A penultimate update from sweltering Syria… we’re now just over a month away from finishing our time here. Boo. I write in the midst of an exciting week for me… last Tuesday I became perhaps the first person ever in Syria to have my car towed away, by leaving it in front of the Polish Embassy and a big no-parking sign (‘I thought it said please park here’). Luckily I carefully noted down exactly where the car had been taken, so we could easily direct a taxi there – ‘karaj hajaz’, ‘the car-pound’. Eventually, a £3.50 fine to recover the car gave us a new appreciation of why you should always commit parking violations outside the London borough of Lambeth. My erratic behaviour (I may be suffering from some sort of tropical brainrot) continued until this morning, when I very kindly gave Mr A’s mobile phone (left on the bed) a thorough spin in the washing machine. ‘What’s that bashing noise?’ he asked. The response: ‘The washing is very heavy today.’
We’ve also had a number of visitors in July and August, who did their best to destroy the good reputation we had built up over 6 months here. For example, T showed cultural sensitivity by kicking a man’s prayer beads away while visiting a mosque. (He later got his comeuppance though, walking straight into a road sign with a loud clang - a Syrian found this so funny he actually got up from his seat in order to stand and point) H, Mr A’s brother, enjoyed his visit, and won’t forget his special ‘medical’ massage at the hammam which was slightly more intimate than he expected… but he didn’t quite stay long enough to fully adjust to the Middle-East, making the observation just before he left, as Mr A cut up a taxi, that ‘maybe it’s just me, but when I see a car full of angry Arab men my instinct is to be scared.’ A visit to the Umayyad Mosque with them meant I had to wear the ewok outfit again (full length brown cloak with hood). We went to visit St Simeon with M and N, where a very pious man (you guessed it, St Simeon) stood on a 15m column for 39 years over a thousand years ago. It was rather windy, and Mr A spent an hour translating the ramblings of a man who decided to tell us everything we already knew about the place. For an hour. On a really hot day.
Other notable events (from our point of view) since we last wrote:
- Two weeks in Egypt, spent pottering around mosques and pyramids in Cairo and learning to dive in Sharm el Sheikh. In Cairo, we remembered how many slimy men there are, and sailed up the Nile whilst surreptitiously sipping bottles of beer. In Sharm we were amazed by huge numbers of semi-naked drunk British tourists being calmly watched by Gulfi ladies in full niqabs sipping tea and smoking shisha. Also, Mr A had a brainfreeze in a strong current and descended accidentally to 37m (18 being the maximum allowed for idiots like him). His ears hurt. I looked pretty cool in my diving garb. We then stayed in a posh resort (also in Sharm) with permanently horrific loud music and we saw as many fish snorkelling off the coast as we had in the whole of our (very expensive) diving.
- A good day for the 1 million-plus Iraqis living in Damascus, when they won the Asian cup. Mr A watched it in a café full of Iraqis, who found it mystifyingly hilarious when the commentator starting going on about how ‘today, all of Iraq is glued to this game. Today, for just 90 minutes, even the suicide bombers are taking a break… etc etc.’
- Our first visit to the ‘hakawati’, a story teller in the centre of the old city. His routine is to veer between the sublime – impassioned recitals of great works of Arab literature, maintaining the centuries-old Arab tradition of oratory – and the ridiculous – answering his mobile mid-way through an exciting bit of the story, yelling at teenagers that aren’t paying him sufficient respect, and suddenly bringing down his enormous cane on a metal plate in order to scare the crap out of Italian tourists.
- The birth of even more kittens in our garden, causing me severe anguish. Caught between finding them sweet and vulnerable, and knowing we can’t keep them, I spent half the time giving them milk and the other half ignoring their pitiful squeaks as like lemmings they dutifully climbed up onto the wall by our kitchen to be with their mother, then inevitably fell 8 foot onto the stone floor below, one after the other.
- Two somewhat surreal concerts – the first an Arabic rap outfit playing in the finest old Damascene house (Arabic lyrics we picked up – ‘I’m drunk… there’s a carbomb’… not sure how the ideas related), the second a Los Angeles latino-rap fusion group in a Roman amphitheatre in northern Jordan. The highlight of the latter was clearly the moment when the elegant elderly Jordanian man next to us, who had up until that point appeared more interested in his Gauloise cigarettes than the music, developed a curious passion for one of the rappers, standing up to yell ‘yalla M.C. Jabu, yalla! Salaam! Salaam!’
- A Saturday night at the family house of our Arabic teacher, the only old-town house still occupied by the family that built it – a beautiful courtyard house with fountain and huge lemon trees. We mainly played with his son for four hours since he is possibly the most adorable one year old in the world. And then we listened to Russian folk music on a record player.
- Last but not least, the tortoises’ becoming frankly disturbing with their energy levels. We have some explicit video we may try to put on the internet to truly appreciate the abuses that go on everyday in our garden.
Got to run - we’re going to Jordan to get very hot and look at some more old stuff (Petra).
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