Ah, the Doctor
It turns out I had a nasty bacterial infection, which I learned once I visited the doctor. I made the trip to the doctor only because about a week ago I developed a pretty painful ear infection and then one day later got a case of pink eye. I looked like a small disaster and had zero energy, so I managed to drag myself over to the clinic, get some antibiotics (as well as get prescribed several drugs I'm sure I did not need, such as Celebrex), and curl back up in bed.
Though I still have an ear infection, I'm feeling much better than I have been in the past two weeks. Yesterday was the first day I felt somewhat back to normal; it's a remarkably strange feeling to wake up and not feel lethargic and feel sort of cheery, too. I had been so crabby that I thought that was my normal state.
I'm looking forward to having more to write about other than being sick.
It's My Fault
One of my friends once pointedly said that one of my faults is that I tend to care more about people than they care about me. I fail to gauge how much people care about me, which inevitably lands me into trouble, especially when I’m living abroad. Being sick his past week, for example, showed me that, while I may know a lot of people here, very few of them really cared when I was sick.
Over the last week, I’ve had people emphasize to me that I should know that the friendships I’m forming here aren’t real. But to me that’s wrong. I don’t become friends with someone with the idea that I might not be friends with them for several years, or for the rest of my life. And I’ve formed some great friendships while I’ve lived abroad, so I like to think that there’s always the possibility that I’m going to form another great friendship while I’m living someplace new.
My best friend here is probably a very nice German guy who I’d really like to think I have a pretty good friendship with, but I don’t know if that’s true. I talked to him tonight and started crying because I’ve been so lonely and sick this past week. Sympathetic as he was and as sorry as he was that he hadn’t been around the past week, when he told me that I had to remember that the friendships I’m forming here aren’t real, I thought that maybe that’s what he thinks of his friendship with me. That leads me back to what my friend said about me. Have I failed to gauge how much he cares about me?
More on the Support Rally
I've had a few comments regarding the support rally and am really grateful for the explanations and comments. Someone pointed out to me that "the black flag you saw is that of the Syrian Social National Party (SSNP) which was recently allowed to operate in Syria. The design in the middle is the Red Hurricane, the Party's famous symbol"; someone else explained some background on the rally.
I'm spending my time here trying to learn Arabic and find out as much as I can about Syrian culture. It's difficult to immerse oneself in a culture (even when living in it) when one doesn't know the language, so attempting learn about both in tandem is a challenge. The experiences I write about are really my own as a student, guest, and tourist here so they can be pretty limited.
Being Sick
I've been sick for four or five days now. Nothing bad, just a flu, but definitely the sort that has knocked me off my feet and left me dizzy and coughing so hard my stomach hurts. I'm sick of being sick; I'm sure my friends are sick of my being sick and crabby, too. I've probably managed to lose a few friends this week with my perhaps irrational demand that they call to find out how I'm doing.
Oh well. Sometimes I can't help who I am and what I want from friends. You can't force people to care about you when you're sick, even when they're friends. I guess some friends are just your friend when you're feeling fine and can party with them and sometimes it's difficult to know which friends are what sort until you get sick. There's nothing wrong with having party friends as long as you both have the same expectations from your friendship.
Sometimes friendship isn't enough when you're sick, though. There's only so much you can expect your friends to do, especially when you've only known them for a few months. Is there something different about being a single girl and being sick? I feel like the older I get, the harder it is to be single and sick. It's not that I want to be pampered; I'm horrible at being pampered because it makes me feel uncomfortable. It's just nice to have someone around to bring you water every once in a while or sit with you and watch movies or just chat. I feel like none of my male friends have this problem; it seems that when they're sick there's always some woman around to pamper them. When I'm sick I definitely no longer want to be single. I want to be that girl with the boyfriend who brings around books, movies, food, and maybe the occasional cup of tea.
To top it off, I got sick during my vacation, so, after a day trip to the spectacular Roman ruins in Bosra and exploring a bit of the southern part of Damascus, I didn't do anything other than wander dizzily around my apartment and my neighborhood. I guess it's not too bad to be forced to take a break every once in a while.
Oh, Sick Again
Meh. Am sick again, this time with some sort of flu/cold combination. Last night I ached so much I couldn’t get out of bed. When my roommate came home after class eventually I got up and tried to do things, like tidy the kitchen, since I hadn’t had any luck going to sleep, but was useless at doing things as well. I just wandered the apartment dizzily.
My roommate left for vacation last night so I’m alone now; I asked one of my friends to come over after work to keep me company since I’m feeling too dizzy to tackle the four flights of stairs in my building. I hope he shows up. It's not that I can't handle being sick alone; it's that it's nice to have someone around to take care of me a bit.
Massive Rally in Damascus
There was no way to miss the rally in support of the Syrian government today. People started gathering on the highway outside the university an hour before it started, chanting and shouting and waving flags. We peered out the classroom windows and knew that we still had another hour of class before we could go see what was going on; concentrating on the Arabic we were supposed to be learning suddenly became impossible. We wanted to learn about the words for independence and all the words we have been seeing on posters in Lebanon lately.
After class ended, my friends and I ran out to the street and climbed onto a fountain in the median to get a view of the crowd. People filled both sides of the street, walking towards the center of the city. The crowd became denser and denser, full of people waving Syrian and the occasional Hizbollah flags as well as a black flag with a red design in the center (which flag that is I still haven't been able to find out).
I pulled out my camera and started taking photos. The crowd was enthusiastic, and upon seeing a group of foreigners, people would often stop and talk to us. We stood around for a few minutes and then decided to walk through the crowd. They were moving in the direction we needed to go, the direction of home.
I kept scanning the crowd to try to gauge who exactly was at this rally: was it just men, how old were they, did they cut across classes? While the majority of the crowd was men, there were quite a lot of women in the crowd, including one group of very exuberant young teenage girls in hijab. I saw people of all ages, but got the sense that this was a rally that was limited primarily to the lower and middle classes. That's probably the thing that's hardest to gauge, though.
People chanted, "Allah, Syria, Bashar, that's it" over and over. I saw several banners with quotations from Bashar about what it means to be Syrian; people also carried signs denouncing Bush and his idea of democracy.
As I tried to read the signs and banners people were carrying, I tried to make sure I didn't lose my friends. I hate crowds and rarely go to rallies; I was wading through this one in order to get home. Gradually, though, I lost sight of two of my friends. We passed people who had climbed up on top of a billboard right behind one that read 'Proud to be Syrian' (in English) and were waving Syrian flags. While trying to get a photo of them I managed to separate from my three other friends. The crowd was getting denser and I was starting to feel that I might get stuck in this mass of people, pushed towards whatever the end point of this rally was. Just when I was beginning to get jostled from right and left and was about to start panicking, I looked over to the right of the crowd and saw one of my friends standing on top of the bridge I was about to pass under. I managed to push my way over to the stairs up to the bridge and ran after her, shouting her name. She was with another one of our friends and we stood on top of the bridge for a while, watching the crowd pass under.
We wandered through the city to get home, crossing the path of the rally and people going towards the rally; although people were leaving, there were plenty of people going to replace them. The rally seemed to fracture and spread through parts of the city. Aside from the core that seemed to be heading towards the area where many of the embassies are, groups of people were spreading towards the Old City.
When I finally got back to my neighborhood, the streets were eerily deserted and almost all the shops were shuttered. Bashar posters had suddenly appeared in the windows of restaurants and stores. The main street, usually crowded with cars and people, was deserted, so I walked down the middle of it, listening to the chanting crowd off in the distance.
After the support rally at the University last week, I had wondered whether or not there would be more rallies. Last night I went to check my e-mail and heard some people in the cafe talking about a rally that was going to take place today; apparently people had been notified about it on their mobiles. When I heard this I turned around and mentioned that I have a mobile but I didn't get a text about the rally. I was curious, though, about
how big it would be, what it would entail, and who would be there. I hadn't quite imagined seeing the rally like this, or seeing a rally this big. There had to be at least a hundred thousand people there.
While thinking about this rally in context of the rallies and demonstrations taking place in Lebanon and what Bush and Chirac have been saying makes me a little nervous, I also really want to believe that peace in Lebanon and the Levantine can be maintained. It's difficult to think about further unrest or civil war in Lebanon. For a while I have felt that the US doesn't fully understand the the state and nationalism in the Middle East and now I'm beginning to feel that it doesn't want to.
Rally in Beirut
I wrote something long and fairly coherent about the rally in Beirut, it didn't post, and then it got erased. Now I'm too tired to write decently. So more tomorrow.
An Important Night in Damascus
Tonight the president addressed Parliament in a specially scheduled address, something that made Syrians a little nervous and anxious. Certain streets in the city were closed off today and plainclothes policemen, somehow always recognizable here because of their stylish suits, were out in force.
My friend Jan and I were walking through the old city just as his address started and the streets echoed with the speech from the radios and tvs on in the majority of the shops. No one knew exactly what the president would say and the uncertainty and perhaps a bit of anxiety people are feeling was palpable in this part of the old city. Walking down the street, we saw
shopkeepers transfixed by the speech; the guys in my favorite falafel shop had set up a tv, and many other food stand workers had abandoned their stands to go watch the speech in neighboring shops. Jan and I wanted to watch the speech, but as my satellite is currently not working and he doesn't have one and we couldn't think of a place to watch the speech with
subtitles, we didn't have any options to do that.
Partly because we both had work to do and partly because the old city was someone eerily echoing with the president's speech rather than the usual car horns and street vendors, we ended up getting into a cab to go home. Because of the heavy traffic due to barricaded streets, we ended up listening to a good part of the speech in the cab. I unfortunately understood all the less important parts and the points that are already obvious: things like he made 8 or more different points, then asked several questions and called for answers to these questions, and the fact that France and the United States are united on the issue of Syria's involvement in Lebanon.
The cab dropped us off about halfway inbetween parliament and my apartment. I had heard the supporters outside parliament on the radio, so I asked Jan to walk over there with me to see what was going on. After seeing a support rally at school on Wednesday I have been interested in seeing what other expressions about the situation are taking place. Obviously these aren't the types of expressions I'm used to.
A huge screen broadcasting the speech hung on front of Parliament and the street in front of the building was absolutely packed with cheering supporters waving flags; the streets were so crowded that some people had climbed up lampposts to get a view of the scene. The area was dazzlingly bright and full of energy, but still somehow rather orderly. Jan was visibly nervous after a few minutes so we walked back home.
I'm just reading the news now but it looks like the government has announced a gradual pullback. Apparently there were cheers in Martyr's Square in Beirut when this was announced; I'm anxious to read more about the speech and the Lebanese, American, and French reactions to it. I don't know what this means for Syrians; I don't think most of them do, either. We're
just hoping for the best, hoping that this is good enough to prevent sanctions or to continue the diplomatic process, I think.
Protest on Campus
Today during one of our breaks my friend Soraja noticed a group of students standing near the statue of the President that is right near the main entrance of campus. They had what looked like flags. After she pointed this out we walked over and notice that the flags were Lebanese flags. The students were still organizing themselves, so we walked around campus a bit and then returned to find some progress: a banner unfurled. It stated something about how Lebanon and Syria will always be together.
The protest really started up once we got back to class; it was close to our classroom, so we could hear the music and a bit of shouting. We dashed outside once we had another break, joining the other students running outside to see what was going on. A group of about 50 students had gathered and was waving Lebanese flags, chanting, and holding up some signs, including at least one protesting SCR 1559. A few camera crews were running around shooting the action and a crowd larger than the protesting crowd had gathered to watch the protest.
I'm fascinated by the idea of a protest or a rally here. The students were pretty calm; at the same time, they were rather organized. And although they made it clear that Lebanon and Syria are close, what that means and what they mean by that wasn't clear. I wonder if further protests are ahead or if this is an anomaly. Will students at university keep protesting?
