Almost 5 months, time to blog...

I'm sure I have something at least mildly interesting to say after having been here for almost 5 months now, but the main goal for this post, is itself. I'm trying to break the inertia that has kept me from blogging regularly... ok, at all, since I've been here.

I can hear a small protest going on in front of the US embassy (the language institute where I work is just down the road). It's middle of the day here, and the current gathering is the third in about a week. These shows of defiance against the evil enemy are government orchestrated and given the resources backing them kind of pathetic. I guess I should be happy that the people here are able to freely express themselves, even if it's only when your message furthers the current regimes' objectives... right?

As I have been communicating to some family and friends, my life here has been little altered by recent events. I live in a quiet community and not too far from work (where I also meet my Arabic tutor for lessons). The past couple of weeks have seen a slight up-tick in activity in Damascus itself, but most of the noise continues to take place in cities far from the capital and in a few suburbs around the capital.

From talking with folks both Syrian and ex-pats, the opinions of where this situation may go are no too varied. They range from an Iraqi style civil war to a bloody crackdown by the regime, balanced with enough normality so as to bury the underlying social/political fissures for at least another few years.

I originally thought that only about 10% of the population supported the government and that the remainder were against, with a split between those willing to risk their lives to express themselves and those who would sit back and hope their more defiant counterparts would succeed. However, I had an interesting conversation with a student of mine last night. Like most students here he is fairly liberal and well educated. He commented that, while he recognizes the shortcomings in the current system, that people going out into the streets and yelling and at times shooting (I have a feeling he believes that there is more shooting from the anti-government side, than I do) is not the right way forward and that calmer heads need to prevail. This may be an allusion to the "civil war" scenario, or may be his own feelings that despite its deficiencies, the Al-Assad regime isn't that bad and must be given an chance to reform over time. This conversation has made me begin to rethink my hypothesized distribution of political attitudes across the Syria citizenry. It has also made me wonder about the possible frustration that those more defiant elements of the country must feel when faced with opposition from folks who agree with them in long-term vision, but perhaps not in terms of how to get there, or who may not feel the same urgency to act.

A Danish Christmas in Damascus

I celebrated a Danish Christmas in Syria this year. This really only amounted to exchanging gifts on New Year’s eve instead of the following day, and eating warm rice pudding for dinner. I unfortunately couldn’t convince Charlene to dance around a Christmas tree holding hands, singing songs as is tradition.

The weather here has been chilly, and although I was forewarned, it has made nights in the 40’s with no heat, no less bearable.

I am sharing a three bedroom apartment with my girlfriend Charlene and two of her classmates from university in Denmark. They study Arabic and Communications and have been out here since September as part of a year abroad for their program. Needless to say my Danish is coming along swimmingly… I’ve picked up two or three words in two weeks and I can’t pronounce them correctly.

Fortunately, the Arabic is fairing a bit better. Each day more vocabulary is coming back to me. The dialect here is fairly different than the standard Arabic that I have been studying, but basic vocabulary works, and anyone who can read will understand my “formal Arabic”… that is assuming that I pronounce things correctly, which is no small task.

On my second weekend here Charlene, her parents (who came to visit for 6 days), and I traveled to Palmyra (Tadhmur in Arabic) in the northeast of the country. The city served as an important center and tax collection point for trade from East to West, during the Roman Empire. Salah-Adin eventually conquered the city and it became an outpost for the expanding Muslim empire, and an enormous castle was erected atop a peak overlooking the site of the former Roman city, which at some point was largely covered in sand.

The Roman ruins are quite impressive. Thus far in my travels only the ruins in Tarragona (Spain) match them for their beauty, and none compare in size (I haven’t been to Rome, and although the expanse of Petra (Jordan) is breathtaking, they aren’t Roman).

I apparently arrived two weeks too late to easily snap up a job as an English teacher. It seems that four big language institutes completed their teacher hiring before I arrived, so I am continuing to look for opportunities. I may offer private tutoring, which I am told I could charge $18-$20/hr. I was quite surprised that some Damascenes would be willing to fork over that much money, but an American with a good education and teaching experience is apparently quite rare here… who would’ve thought? To provide some context a large bottle of water here costs 40 cents, a chicken sandwich $1. I can eat pretty easily for about $3/day as long as I don’t buy any sweets. Given the presence of ten sweet shops (Heluwayat) within five minutes walk of the house I am continually testing my self control, and when the Danish sweets Charlene’s parents brought at Christmas time run out I could be in trouble.

My recovery from knee surgery continues, and given the fact that I live on the side of a mountain, I am getting no shortage of climbing exercise. I joined a gym down the street from the house. It’s about 400 square feet and packed with old weight machines, but at a pricey $14/mo it should do the trick, and my muscles (or what’s left of them) are reminding me this evening that I haven’t worked out in 4 months.

Before I left Washington I obtained a six month multiple-entry visa from the Syrian embassy. Unfortunately, if you want to stay for more than two weeks continuously you are required to register. This registration requires I have a lease for an apartment, but according to the landlord, who has no issue with me living in the apartment, Syrian law does not allow the cohabitation of non-familial, non-married co-eds. This on top of the fact that my two weeks have passed may prove to aggravate me over the next week or so while I figure things out. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the two week limit is very flexible, so I more worried about how much it is going to cost to get my name on “A” lease. Alternatives costing $100 have already been suggested, but given this amount should feed me for a month, I’m going to keep investigating.