final reflections

Rain in Damascus. Is it the city's way of saying goodbye to me? I doubt it, though the few drops were a refreshing break from the dry heat (100 F, and I still feel at times that I need to wear a scarf, jeans, and cardigan for modesty). I hate packing and saying goodbye. It's one of my least favorite things to do. Maybe I should be used to it, growing up in a military lifestyle, but I don't think the heart ever gets used to leaving or being left by loved ones.

Yesterday Nora and Karim (Am Anas's daughter and grandson - grandson one and a half years) visited the house to say goodbye. I enjoyed sitting outside with everyone, sipping tea first, followed by Arabic coffee. Nora was telling me stories about her pregnancies and family names - apparently one of her great grandmothers is named Sea, because her mother gave birth to her while on a boat. It was hard to say masalaama to them both. While I was hugging Nora goodbye, Karim lifted his arms up to me for a hug, which was really sweet. He's never hugged me as I left before.

Today after checking my grade at university (I passed! Ahumdu Allah!), I walked to Souq Al-Hamidiyyah. Running low on Syrian money at the end of my travels in this country, I bought some sweets and pretended to be a tourist, walking through the spice souq and behind the Omayyad Mosque. Some things I felt uncomfortable taking pictures of, such as the young boy (maybe 10 years) selling sweets on the street, alone, or the beggar with an outstretched arm and cane, or the group of Iranian women, with their long cloth that covers their heads and reaches the floor. I'll have to leave it as a memory.

Hmm. It's hard to come up with overarching reflections from my home for the past four months. It doesn't feel like I'm really leaving yet, so maybe ask me once I return to the states. I also have some stories and thoughts I'm not able to express here. Overall though, Syria has been great. There have definitely been some frustrating moments, but on the whole, Syrian people are really welcoming and friendly. Being totally immersed in a foreign culture is challenging, but every bit worth it.

"Just keep on moving, it's such a wondrous world out there." - Johannes Stakowski

Ela aqa, ya Syria. Masalaama.

Fatoush and the Druze

This past weekend I've spent a lot of time at home. I know I've said it before, but my host family is really really great. They have good advice, make fun of each other, and for the most part, we all have a good time.

Am Anas has started showing me how to cook Syrian food. I made fatoush with her in the kitchen twice this weekend, and the big test is when I went to Max's and we made it together... I think I passed. Our fatoush tasted almost as good as Am Anas's (she has the best in the country). So in case you're interested... fatoush is a delicious salad. Ingredients: romaine lettuce, mint leaves, special leaves you can only get in Syria (Am Anas says without them, its not fatoush, though I think I'll let that slide in the states), tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, ground mint leaves, olive oil, apple vinegar, salt, and fried pita bread. Just add everything together in the right quantities (to your taste) and voila! Delicious fatoush. Regular Syrian salad is pretty much the same, except you use lemon juice instead of apple vinegar and no fried pita. Don't worry, I think I'll be making a lot of fatoush once I return.

Wednesday night, Max and I joined Astrid in Jaramana - a neighborhood somewhat on the edge of Damascus where most of the inhabitants are Druze. Astrid lives with a Druze family in Jaramana, and it was my first time visiting the neighborhood. It feels like its own city. The streets are lined with little shops, and life carries on in its normal (dis)organized fashion. I'm still trying to understand the nuances of the Druze, but to sum up what little I know, it's a sect, or denomination of Islam, though unlike other muslims, the Druze are allowed to drink alcohol, and women do not wear the hijab (though some traditionally wear a thin scarf loosely around their heads). The religion is closed, meaning no one can convert to or from Druze. You also must marry within the religion. Druze believe in reincarnation. Men are reincarnated as other men, and women as women. I don't know much else other than that. I believe even within the Druze, there are heirarchies of people who know certain amounts of information regarding the religion.

I'm sadly approaching my last week in Damascus. I'm trying to organize the days - must go to the hamam one last time, buy last minute presents, see what I haven't of the city, etc etc. But as I've come to know so well, you can never fully organize your life in the Middle East, because, in shah Allah, plans easily change, things take longer than expected, and you are constantly reminded to just sit back and enjoy the Arab pace of life.

reflections

Despite having a ridiculously hard midterm this morning, today has been a beautiful day. After eating a falafel sandwich, taking a shower, hand-washing some clothes and hanging them outside to dry, I left my house and took a service bus to the old city. I can't believe I only have two weeks left here. Time has run down so quickly. Today I realized how many things I'm really going to miss:

- Walking down a street lined with baskets of dates, vegetables, and fruits, with men yelling out different prices.
- Walking through Souq Al-Hamidiyyah and falling behind a tour group of Iranian pilgrimers heading to the Ommayad Mosque.
- الله هو أكبر... God, He is the greatest... the opening to each call to prayer. I love hearing the call to prayer echo throughout the city.
- Men in small trucks slowly driving down my street, yelling their goods through a loudspeaker (selling vegetables from the back of their truck).
- food! falafel, hummus, fatoush, fooul, kibeh, labneh, tabouleh, tea, arabic coffee...
- My Syrian family.
- Running late to class and finding a horse right outside my house, in the middle of the city.
- dare I say, I'll miss the crazy driving. and service buses. They're amazing.
- Getting lost in a foreign language, and feeling accomplished when able to carry on a conversation.
- Fresh mango or orange or lemon with mint or strawberry juice.
- Narrow alleyways and old windows/doors.
- Elissa blasting out of car windows (don't worry, I have her latest CD now...)
- The ease of traveling between countries.
- عنده بيت!! He has a house!! (with a woman in a wedding dress dragging a man along) This billboard is the perfect encapsulation of a growing societal problem... men must have a house before they get married. With the influx of Iraqi refugees (and Iraqis with money), the housing market has gone up quite a bit, and many young men can't afford to buy homes, which is damaging their marriage prospects.

In the old city, I sat inside the Ommayad Mosque for awhile. Just me and my sketchbook and pen. It was really nice. I then met Astrid, and together we shopped for gifts and different things to bring home (which included many scarves, a mate cup and straw, and a hand-held mini vacuum cleaner-like thing).

Tomorrow will be another beautiful day, in shah Allah.

Maalula and Mar Musa

So now that my mom has updated my blog through the rest of her trip, I can write about my travels from this past weekend.

Thursday I gave a thirty minute presentation in class on Uganda and Invisible Children. I think it went pretty well. Right after class Max, Astrid, and I headed to the bus station to take a service bus to Maalula. We actually had to take two taxis to get there, because the first taxi dropped us off at the wrong station. Our second taxi driver was really interesting. He talked to us a lot about American politics (its always about our politics, never their own), and his opinion on Iran. He had a really open mind and spoke really clearly in fusha. It was a good ride.

The service bus dropped us off in front of one convent in Maalula. After walking around the convent, visiting St. Takla's shrine and the holy church, we walked through a canyon up to another church, which had a great view of the city. Maalula is an interesting Syrian town. Nuzzled up against several mountains, most of the population is Christian (from a local's estimate, about 85% Christian). On our way between two mountains, we saw several caves carved high into the rocky mountain wall with handmade wooden ladders leading up to the entrances. Maalula is also one of the few places in the world where Aramaic is still spoken. We had a private driver drive us from Maalula to Mar Musa, and we enjoyed listening to him sing in Aramaic.

We arrived at Mar Musa around 6pm, as the sun was slowly setting behind the mountains. Thankfully we still had about an hour left of sunlight, because our driver dropped us off at the bottom of the mountain and we hiked up the narrow pathway to the monastery on the edge of the mountain. Supposedly the monastery is from the sixth century AD, and an Italian man happened upon the old building back in the 80s while he was out hiking in the desert. We were immediately welcomed into the monastery by Youssef, and Astrid and I were shown our room for the night (the girls had a big room with bunk beds while the boys slept in nearby caves). Shortly after we arrived, two bells were rung, and there was an hour of silence. We went into the church and listened as some people prayed and sang songs (not silent, but worshiping the Lord). The hour of silence was followed by a traditional Catholic church service. After the service (around 9:30pm) everyone helped in setting the tables for dinner. We met some really interesting people, who were all spending at least the night at the monastery - three Bulgarians who had driven to Syria from Bulgaria, a Brazilian filmmaker working on a documentary about his great-grandfather in Syria, a couple - Irish husband and British/Palestinian wife - who were also filmmakers working on a documentary starring one of the priests, and several other guests. We went to bed shortly after dinner (though we admired the gorgeous night sky before - so many stars shining clearly in the absence of light pollution... night in the desert is comforting in its solitude and peace).

The next morning, we woke up and went downstairs to find many tourists visiting the monastery for a couple of hours. We helped prepare tea, which we shared with the visitors. Breakfast was enjoyed on a wooden platform (the walls were blankets sewn together) covered in carpets and pillows. After breakfast, everyone helped clean dishes, and Astrid and I helped chop vegetables for a later meal. Max, Astrid and I returned to Damascus in an empty service bus with Father Peter, one of the Syrian priests at the monastery (he's lived at the monastery for the past fourteen years).

Mar Musa was really great. The atmosphere is really peaceful, and everyone had such beautiful hearts.

guest writer

All credit for this blog to my dear mother:

Syria, again and Beyond

My sweet daughter is falling back on her blogging because of studies and the pursuit of further adventures ~ so mom will write a quick entry ~ the audience cannot be kept waiting!

We flew out of Turkey on a Sunday, oblivious to the no-fly zone in Europe from the volcano, and arrived in Damascus late afternoon (we learned the next day that all airports in Turkey had closed). Back home, we were greeted by Am Anas and several sisters and a sumptuous dinner around the table. Afterwards, everyone left for a cousin’s engagement party so Haley and I departed for the souq. A warren of colorful covered streets and alleyways, the souq is the main shopping area (as in other parts of the middle east) and is usually thronged with men, women and children, with shopowners calling out to entice you to their shops. Smelling the spices and the hints of incense and perfume completely whisked away all place and time ~ I had smelled this before in both Bahrain and Morocco.

The next few days were spent with Haley showing me her temporary home city. She went to university in the morning, and I tagged along, happily reading and journaling on a comfy hallway sofa while she was in class. On the first day I was invited into the classroom during the second hour to observe ~ I felt like a deer caught in the headlights! I understood that the class was conjugating verbs ~ but that’s all obviously. Eventually I started copying some of the Arabic script in my journal and quite enjoyed the artistic feel of both writing right to left, and also the curvy flowing script. Once the break came, I showed the teacher, through Haley’s interpretation, that I wrote some words down but that it probably looked like a child’s writing ~ she actually told me that it looked quite nice and she could read it ~ although I’m sure she wasn’t completely truthful.

After school one day, Haley and her friend Astrid took me to a hammam or bath. We entered off a non-descript ancient street, going first behind a heavy curtain and then pushing past a carved thick wooden door. Suffice it to say that we have never felt cleaner or more refreshed after the hammam.

We ate from street vendors a lot ~ it’s inexpensive and convenient to carry the food as one walks. One day we bought flat bread that had been grilled with a bit of oil and zatar ~ an oregano mixture with sesame seeds ~ yum. We ate a vanilla ice cream cone that had been rolled in a pistachio/almond mix ~ we consumed baklava type pastries, dripping with sweet syrup and we drank freshly squeezed orange juice and loads of sweet tea, always hot. Haley’s family fed us at every opportunity too. We tried to pace ourselves so that we once home we could happily accept their hospitality in food. We ate hummus and olives and fatoush and some kind of warm dish with chick peas and pine nuts and eaten as if a thick soup.

On the afternoon of the third day in Syria with another friend of Haley’s in tow, we headed to Lebanon ~ via the bus station, and a passenger van, with much price negotiation. Three and a half hours later, we were in Beirut. Signs throughout the city are in both French and Arabic, thus this city was called Beyrouth, Liban. Our friend Melanie was ecstatic when she saw all the dual language signs – she is a Parisian and felt like she was home! Beirut itself is like paradise and one can understand why many from the middle east choose to vacation here. Of course despite the resiliency of its people to rebuilt, there are still evidences of the country’s 15 years of civil war (1975-1991), with bombed out skeleton buildings still standing tall as if in memoriam. Two full days here wandering around the city which certainly feels very European and enjoying the food, weather and company. It was a perfect end to a trip.

I put Haley and Melanie in a taxi to begin their journey back to Damascus on a Friday evening. It was difficult to say goodbye ~ my tears betrayed me ~ I didn’t want the girls to leave but I knew they had to ~ at this point they were at the mercy of strangers to insure their safe passage home. I worried until I received the news next morning that they had arrived around midnight. My journey home would be easy and enjoyable, and I met many extraordinary people along the way. Sometimes one of the highlights of any trip is going home, and that’s very comforting.

Istanbul

After just returning from Beirut, my visit to Istanbul seems like a while ago, but it was such a great city, it warrants a post. After finishing the exam for level four, I headed to the airport for a quick two hour flight to Ataturk Airport (Ataturk is everywhere in Turkey, though his picture doesn't frequent public spaces quite as much as the Syrian president). My mom was waiting for me at our hotel when I arrived that night. Our hotel was in the perfect location. We were right behind the Blue Mosque, and could see the Marmara Sea and the Black Sea Strait from both windows.

We stayed in Istanbul for five days, and I really enjoyed just walking around the city with my mom. We visited several amazing mosques (the Blue Mosque, the New Mosque, another smaller mosque behind the Spice Market, and the exterior of Suleiman the Magnificent's mosque [the actual mosque was undergoing major restorations]). We also visited the Hagia Sophia, which is absolutely stunning. The dome is so large - Notre Dame could fit inside as could the Statue of Liberty, if that gives you any reference. First a church built under the instruction of Justinian, then turned mosque, and now a museum, it is really beautiful to explore. We also toured the Topkaci Palace, which was once home to the great sultans of the Ottoman empire. The harem was especially beautiful, with the walls covered in blue floral tiles. The palace has great views of the Golden Horn and the Black Sea Strait. Mom and I also did some shopping at the Grand Bazaar and the Spice Market, sampled turkish delights and baklava off the street (sometimes our only dinner), visited the new city, tried Raki (something we had to do in Turkey, but I won't drink it again... not a fan of licorice), and went to a Whirling Dervish performance.

Istanbul is a fairly western city. There were many tourists (one day we saw an international car rally taking place between the Hagia Sopia and the Blue Mosque). Though a large majority of the population is Muslim, women are not allowed to wear the hijab in public schools or if working for the government. Turkish hijabs are also very different from Syrian ones - they are brightly colored silk, for the most part. Turkish tea is also different - made from two kettles, one stacked on top of the other. The top kettle holds the strongly concentrated tea, and the bottom kettle has boiling water. Both kettles are poured into your tea cup. The ice cream is a very strange consistency - stretchy, if that makes sense. And no hair gel! Or at least not enough to notice.

Istanbul is a beautiful city with a lot to explore.

identities and gum

One of the neat things about living in a foreign country is that no one knows you, and you can adopt several different identities. Though it's hard to remain anonymous in the Middle East with blond hair and blue eyes (I roll my eyes every time I hear Syrians say "foreigner" in Arabic with their friends... I relate it to living in Coronado and us locals talking about the Zonies.), I have been given several new names. As it has been my entire educational career, the attendance sheet lists my name as Jane. I tried correcting my teacher in level 3, but Haley didn't stick, and for a month I was Jane to my classmates and teacher (thankfully I was Haley in level 4). The guy at the internet cafe I frequent says "marhaba" to Janey every day. My host sister calls me Halhoola (her nickname for me). And for about the first month, my host dad called me Helen (for some reason, Syrians have a hard time saying Haley, even though they have all of those sounds in Arabic, maybe just not in that combination). So I have learned to answer to Jane, Janey, Halhoola, Helen, and Haley (though I will forget this once I return to the states, so don't even try). As per identities, while I'm walking through the souq I try to put on Melanie's Parisian, don't mess with me, face. It actually does reduce comments and blown kisses. To wandering salesmen trying to sell me tissues or other trinkets, I use the Syrian "no" - an upward tilt of the head with a click of the tongue. Meeting for drinks in Bab Touma, I greet friends with kisses on each side of the face (a custom I've noticed everywhere except the states - why is that?). I really enjoy the diverse community at university.

Speaking of university, I took my final exam for level 4 today. Yesterday I had my interview portion, and today was the written exam. The written exam was actually fairly difficult. I wrote my essay about water pollution, the reasons why some people care about the environment while others don't, and countries exporting their productions and pollutions to third world nations (mushkila kabira). In shah Allah, I'll be in level 5 next week.

Yesterday as I was walking up the hill home, the man at the corner store waved at me and gestured me over. I bought colored pencils from him a couple of weeks ago and since then have always waved and exchanged "salaam"s (peace) whenever I pass his store. Yesterday he asked me how I was (Kefik? - How are you, Sloonik? - literally, what's your color?... my favorite Arabic phrase, Sho akbar? - what's the news? ... all of these are asked during a greeting, and then you are asked about your family, friends, relatives, etc etc. Greetings are very long in the Middle East). After replying with "I'm good!", the shopkeeper told me my Arabic has improved a lot since the last time we talked (I don't know how he could get that with just one word from me) and handed me a free pack of gum before I left his store. People are really friendly and generous here. I'm loving it.

And now, in just a couple of hours, I'll meet my mom in Istanbul for our little rahla. !! I'm really excited to see her and go exploring with her. Ela ekqa, ya Syria (until we meet again).