize that this type of rhetoric, for young people (not a term tied to age) will naturally and unknowingly be taken in with the same type of faith that is used whenever a novel idea is thrown out at them. If it is pragmatic and sane it will be accepted- but not necessarily understood. For older people (again, nothing to do with age), I would guess that this sort of reflection on maturation will spark a memory from when they first experienced the same thing. I’d imagine those memories don’t fade very easily.

I knew by faith that removing myself from my natural environment would give me an unprecedented ability to realize things and to mature. The difference is now I know this by experience.

I think the idea is that everything is pushed away from the middle of the day (the most difficult time for fasters who can’t drink water or eat) and the time around iftaar (the breaking of the fast, which depends on sunset).
Key:
ALNG 201: Intermediate Arabic

• This class is going over a text I have already completed. I am probably going to enroll in private classes at a language school to supplement it. It never hurts to review things though, and I’m sure I don’t remember all of the vocabulary or grammar.

ECLT 411: History of Comparative Literature

• I basically took this class so I could be challenged and to improve my academic writing. The professor seems knowledgeable, as do the students (which is odd for the Egyptian students). Right now we’re reading Plato’s “The Republic”, which is quite a task.

POLS 350: Political Economy

• Another class with an interesting Princeton PHD’d professor of Economics. My expertise is more on the political side, but I’ve always been intrigued by Economics, especially after reading Hernando De Soto’s “The Mystery of Capital” this summer. A must read for anyone. : (Here is the complete first chapter, if you want a preview)

HIST 246: Survey of Arab History

• Let’s just say that the entire first class was spent discussing a definition for “History”. This is going to be a long semester if I have this class for more than an hour two times a week. I’m going to do all the readings and some extra and try to make something out of a class I wouldn’t otherwise.

view from our balcony over Tahrir Square

Headline: 18th August 2007.19:47.Somewhere over the Ionian Sea

Well today was the biggest ordeal of a day yet, and we are still nowhere near midnight.

The plan last night was to take a bus from Sandanski to Athens, a long trip, but one that was manageable. After that, I would board a plane to Cairo, the ticket for which was bought the previous day. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out that way.

At 7 am, Sofi and I went down to the bus station to buy the ticket to Athens. It just so happens that Sandanski is a very popular Greek vacation destination due to the low price of everything (comparatively), especially clothes.

Because of this, busses to Athens need to be booked at least three weeks in advance. Translation: The bus was full.

After a considerable amount of panic, and resignation for some of us, a miraculous plan arose. Yanni [Sofi's cousin] had a friend named Simu who had a friend who was willing to drive me to Athens for 150 LB, or about $105. Although this would be $20 more expensive than the bus, it would be with a known person and I’d get to the airport in plenty of time to catch my flight to Cairo (a big concern at the time).

Instead, the price turned out to be 250 Euros- more than twice what I thought it was going to be. The deal was off.

My best option left (only option left) was to take the $5 bus to Sofia and hope that I could get to the airport in time to not only buy a ticket, but also get through the security in an international airport, and then catch the tram to the boarding plane.

Time Frame:

7am: Woke up, showed up at bus station, told to come back at 11:00am, and that everything was possibly full

1030am: Found out that there were indeed no seats to Athens

1230p: Simu’s friend’s offer came, was told to wait for confirmation

130p: Still no call, Sofi begins to pannic, calls everyone, finds a plane fare available from Sofia to Athens

140p: Decide to take the 200pm bus to Sofia (the last one of the day)

150p: get to bus station, buy ticket

155p: Simu’s other friend says he can do it for 120 Euros, I say okay to that

157p: Offer revised to 250 Euros

158p: I board the bus, after an emotional and hurried goodbye

203p: Bus leaves (3 hr. journey)

203-515p: Bus moves SO SLOWLY

516p: Yanni’s mom and dad pick me up from the bus station (OTOGAR)

516-540p: Driving through the streets of Sofia (flight is @630)

545: Get to ticket counter, told only cash

550: Come back from cash machine with enough money

600: Check luggage -overweight: payment back at ticket counter (I think they were trying to squeeze extra money from me, but whatever at this point)

605: Hug Yanni’s mom goodbye

625: Shuttle to the scary looking plane named A42- I don’t know what company it was from but it had propellers- like the old kind

640: takeoff

This is where the journal ended, but a lot more happened that day. When I got into the Athens airport, I had a long conversation with an English real-estate investor. We both had our bags lost somewhere along the way, but they came about an hour later. I didn’t care considering my next flight wasn’t til 1am.

Next, I made my way through the crowds and picked up my Athens-Cairo ticket at the front counter. This took only about fifteen minutes. I saw a greek traveller in front of me with a piece of luggage named “Ulysses”. I found it hysterically funny at that point for some reason.

Then I made my way to the Duty Free shops. The only thing I bought was Cuban Cigars, since this was basically my only chance to. (You can’t get them if you have a ticket either to an EU country or the United States). Stupid embargo.

I proceeded my way through security. I had two carry-ons because they don’t allow you to have two free checked bags for some reason. One of my bags might have looked suspicious under their x-ray machine because they asked me to unzip it. This is the best part: It was my bookbag, and the first three things they pull out are: 1. My Arabic textbook 2. a book entitled simply “Hezbollah” by Richard Norton and 3. A Qur’an. The attendant smiled at me and told me to re-zip my bag. No problem.

I had about a two-and-a-half hour wait in the terminal before boarding, so I took out my Egyptian phrasebook. I was the only one there that early. The next person to come in was a youngish (maybe mid-20s) good looking younger guy. He sat down next to me and said something in a slavic language. I shook my head. He then said in perfect English “are you going to…(some small polish city’s name)”. I said no, I was going to Cairo. We got to talking, and it turns out that he was an extremely nice Polish Juggler. Yes, Juggler. That’s his only job. Juggling. Oh- and spitting fire. He says that he’s enrolled at University but that he was taking time off to travel. I asked him how long he was traveling for, he responded “off and on for three years now”. He told me about his model girlfriend back in Poland. About the time a drunken guy tried to stab him in Mongolia, and about his heart surgery. The heart surgery was because he held the gasoline for fire spitting in his mouth for too long, and through capilaries, it backed up into his heart. He said he was angry because it kept him away from traveling and firebreathing for three months.

He left and gave me his card- literally it was a playing card with a business card on the back. http://www.qduaty.com/ is his website: he’s the one on the right.

–

I slept on the flight to Cairo. Got a decent 45 pound fare ($8) to my place in Downtown Cairo. (Zach paid 90, but Zach doesn’t know any Arabic). I amazingly found the place on my first try, went upstairs, knocked on the door, and was home.

al Hamdulilleh (thank god)