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!!