Decompress

Thursday, 15 January 2009 – 2:30PMish

I’ve been in Damascus ten days now—the time seems too short for how comfortable I’ve become with everything from unscrupulous taxi drivers to living without toilet paper. (Syrians, like Tunisians, largely shun toilet paper in favour of a small water hose next to the toilet.) After a hectic week leading up to my midterm today, I need to take a few moments to decompress before heading to Sham City to shop for Western goods (peanut butter!) and then out to hang out with my friends.

I am well. Truly. There have been moments where I have been overwhelmed by a sense of loss for what I have set aside in the US to be here now, but for the most part I am enjoying the adventure. I have met some neat people and am starting to get a good sense of Damascus. Hopefully I haven’t alienated my host family too much with my leg-baring, morning-shower-taking, late-night-keeping habits. (I was sent scuttling back to my room last night for sweatpants after being told by my host mom that it was harem in the house to wear my pajama shorts while brushing my teeth.) I’m starting to give greater credit to the power of culture (though I still think it’s a crap cop-out), especially as I feel like there are times when I am being rude to my family but have no idea why. Inevitably, much of my cultural understanding comes through my mistakes, which I suppose is good in the end but super uncomfortable to experience.

Studying Arabic is also going well, simultaneously better, easier, and harder than I expected. On the upside, I am usually able to understand everything talked about in class, a huge change from the exhausting and confusing hours at the Bourguiba School in Tunis. My two teachers, Ceba and Noor, are lovely—energetic, friendly, helpful, and excellent at explaining things. The grammar is also easy, largely because we’re covering things I’ve learned already. My biggest grammatical problem is that I missed the short vowel construction for nominative, dative, and genitive sentences because I jumped into Level 3, but it’s mostly a pronunciation thing and I’m picking it up in pieces.

My problem comes with the sheer quantity of new words I have to memorise. Almost every new noun comes with its [irregular] plural, and every verb comes with the present, past, imperative, and المصدر (the closest English translation would be present continuous, or the “-ing” verb tense). I’ve studied hundreds of new words over the past week and a half, and I’ve struggled to organise and keep them all in my head. I was sure that my midterm would be miserable, but it actually turned out to not be as bad as I expected. I messed up some plurals and opposites, but I also don’t think I failed. This is good news—you have to make above a 70% to pass the class, and I’d rather not repeat Level 3.

Speaking Arabic is a different story. It’s one thing to learn the word on paper, but to be able to speak and understand it is another entirely. My tutor has zeroed in on my listening and speaking weaknesses, along with my pathetic knowledge of verbs. It’s tiring to add another two hours of talking onto four hours of class and general immersion with the city and family, but it will help. I hope. At some point.

My tutor and I also have an awkward-yet-functional interaction where we end up talking about personal topics in an almost uncomfortable way—all in Arabic, of course. On Tuesday I talked about how I don’t live at home anymore, and she scolded me for abandoning the mother who gave birth to me and sacrificed so much for me in my childhood, and then started to cry when talking about how much her mother and father meant to her. So, Mom, sorry for forsaking you—love you.

Arabic is almost the full extent of my life here, but it helps that I’ve made friends with my classmates and can hang out with people and study at the same time. I am not at home much—one of the things that make me worry about insulting my family—but it’s also because my days go class to tutoring to studying to bed. And while I like the family situation because it provides instant connections to what it might mean to be Syrian, it is frustrating to be 22 and living like I am twelve again. But in general, everything is loads better than I could have expected and I like my life here.

Friday, 16 January – 3PMish

I’m back home now after staying over at my friends’ house last night—my host family is more concerned about my travel across Damascus at night than about my actual physical presence here at midnight, so I can stay out after midnight if I just don’t come home. Two friends and I wandered around the Old City at 2AM, exploring dead ends and getting lost in the narrow, winding roads. It was fun (and totally safe).

The Old City is amazing, but especially so at night, when everything is quiet and empty. The city is built on top of itself, and in places 2000 year-old Roman pillars have been turned into support beams for more recent (read: 1000 years old?) buildings. Roads dart here and there, some wide and paved, some narrow and packed down. Bits of houses overhang the roads in many places, blocking out the sky. The only indication of residences is the doors, which are themselves are totally individualised to the resident family. Everything else is behind high stone or old-school brick walls (back when bricks were straw and mud), hiding the dar (دار), or family home, from view. Inside a dar is a central courtyard open to the sky, with several floors of individual rooms breaking off. This means moving from a bedroom to the bathroom or kitchen involves going outside and sometimes down or upstairs. Random sinks attach to the outside walls, and there are often fruit trees and fountains in the middle. It’s really lovely, especially in the summer—right now it makes going outside rather cold.

Still Friday, internet café -- 5PMish

I was able to briefly connect my real computer to the internet at a coffee and nargila cafe, and it sort of worked in a not actually really working kind of way. Frustrating. Now I'm at an internet café to briefly post this before running back home for at 6PM family lunch. On the way between the first place and here, we were passed by a group of cars driving through Bab Touma area waving Hizbollah flags. And then we walked past a Hizbollah office-type thing. I'm kind of geeked out.[Edited to say: In a totally sober and only academic way, I promise.]

I have many more photos, but no good way to get them online. I think I might try towards picasa, but it still takes ages to upload anything because of the slow connections. Hopefully in a few days.

Finally, an observation: In Damascus, it is Christians who are known for their tolerance, drinking, and partying. It's such a reversal.