Tea in the Star-Cross'd Lover's Cafe
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
1
26
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
Damascus,
Syria
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Damascus has two hostels which cater to the backpacker type. The premier location is Al Haramain, and its next door rival is Ar Rabie. Both do slick business, and when they were listed in the latest edition of LP, they made a pact with Memmon and raised their prices considerably. Nevertheless, they are clean and still affordable. Amazingly, for the season, the Al Haramain was full the day after I arrived. Other newcomers were trickling into the Ar Rabie and we discussed "how could it be full??" in this season. And then we realised that 50 backpackers, in this budget-destination city of 6 million, was actually not all that many.
Within minutes of my arrival, I met Christoph. He had biked from Paris to Athens in three months. Then he flew to Egypt and biked some part of the way to Damascus (but not all because his pace was slow that he worried his Syrian visa would expire).
Then I bumped into Phil, who had spent the better part of last week "wickering out." Essentially that means sitting on wicker (hence wickering) chairs in cafes and shooting the breeze for the greater part of the day. Phil was chatting with Pablo, who was reading a Spanish - Arabic dual translation of the Koran.
Pablo met a Syian girl on the internet and fell in love with her. He's converted to Islam, and is now here to claim his bride. The only catch is that she is Circassian and her family wanted her to marry a Circassian man. Pablo is Mexican. The Circassians come from the Caucausus, or somewhere in Southern Russia just north of Georgia. Yes, Pablo has a problem.
At the moment, he has to wait six months and "prove that he will be a decent husband and a good Muslim" before they will give her away. They want to see that he has a good job. He does have a good job in Mexico, but that is not good enough, and they want him to get something in the Middle East. At the moment, he has lined up work in Qatar. Now he's waiting for that nation to send him a working visa.
Phil also introduced me to Rob, Adrian and Mabs. Rob and Adrian have been out for a long time and had also been following a wickering out itinerary for the last while. Mabs was doing a mirror image of my trip: South to North from Cairo to Istanbul. Alex and Arnika, whom I met in Lebanon, showed up a few days later to round out the community. I won't presume to speak for the others (knowing what I'm like), but I had a lot of fun in this company!
For the few days I was in Damascus, I sipped tea (yes, there was a cafe called the Star Cross'd lovers. It's frequented by travellers whose relationships with other travellers are destined to be curt). There was more than tea to be sipped: some backgammon dice had to be thrown, and then there was the odd sheesha (water-pipe) to be smoked. I'm not much of a smoker, but what an odd surprise to wake up and realise that the aroma of sheesha linger's on one's breath. It's completely unlike the aftertastes of most consumables. It is really a quite pleasant taste around eleven o'clock, when I would get up to see a bit of something, before I could justify shooting the breeze for the rest of the day.
The Damascus souq (market) is something to see. It is a complex of streets covered by corrugated iron arches. They were shot up by the French 80 years ago during an Arab uprising. The bullet holes in the black metal make the ceiling look like the night sky, with stars shining. There are big burgundy banners painted with Arabic writing, hanging from between the market stalls. Most are in Arabic, except for one in French and one in English. These are political banners, claiming that Syria has been abused in the UN, at the hands of the USA and the Israelis...
The souq is in the old city. It's a walled conglomeration of buildings that has existed since the dawn of human history (Damascus has been inhabited for more than seven thousand years). Obviously the mud huts have fallen away to be replaced by other buildings, but there are Roman arches in the middle of buildings, across streets, Byzantine churches have become mosques, and there is one street known as "Straight" that is mentioned in the Bible (even then, it was not straight).
Lots of the buildings have little constructions that hang over the street. Most are supported by roughly hewn logs; they work fine but I think to myself that a processed 2x4 would do a better job (that's my North American mind at work). Most of the streets are narrow, and I was amazed at what some drivers would dare to go through. Thankfully not too many cars drive around the old city, otherwise the gridlock would be unimaginable! But the place is interesting and lively, and pleasant to walk in, even at night. Then, neon green lights illuminate the mosques, and yellow street lights keep the rest of the streets from looking too dim.
The rest of the city is a dusty place. There are Syrian flags everywhere, but not by a long shot are there as many firearms as in Lebanon. There is the odd official here and there, usually a member of the Ba'ath party, but rarely is he armed. There are some big printed banners on government buildings, on one unfinished 20 storey beast in particular, that doesn't have walls yet. As far as I can tell, most of the banners make people feel proud to be Syrian.
"Dusty" may describe the city fairly well, if one reads into the word enough. Dusty means that it hasn't been swept in a while, but it's being lived in. Dusty means that people are enjoying themselves too much to be cleaning, and are living lives at a manageable pace. Dusty could mean a certain weltanschauung, where no one cares too much about the build up of consumed consumables.
But let me not over romanticise dust. Damascus is in the middle of a sandy desert. Dust blows in from time to time. It's hard for the locals to argue with the wind.
I wouldn't use the term "dusty" to describe Syria's National Military Museum. I would use "cluttered." It is possibly the weakest national military museum I have seen. For seven cents admission (!), I was allowed to see display cases literally piled full of old swords, cold war era handguns and rifles, and the odd collection of anti aircraft guns. I was also permitted by a guy in civilian clothes with an AK-47 (that should have been on display itself) to wander through a courtyard that had a few dented and decomissioned Syrian jet fighters.
But the museum did contain a few interesting elements: in the hall which displays antiaircraft guns, there is a long mural displaying the Syrian victory of 1973. The Syrian victory of 1973?? What's that? The Syrians didn't win, unless by win one means getting one's ass whooped by Israel.
Apparently, the Syrians remember the better parts of that war: that they had some initial advances at the start of that war. They conviently forget how it ended! In another part of the museum, there is a room displaying Israeli gear the Syrians captured in the war: tail sections from Israeli jets, machine guns and ammo supplied by the USA, as it says on the ammo itself. There are a few flight suits once worn by captured Israeli pilots.
A leather-jacket wearing man stuck to my elbow as I walked around the room, and more than once he told me that I couldn't take pictures (even though I had never once taken my camera from my pocket). A keen Syrian, or a member of a hush-hush spy-spy governmental orgainisation?
Lastly, I was permitted to view artifacts from the Syrian space program. Once again I say, what?!? I sure didn't know that Syria was a space power. It isn't any more. When the CCCP was still something to be contended with, way way back in the late 80s, the Syrians had a deal where they sent a few fellows off to the USSR to be cosmonaughts. Now, the space suits they wore are on display: there are the obligatory glass domed helms, and the white suits, but also violet and teal jumpsuits, patches from the program, and amazing posters proclaiming CCCP and Syrian cooperation.
These posters look like they are straight out of the 70s school of poster design, with bright (and faded) colours, block letters and a futuristic feel, not unlike Disney's 60s version of tomorrowland. Lots of Syrians were in the room with me admiring their erstwhile progress. Outside, in walk-in display case, was the better part of a landing capsule that the Syrian cosmonaughts used.
I never would have guessed that a nation where the majority of commerce is still done on the street could ever have had a space program. Yet, the Syrians were in the Soviet sphere. I guess that explains the (wearing out) AK-47s.
Compared to its military counterpart, Syria's national museum has attractive and well dislpayed artifacts ranging from the Paleolithic to the Ottoman eras. I have seen all this sort of stuff before, but I still enjoy the old mosaics, statues, and ceramic pots because artistically they are beautiful (well not the pots, really, I couldn't care less about them). But these arficacts (the pots) prove that the ancient societies which we sometimes talk about actually existed at one point.
Of particular interest was a selection of fabrics found on mummies in the Syrian desert at Palmyra. These bodies were found wearing Chinese silk that is dated from about 1900 years ago. It's hard to believe that merchants were walking all across Asia back then long ago. I wouldn't think it was possible, except nearly every day I meet South Koreans and Japanese backpackers who have done the exact same trip that these silk merchants did (albeit with buses and trains). I wonder if those old merchants talked about tarrifs and how the WTO and EU textile regulations were screwing them.
In some samples of the fabric, the embroidery is still completely visible, and is of a quality that would hold its own in today's embroidered silk market. One design which sticks in my memory is a flower on green silk, thickly woven and perfectly complete. Of course, the garments themselves are in rags (except for a few child's shirts which are complete in form), but nevertheless the exhibit was for me a surprising insight into ancient trade and costume.
Following that afternoon at the archaeological museum, I met up with Rob, Mabs and Phil at Al Haramein. A real treat was in store for my Saturday evening. Apparently, a couple of Japanese women in Hijabs make a visit to Al Haramain every week. They invite Western backpackers to a weekly lecture to inform them about the "Real" Islam. I had heard about the lecture on Thursday, and the four of us felt open-minded and wanted to hear what was being said.
We caught a cab across the city to get to an Islamic theological institute. As Phil and I walked in, a boy's voice chanted the Koran through speakers around the mosque. We struggle for a word to define the frantic pace of this voice. It made neither pauses for punctuation nor emphasis on specific words. The voice had the resonance of words memorized but not words understood.
Up three flights of stairs was the hall where the discussion was being held. It was a comfortable room: one wall was decorated as if it were a professor's or a lawyer's office, but the rest of the room's sides had double rows of thickly cushioned benches, where a mixture of Muslims dressed in religious clothing and Westerner tourists were sitting. All the non-Muslims were considered Westerners, but ironically half of the Westerners there came from Japan. Having caught the last cab, Phil and I got a seat by Rob and Mabs in the front row just to the right of the speaker. A Chechen Muslim sat next to me.
After we waited fourty five minutes for the speaker to arrive, he came in and excused himself saying that he wanted everyone to be present before he began. Although the talk was to be held in English, he spoke in Arabic and a British-Muslim convert translated for him. The translator seemed to do a good job, because there were clearly other bilinguals in the hall who had no problem with the translation.
The theme for the evening was "The life of the Prophet Mohamed" (P.H.U.B., as they always said = peace be upon him). The P.H.U.B. coming after the Prophet's name every time has the unusual rammification that the speaker continuously referred to Mohammed in the pronominal third person; ie. "He was a man who had humble origins" and so on, without saying "Mohamed." The topic held promise, but the speaker, the Dean of a certain branch of Islamic theology, was very much a victim of that nasty university professor disease called "Tangentius Tendencyius."
The professor didn't really stick to the theme, and he had no regard for the clock. After a few hours of his stream of consciousness, it was time for question period. It was monopolised by a German girl who spoke excellent English (I was able to discern her nationality - she let out a "genau" when the translator repeated one of her many follow-up questions). Her goal was pretty obviously to make Islam look bad and she did a pretty good job for a talk that was supposed to reveal the "Real" Islam.
She pursuaded the "moderate" professor, who seemed pretty nice and all, to admit, with a lot of qualifications, that an ideal Islamic society would execute anyone who becomes apostate! (apostate is what anyone who rejects what any of the prophets says). One of the qualifications was that no such society exists, and another was that the apostate would be given some time to recant.
I think the more specific problem that was revealed was that he said that if anyone rejects any of the words of any of the prophets, he has apostied and that is unforgivable. But what he was saying, as far as I could tell, was that any heresy is punishable with death. I felt that this was sort of a sad thing to hear being said these days. I always think that killing people for heresy happened only in the middle ages.
But more than anything else, I was dissapointed by the lecture. The professor made so many tangents to his theme that it was impossible to follow. Perhaps it is a cultural thing to lecture without adhering to a theme (I don't know) but the lecturer made no effort to construct his lecture in the Greek rhetorical fashion. He gave no background for most of his tangential statements, and as listeners we were asked to accept too much without basis (even a basis within an Islamic system would have been sufficent).
Around the three and a quarter hour mark, the German girl was still asking follow-up questions, and the professor was answering them with twenty minute tangents. We left.
We finished up the night at a sheesha cafe playing backgammon. I was solidly thrashed, too busy huffing on my pipe to pay proper attention to the board. I could spend every night like that, indefinately.
LP* is an abbreviation for a sometimes informative travel guide.
