things I haven't consumed in four months
I realized today that I haven’t had fresh milk for almost four months. There’s something wrong with that. I haven’t even seen fresh milk in the market; to be honest, I’d be a little wary of drinking it. Even the Starbucks-like coffee place here, InHouse, uses UHT milk.
My other insight for the day? I also realized that, because it's so expensive here, I also have not had broccoli in almost four months. It’s one of my favorite vegetables; I can eat a head for dinner. I heard someone asking about it at the vegetable stand today, which is what reminded me that I haven't eaten broccoli in a long time; its name in Arabic translates as ‘foreign cauliflower’.
I'll state the obvious before someone points this out to me: there are a lot of foods I haven't had in four months. These are the ones that stand out.
Syrian Medical Care
My dad had knee replacement surgery yesterday; I wasn't able to talk to him this past week, unfortunately, because he wasn't able to get through when he tried my mobile and my landline, and I wasn't able to call out to the US. I was rather sad and a little on edge about his surgery and the fact that I'm not in Pittsburgh to be with my mom and brother when my dad has surgery. His surgery went well and he's now resting up in a hospital room with a view. I'm looking forward to his recovery and to when he can, inshallah, visit me in Syria.
Today I decided to go see a doctor because I've had a sore throat and have been feeling dizzy for the past week and, who knows, it could be strep, it could be something else. Best to find out. A few friends recommended a clinic that is open 24/7, one where the doctors speak English. The place was nice and sort of modern, kind of like something from an early 90s tv show. It was definitely cleaner than any other place I've seen in Syria but still lacked some of the sterility I'm used to in doctor's offices: the paint on the cabinets was peeling a bit, the ceiling tiles were a little beaten up, things like that. My doctor seemed a little amused I had come in for a sore throat and, after looking at it declared 'You have a sore throat'. Seriously. He did order a swab test done, though, and after determining I didn't have a bacterial infection, I came out of the office thirty dollars poorer and with a bag full of Syrian medicine. It was, overall, a fine experience.
Alexander - best worst movie ever?
Last night Mike, Stephanie, and I went to see Alexander. The only reason I wanted to see it (and I can't stress this enough) is that one of my friends from London, a guy I met at LSE, is in it (or so he told me. He was, and I quote, 'someone's gay lover'). I'm not sure if his scene was:
1) cut from the movie originally
2) cut by the Syrian censors
or 3) never happened
but I didn't see him in the movie. He's a rosy cheeked, wickedly cute guy, the sort that one notices, so I like to think I didn't just blink and miss him.
The thing about seeing movies in Damascus is that you aren't spoiled for choice. I think there's a total of one movie showing here, and Alexander is it. It's been playing for about three weeks; it's rather amazing that a horrible movie could be so popular that it's worth keeping in the movie theatre that long.
Walking out the movie theatre, Mike and I tried to determine whether or not Alexander is the worst movie we've ever seen or whether it's just in the top ten. It was just so bad in so many ways: the accents that were from all over, the stereotyping of Persians, the acting, the production, the way the movie was shot, the fact that Rosario Dawson played a Persian - the list is really quite long. Stephanie, however, loved it. Rather, I think she loved that it was so bad and played up the idea of the evilness of empire. This, combined with the fact that Fahrenheit 9/11 is the only other movie she's seen in Damascus, has convinced her that movies about how bad empire is play well here.
In other news, I'm sick. Boo.
'I'd rather hang around and be there with my best friend, if she wants me'
Things tend to go terribly awry in when you're living in a foreign country and not neccessarily because bad things happen but sometimes just because they happen in a strange place. Although Syria is a developing country, it's definitely one of the more comfortable developing countries to be living in, especially in the Middle East. Woman can walk around by themselves, drive, take taxis alone, and do things like that that make life a little easier. Somewhat unexpectedly to me, I've felt really comfortable and at ease since I moved to Damascus and, until yesterday, hadn't had a moment in which I thought I really wanted to leave.
I've had a bit of a rough week. It started with a somewhat atrocious Valentine's Day, got better around the end of the week, and then took a turn for the worse yesterday. I have been feeling somewhat out of sorts lately and it all came to a head last night. I was on my way home from a somewhat awkward conversation with a guy in my dialect class in which I attempted to clarify where our relationship was headed. He had mentioned in class he has a fiancee but never talks about her otherwise and, after some making out Thursday and subsequently nice but strictly friendly meetings after that, I thought I would be direct and find out what was going on. Nothing, as it turns out, which is fine, but on my way home I had a moment of spectacular loneliness prompted by glancing at an internet cafe and knowing I could write to my friends scattered around the world but wishing they were there, on that Damascene street, to hang out with me.
The internet cafe was open (oddly enough, since it was almost midnight), so I walked in and wrote some e-mails, which made me feel better because at least I was writing to someone about my moment of spectacular loneliness. It made me feel worse, though, because I suddenly felt a loss of a sense of purpose. I know I'm here to learn Arabic, but it's been rather tough this past week as I've realized I can't speak well at all. I also feel a sense of failure: I'm failing to learn Arabic as well as I could, I'm failing at my friendships and relationships here, and I'm failing at building up a career.
I got home and texted my friend Mike asking him if he could be my friend on call, if he would meet up with me the next day for coffee. He said of course, that he would phone me the next day. Of course, the next morning I realized I should talk to a girl, so I texted my friend Stephanie, and she suggested we go out for dinner. To make things easier, I asked Mike to go with us.
We went to dinner at a new Chinese restaurant in the Old City. On the way there Stephanie and I shared our fear that we're never going to married. Mike suggested that if we got ourselves used to this idea we'd be much happier with our lives and made a horribly inappropriate analogy between our situation and one he was once in. He said that, one evening, he discovered he didn't have a pillow and he was really upset that he had to sleep without a pillow. But, from that moment, he decided that he was going to get used to the idea of sleeping without a pillow, and he's slept without one ever since (this was three years ago), and he's been perfectly happy. He suggested that if we get used to the idea that we're never going to get married, we'll be perfectly happy, like he was without the pillow. I pointed out that this is an awful comparison for several reasons, the most obvious being that YOU CAN BUY A PILLOW. He of course chose to argue with me on this, telling me that you aren't always in a situation where you can buy a pillow. Of course. But while Target, Macy's, Amazon, and Ebay, I'm sure, are all fine purveyors of pillows, they do not sell husbands.
The lesson here is that 21 year old men are poor substitutes for your girlfriends. They're not going to be your cheerleader, they're not going to say that of course you're going to get married if that's what you want, they're going to gloss over the math and determine that it's possible for you to get your PhD/establish your career/get married/possibly even have a child within the space of 10 years, before the risk of having a baby with birth defects goes up dramatically. Men don't have to think about that.
While in the US it might be completely obvious that 21 year old men are poor subsitutes for girlfriends, when your circle of friends is severely limited by your language ability, the fact that you've been living in a city for just under four months, and a myriad of other factors, you look for comfort in the people you feel comfortable with. In my case, Mike falls under that category. Having this happen in Damascus made this much worse than having it happen in London, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Munich, or Atlanta.
Shu yanni ‘blog’ bilArabia? (How do you say ‘blog’ in Arabic?)
Today in my conversation class we had to discuss the Internet. For a country that’s had affordable Internet access for less than 5 years (before 2000 Internet access was priced out of the range of most Syrians and was used to some extent by the government), this is an interesting topic. I recently discovered that one of my Syrian friends here, a woman my age, doesn’t have an e-mail address, though she is eager to get one so she can correspond with me when I leave Syria. To me that’s somehow unfathomable that someone in my generation could not have an e-mail address.
Internet access in Syria is somewhat restricted; some websites are blocked, seemingly arbitrarily (I can’t access my bank account but I also can’t access my brother’s website). Some free e-mail services, such as yahoo and hotmail, were blocked by the government until just a few years ago because they competed with the e-mail accounts offered by the government. E-mail correspondence can be monitored. None of this was in the topics we were asked to discuss.
My teacher divided our class into groups and asked us to talk about questions such as ‘What do you do on the Internet?’, ‘How many times a week do you go on-line?’,‘What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of the Internet?’ and ‘Do you think the Internet is necessary?’ These are all good questions, but ones I think Americans and a lot of westerners have ceased to really think about, other than the idea of censorship and types of access in libraries and other public places.
When she came around to our group, we were discussing language (with a Barcelonan, Korean, and Finn in my group, this was a lot of fun) so she tried to get us back on topic by asking me how I use the Internet. I struggled to explain what a ‘blog’ is and then ended up saying I have a website and write about myself on it, which just sounds terribly vain.
Because DSL is priced out of the budget of most Syrians, I think the idea of maintaining a blog over dialup isn’t really attractive, so perhaps that's why blogging isn't part of the Internet language here. I enjoy my dialup blog, but it does take a lot of time to upload photos (hence a paucity of them right now). I think I’m going to make this a task for this week, to find out what ‘blog’ is in Arabic.
Aleppo ahoy!
Am off to Aleppo tomorrow! Lawyer souk, here I come.
