Buyout AsSham - Houses of Damascus

The houses of Syria are, in a word, amazing. There are alleyways throughout the old city and then very ornate doors that lead inside. Sometimes this leads directly into the courtyard of the house and sometimes it leads into another alley.

This picture on the left is of the second floor looking down from the my window on the third floor. The bathroom is on the left, and at the top of the picture is the trees coming up from the courtyard. The rooms all surround this open courtyard and there are terraces on every level.


Everywhere you look there is greenery. Vines climbing up the houses, potted plants on every step, trees growing right through the middle of the courtyard, and yesterday I even saw a house that had grapes randomly growing.





Last night there was a music festival at these huge beautiful homes all around the city. I went with my friend and her parents, who are originally from here to five different houses to hear old Arabic music with Ouds and other instruments whose names I don't know. How it worked was there were like 3 different bands assigned to each house, so someone was always playing. The crowds just moved from home to home to hear all the different ones.





** After all my comments about how lovely the houses are and how much I love the open courtyards in the middle, as I was sitting in the courtyard with my host family last night beneath a tree, a bird decided to release droppings all over my hair and shirt. I suppose there are downsides to the openness.

Cell phones

Everyone in the Arab World has a cell phone or two or three. Some people switch them out to coordinate with their outfits or their mood. You can't live without one. In some cases they have bypassed landlines and just use cell phones (here we call them "mobiles"). At any rate, I survived in Kuwait for a week without one, but it was on my priority list to go and purchase one yesterday.



My friend that I stayed with lives with only her mom, and they said I should wait until I was with a man to buy a phone because the women don't really know anything about them. So when my guy friend came to show me around and help me find a place to live, he also took me around to cell phone stores. These stores are actually more like booths where they keep models of the phone and try to get you to pay more than you should. If you like a phone, they call some number and have a person bring it. This could take 30 minutes to an hour.



When I found my phone - of course the cheapest one available- they insisted that I leave my money with them and come back in an hour to pick it up. They also needed a copy of my passport and entrance visa. Ok, I thought. This isn't America, this is Syria and I can trust them with my money. I pay the guy my money and leave to go look for a house. An hour later we return. No guy. Door locked. I almost get upset but I calm down by reminding myself that people do go to lunch and things do come up, so we'll try back later. Two more tries back later and the guy has come back and I get my phone! alhamdulilah!

Fursa Sai'da - Happy Chance

There are so many wonderful phrases in Arabic that one can't fully grasp until they experience them in the Middle East. The first and most important phrase is of course inshallah (God willing). Whenever you make plans or say you will do this or that, inshallah always follows. The second phrase I want to mention today is fursa sai'da (happy chance).

Yesterday a friend in Kuwait told me she would be taking me to the airport. First I went out with my "abaya friends" from the wedding to the all women's brunch at the Kuwait Towers and I was planning to go home and get ready for the other friend to come. I called and called. No answer. Luckily, my "abaya friends" being the sweet Kuwaitis they are offered to take me to the airport instead. I wasn't upset about it. It just wasn't inshallah!

We arrive at the airport check in my one allowed bag of 40lbs and are off to sit in Starbucks and chat for a while before I have to go in. Right when I'm about to go through the first security checkpoint we see the sister and cousin of the bride from the wedding a week ago. The cousin and I had chatted and she mentioned she was going to Damascus, but I didn't ask when. As it turns out she was going on the same plane as me! What a fursa sai'da! Two minor issues with my carry-on and my visa were solved and then I was on the plane to AsSham!

Watching out my window I saw 12 strollers being loaded onto the plane before I stopped counting. Yes, this is also a good indication of the noise level. --quick sidenote-- the guy sitting beside me just lit the 2nd cigarette in 10 minutes!-- The atmosphere on the plane was really exciting. People were so happy to be going back, and the children were SO cute the way they said Suriyya.

Next thing I know I'm standing at the customs/border control counter sweating like crazy. I handed the officers my passport, and they let me just stand there and they were making me so nervous flipping through and thoroughly checking it for anything suspicious (even though I already had a visa). They were so intimidating!

I meet up with my friend at the baggage claim and she insisted that I go back with her family and stay with them for a night. My previous plan was to get a taxi and just try to find a hotel from the hotel names I had previously written down. I took my friend up on her offer. We went back to her house, talked with her family a LONG time, and had dinner out on their veranda at midnight. They asked me a zillion questions and I had to try my best to answer them in Arabic and convey the exact meaning I wanted since they spoke very very little Arabic. At 1:30 everyone finally left and we slept. Another long day!

8:00, 9:00, 10:30, 12:00, 12:30 and I finally decide that I need to get up and out of the bed. I need to find a hotel, a room in a house, and buy a phone. We sit down with the phone book, which is just like ours, except in Arabic of course. We call every single hotel in the book under three starts. Feesh gharafa. No rooms. My friend and her mom and I keep blinking hard and looking back and forth at each other silently and try some four stars. Feesh gharafa. Finally the Sultan hotel says they have a room. alhamdulilah! (another useful phrase meaning "Praise God!")

By three my things are in the room and I've met up with a friend of a friend of a friend who is a Palestinan American Fulbrighter and has agreed to show me around the old city and help me get a phone and an apartment... inshallah.

We casually stroll through Souq Al-Hamidiya and the Umayyad Mosque and all the way to Bab Touma which is in the "Christian Quarter" and the area where he was staying. This was a safe bet he was saying. If I liked the place then I could probably just take his room. The old city is set up in long corridors. Then there are doors to other corridors and also to homes. We open the door to his house and it leads down a small hallway into a courtyard surrounded by rooms. The rooms aren't connected to each other, so to go from one to the other you have to cross the outdoor courtyard. It is beautiful. I love it. Unfortunately the family has already arranged for someone to take his place. On to plan B.

I am starting to feel really small, realizing that my life is no consequence. Here I am walking around the oldest inhabited city in the world trying to find a place to call my home for three months. There are so many foreigners here learning Arabic. They're all staying for 3 months or 7 months or a year, all vyying for a piece of Damascus, but when they leave the city will forget them. The host families will take in more students and rain will wash away their footprints.

My friend suggest we go and see Um Zaheer. Someone at the hotel already mentioned I should find her, so by now I'm getting the idea that she is like the "big momma" of Damascus- sort of like a South American drug lord, only she deals with foreign students not drugs. So we head to Umm Zaheer's house. She's a nice but tough little old lady and her daughter and grandchildren live with her. Her house is in the old Syrian style with the courtyard in the middle, but it is two stories so there are stairs in the courtyard leading up to rooms that she rents to students. Um Zaheer invites us to sit. She looks me up and down as the runs through the formalities. She says that everyone she knows has rented their rooms out. Then she sits thinking for about 5 minutes while I sit awkwardly wondering what she is about to say. She turns to me talata shahur? 3 months? tayyib, andi ghorfa kibeera fouq. I have a big room for you upstairs. YES! She goes on to say that I'm not like the other girls who come, and I shouldn't be staying in Bab Touma because those foreigners have a bad reputation. Since I am a nice girl, conservatively dressed, I can stay with her for $150 a month. alhamdulilah! fursa sai'ida!!

Wajbat

I love the way the sound of the azan (call to prayer) welcomes me every time I visit the Middle East. Upon my first encounter, the sound rising louder and louder in a low eerie pitch gave me the feeling that I was in a haunted desolate ghost town. Now, my perception has changed -it is a welcoming gesture, one that reminds me of the beauty and spirit of the region. It doesn't wake me up anymore, more often I stay up to hear it.

I slept three hours my first night here. Any hopes of sleeping were dashed with the excitement of my first day in Kuwait and worries that I wouldn't wake up on time. I've come to realize that my body has a pretty good internal clock when it's really worried about oversleeping. And I didn't have a minute to lose!

At the wedding I had made plans to go to breakfast with some of the girls. When they ask if they could take me out for lunch or dinner and I politely turned them down because I already had plans for both meals, they insisted that they take me to breakfast at 8:30 (which really means 9:30) since my teacher was picking me up for lunch at 1.

The girls called up to the apartment and I headed down to the car. The girl driving brought her little brother along, and I wasn't quite sure if he was supposed to be our "male gaurdian" or if she was just trying to be sweet and bring him along. One of the girls announces that we are going to The Avenues for breakfast. The Avenues is the new rage in Kuwait- an atrociously huge mall that was just recently built with shiny sqweaky floors and a Starbucks everywhere you turn. Honestly I wasn't the least bit surprised. The cross-cultural fascination certainly goes both ways. At least I was able to persuade them to have breakfast at the Lebanese restauraunt in the food court!

A couple girls met up with us at the restauraunt, neither of which I recognized fully clothed. I was only able to identify them once they said, "she was the one wearing the green dresss" or something to that affect. I really need to start paying more attention to people's eyes.

Both before and after breakfast we participated in a widely practiced Arab ritual: the walk around the mall. It totally baffles me how many people go to malls here. Every time I've been it's taken at least 20 minutes to find a parking spot. And for what? People don't really go to the mall to shop. They're there to check out everybody else and chat with friends and to window shop. An occasional purchase will be made, but mostly people buy some sort of fruit drink and sit at a restauraunt watching people pass. The girls kept commenting and laughing at how everyone was staring at me because I was walking around with four other girls who were wearing the black abaya and hijab. We even heard someone say that I was Russian (which is NOT a good nationality to be in the Middle East).

For lunch my teacher picked me up and started driving, without giving mention of where we were going or asking if I had any preferences. I recognized the road we were on because I had just gone that way earlier. Out of curiousity I ask him where we were going. His reply: "Well I thought I'd do something quintessentially Kuwaiti and take you to The Avenues." I kind of smirked and told him that's where I'd been earlier that morning. "Wow," he says "I guess I'm more dead on than I thought!"

Needless to say, I didn't have my first real Kuwaiti meal (which was actually more Iranian) until that night when the Fulbrighters and some embassy folks went over to the house of a family member of one of the current Fulbrighters who had invited us for dinner. There was a chicken dish, rice with currents, tabouleh (my personal favorite), a spinachy keeshy type dish, and a few other things I'm now forgetting.

I don't remember the last time I've had three full meals in a day. I slept well the second night.

last night gave new meaning to "hit the ground running"

A very fashionable 2 1/2 hours late in typical Kuwaiti style, and my plane has finally arrived. Time- nearly 7:30pm. The plane doors open and all the passengers wade towards the front eager to get out. A strong gust of desert wind greets us at the door, but it's not a cool breeze. Nope, the temperature is a little over 100 degrees. It's exatly the same sensation as opening the oven door to retrieve a cake in the middle of winter, only it's not an oven- it's a country! Ahlan wa sahlan! Welcome to Kuwait!

After I make it through the visa que and the baggage claim, with an East Asian man who insists on pushing my luggage on the little trolley, I enter the arrivals area where there are like a billion people waiting to pick up their friends and family. (I later learned 7 flights had arrived at nearly the same time) My friends came running up to me, one of which I hadn't seen since I was here two years ago, and I was so excited that I forgot all about my luggage! The man had kept walking thinking that I was behind him, so one of my friends had to go and track him down amidst the crowd.

Shortly thereafter we're on the airport road headed into Kuwait City, my friends yapping in their Khaliji [Gulfi] dialect and I'm trying to keep up... ok mush kitha is now mu chitha and 'ulu is gulu... did she just say dagigatain!? wow... ok... check. I'm also desparately trying to remember to add "ch" to the end of feminine possessive nouns rather than the regular old "k" so I don't offend anyone by addressing them like they are men. AH! Ba7ebak ya Kuwait!

My friends drop me off at another friend's apartment where I'm staying, and one pleads with me to please stay at her house some of the time I'm here. I take all my bags up (alhamdulilah they have elevators in Kuwait). I drop everything off in my room and consult with my friends on whether or not I should still try to make it to a wedding that I am already about 3 hours late for. I decide to go. After all, in Kuwait, 3 hours late could mean you're early!

A 30 minute cab ride later and the mother of a friend of the bride is behind our cab flashing her lights to let me know she's there to pick me up. I hop into the Mercedes and notice she's wearing a niqab (a form of head covering that only had slits for the eyes). She doesn't speak much English. This could get interesting. As we're driving to the reception sight, she warns me that this wedding isn't a typical "Kuwaiti wedding" - it's "bedoui" (bedouin). I couldn't help but smirk thinking about how this very bedoui looking lady is making sure that I understand most Kuwaitis have more posh weddings. She also mentions that she doesn't usually wear "this thing on [her] face," but she put on make-up so no one should see it (in public).

We arrive at the a'rs and I am definately not blending in well. I'm the only person over the age of 15 who is not wearing an abaya (traditional long black robe and headscarf) and among the few who are not wearing the niqab. The party is held in a snazzy reception hall. The men's party was upstairs and was finishing up by the time I got there, but the women were still going strong downstairs. For the first little while, the bride and the groom were still receiving guests up on a stage where they were seated. All of the family members of course had to walk by, shake hands and tell them mabrook. The daughter of the woman who came to pick me up tells me that I shouldn't go up there because Saddam, the groom can't shake my hand. She does however position me perfectly so that I can see the pair as they leave. As they're walking out, the bride's sister catches sight of me (although she's never seen me before... gee I wonder how she figured out it was me?) and pulls me upstairs so I can take a picture with the bride before she leaves. Some random lady (I think one of the camerawomen) jumps in the picture too and clings to me as if I'm a dear old friend. I can't imagine what kind of face I'm making in that picture...

So after the couple leaves, then the party realy gets started. The women all shed their abayas and hijabs to reveal positively gorgeous dresses, the most done-up hair I've ever seen and the make-up.... wow. Many of the ladies have "whitening cream" on their faces, which is lathered on so thick it might as well be white paint. Clearly all of the women in the bride's family have gone to the same make-up artist because on top of the white faces, their eyeliner is probably about a quarter of an inch thick! Everyone has beautiful shimmering eyelids in bright greens, oranges, blues, yellows and pinks (all depending on what color their dresses are of course). Needless to say, I didn't quite measure up with my "just off the plane" look. Most of the people there sort of stared at me for a minute smiling and would come over and introduce themselves. I was happy to be able to use my Arabic, and I have no idea how many time I heard "mashallah anti teHki Arabi aHsan menni!"

Then the dancing begins. Oh, khaliji dancing! I can't do it at all, but I sure did try. It's basically a very intricate scoot kind of swaying from side to side. And then there's the hair! Most everyone's hair is long (one lady's was down to her calves!) and they swish that from side to side too. It was so cute to see the little girls imitating the older ones. The only time when I sort of held my ground on the dance floor was during the couple shami (Levant- Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine) music came on. Everyone was really sweet to me though, dancing with me and trying to show me some moves.

Around 1:30 the party was over and this little group of girls I am with decides that we should all go to the 24hr McDonalds (even though there was TONS of Arabic food at the party which no one my age touched). We pile into two cars with the niqab-clad mom's driving, and I quickly learn that the McDonalds drive through has a very specific procedure. To avoid waiting with two cars, one car takes the order of the other car. Then when you pull up to order (at a window- and in English) it's someone from the back seat who orders if the driver is an older married woman. The girl who was basically in charge of me for the night flips part of her headscarf over her face to order because she's wearing a lot of make-up. It was quite entertaining to watch the Philippino man at the window take an order from basically a black sheet. Once we get our food we pull around to the other car waiting for us in the lot and pass along their orders through the window. We all just sit there and eat laughing and yelling across to the other car. I wonder whether this is a typical 2am outing for the girls.

Finally, around 2:30 were making our way back to my friend's apartment in Salmiya and I'm really hoping that I'll be able to recognize anything that would give away her street. I remember the Kuwait-Bahrain Bank sign that I saw on the way to catch a cab earlier, and luckily I'm right. 3:15 and I'm in my bed tuning in to a Kuwaiti radio station with the cool international radio my granfather gave me before I left. I hear the azan (call to prayer) and it's time to sleep. Whew! What an eventful beginning!

preparations

at the risk of sounding terribly cliche, i am on the road to damascus. syria was never a spectacle of wonder for me. while i was in jordan everyone was talking about how much they wanted to go to syria and i never really caught the bug. but now, over a year later, syria has come to represent so much.

trying to quell my expectations prior to my departure has been difficult. damascus is the oldest inhabited city in the world and was an important center of learning throughout the ages. then of course there are syrian people, which i believe to be some of the friendliest people on the earth! i know my time in damascus will be well spent, but i am trying to be careful not to enter with expectations of what it will be like.

i feel lucky to have jordan under my belt so that i can go into damascus more prepared. i feel more confident in my abilities to only speak in arabic to people, and to venture away from the westerners. i am now better able to live with a family. i know that i want to travel around and see the country, and spend much more time getting to know people and the language.
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the traditional word for the region of the Levant (syria, jordan, lebanon, palestine) prior to the modern nation-state is bilad assham which literally means countries of assham. people often refer to damascus (dimashq) and syria in general as assham.