Finding home

I awoke in the middle of the night, time unknown. The feeling was a bit like Christmas morning - once I was awake and aware that I was on the other side of the planet, I couldn't go back to sleep. I looked out the window of my hotel room to see a much more peaceful street scene than the midday chaos when I first arrived in Damascus. The cars had been replaced by alley cats, the birds by bats, the heat by wind, and the sun by the moon. From there I could see most of the city, all the way to Mount Qassiyoun, where the district called Al-Mohajreen covers part of one side, like trees up to the frost line.

I stared at this for a time, taking it all in, when a lone voice in the distance began singing a long tone over a loudspeaker. Other voices joined in from different directions. Within a few minutes the entire town sang in an unsynchronized ghostly chorus. Think opening sequence of '2001: A space odyssey', just before the apes get violent. This is how the call to prayer sounds to the unexperienced. I was expecting before coming here that I would hear a single voice, loud and clear, reciting the adhan but instead it is a cacophonous blend of distant voices, all starting at slightly different moments with different tempos and styles. It is surprisingly easy to get used to hearing this throughout the day.

After a short shower - I find that I'm too tall for many things in this town, even though the locals are of a normal height - I went to the top floor of the hotel where there is a restaurant with wide open windows to a nice view of the city. I ordered what the menu called fitoor sharqi, the traditional eastern breakfast of olives, slices of crumbly white cheese, and pita bread. This is served with 'Turkish' coffee, which makes an espresso look like watered down decaf. I've gotten very used to this dark, gritty, rocket fuel of a beverage. I believe I will have to go through some kind of caffeine rehab when I get back to the states.

Later that morning I went to the university to attend an orientation meeting and take my placement test for the Arabic program. I thought I did horribly on the test, but so did everyone else. I placed into the middle of three levels, which turns out to be perfect. Class is a substantial challenge but not overwhelming. I will save my description of university life for another time.

After the test a man from the student affairs office took me to check out the homes of families who had offered to provide housing. We went to Bab Touma, the old part of Damascus. Very, very old. Old as in Testament. Like the Romans came here and said, wow this place is freakin old. You get the point. We had to get out of the car to walk down the narrow alleys, turning left and right enough for me to not know my way out if he had abandoned me. In fact, it has taken me many days to learn my way around here, and I still sometimes get lost.

The walls are consistently grey and dusty. They are mostly two stories high, the second story often supporting balconies that, when facing one another, leave only a narrow gap for light to get through. Bab Touma is the Christian quarter, so within this area there are some mosques, but these are greatly outnumbered by churches. There are some niches in the walls that house small altars to the Virgin Mary, with the remnants of many candles hanging from the wire fences which protect these shrines from less pious hands. There are also some small shops - anachronisms like cell phone stores, photography studios, and tiny convenience stores, each about the width of a single-car garage door. And of course, there is the internet 'cafe' (sans coffee) in which I presently sit.

There is a cafe that does indeed serve coffee, al fresca, in a courtyard next door to a church somewhere in the middle of all this. A gateway leads from the alley to the cafe, and in the back of the courtyard there are doors to a few homes. As we walked up to the gate from the alley, Hussein, the university rep who is much nicer than the image that may appear in some of my readers' minds upon seeing his name, turned to me and said that there was a place inside that may be suitable. I looked up at the sign over the gate. Among many other smaller words, both western and Arabic, I saw one English word in large yellow letters on the dark green background - "Columbus".

I told Hussein that this place would be just fine.