Getting real

Dear reader, life in Damascus has consumed my journal writing abilities, and I do apologize. By the end of the next post, I will be living in my current residence (which is very nice, by the way.) Afterwards I shall write on subjects, rather than days, as chronology is no longer a suitable organizational criteria. Time simply does not function the same here as it does back in the states.

But first, a little more about how I came to be in my present situation. In the last episode, your humble narrator had just been introduced to the exhilirating world of Damascus traffic and brought to the entryway to the Hotel al-Majed. The lobby of this hotel is as small as a living room, but decorated like a palace, and brightly lit. Green and white arabesque patterns cover the floor and walls. The staff, though quite friendly, spoke very little English. I had no problem asking for a room, but explaining that Damascus University had one reserved for me was too complicated to get across without confusion. Try saying it without knowing any word for 'reserved'.

So I was brought up to a room and was asked if it was to my liking. I said that it was (an air conditioned tent and a cot would have been acceptable, but this was much nicer), so I was brought back down to the lobby to register for the room. The clerk began some paperwork, but we were having some communication problems about the details, so I decided to look in my bag again for a phone number for anyone from the University. I noticed two guys sitting on a couch who looked very much like American college students, and I asked them if indeed they were. I discovered that one of them was the other student from the institute that was on my flight, the one who had been met at the airport, quickly shuttled through immigration, driven to the hotel, and given a briefcase full of handy orientation materials while I had been left behind to fend for myself. I have yet to understand how they found him but not me, and it was nearly a week before I got my briefcase. I'm not sure who the other one was, but he apparently had already been living in Damascus and was drawing a small map for the other one. He kept his voice low and ignored me, as somehow I was undeserving of his assitance. Anyhow, the two of them had little to say to me and were rather unsympathetic about my situation.

So while I sat on another couch not talking to the two unknown Americans, four of my Ohio State friends walked into the lobby. This is the very moment the whole experience turned around for the positive. One of them with much better Arabic helped clear things up with the front desk for me. We all talked about our travels getting there, what they had done so far, and made some plans for the evening. It was the most English I had spoken in four days.

After some rest time in my room, we met again in the lobby. We went walking around the neighborhood and they pointed out where a few things were, but it was still a little too overwhelming to grasp a sense of direction. The streets in the evening in Damascus are as busy as the State Fair on a weekend when the weather has been perfect. Or like High Street at OSU on the first day of classes, Autumn quarter. I'll have to get into the street scene more on another post, there's just too much to say about it to put here now.

We ate at a great restaurant called Haretna in the Old City. Again, I'll have to talk about dining in another post. For now, let me just say that we were there for nearly three hours, a perfectly normal practice in Damascus.

We finished the evening at an apartment that one of us had already secured. We went to the rooftop to find a view of most of the city. The air was much more acceptable, cool and breezy. Throughout the city you can spot blue and green neon lights - blue for churches, green for mosques. One of us, Heather, has a boyfriend back home who is worried she will cheat on him while she's here, so she has made a large sign that says "I love Jimmie" on it and is collecting pictures of herself with it. We took the picture of her with the sign and city behind her, then we all took pictures of each other. I'm sorry to say I didn't have my camera, so I'll have to hit one of them up for a copy later.

It still felt like a dream. It was only beginning to sink in that I was in Damascus, Syria, and that I would be for a long time to come. It was good to be with some fellow Buckeyes, but I felt very far from home. Later that night, in my hotel room, I did the obligitory flip through the TV channels to see what it was like here, but then clicked it off and turned my attention to the ceiling fan. After weeks and months of planning this trip, I asked myself, 'What the hell am I doing in Damascus?'