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 The cars had been replaced by alley cats, the birds by bats, the heat by wind, and the sun by the moon.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.

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?'