Melantrys’ Page

Wednesday, May 30th

The maze here seems to amaze everyone. (Well, I guess the more likely explanation is that Amer has friends staying at the house when it’s not being rented to anyone.) During the night someone was hammering at my door, calling “Ahmad?!!” repeatedly. I resisted the temptation to shout back “No, Melantrys. Will you push off, you loud annoying person, you?!” and turned over in bed instead.

Apart from that I had a lovely night. Finally I had gotten used to the noise level outside. Good.
Hence I crawled out of bed at a sensible time of around 11am. That morning a mild drizzle was falling outside - the only rain I witnessed during the course of my holiday there.
By the time I had finished washing a few clothes the rain had already stopped again, so I could take ‘em up to the roof to dry.

Around noon I decided to face my inner demons and fry some lunch. I started off small by cleaning and cutting some veggies.
While I was doing that Caesar called me from work to check that everything was all right. Yes, of course it was.
I finished chopping the veggies, tore off a piece of old newspaper and twirled it into a taper. It doesn’t really help one to overcome one’s fear of gas if one has to light said gas with - basically - a piece of burning paper. I turned on the gas and lit it anyway. I am so proud of myself.

(Please note the hole with the burn mark above it where one of the gas switches should have been and the way the stove swayed when I turned on the gas as something was obviously wrong with its rear right leg.)

Something made me check the tap in the corridor again. It coughed and wheezed and spit, then it was working again. Ghosts.

Caesar called me after work and told me he’d be here in 30 minutes. So when someone knocked - twice - half an hour later I was wondering why he didn’t give my phone a ring as well, but went to open the door.
It was a boy, maybe 6 years old, who looked at me with big eyes while I told him in English that he must have the wrong house. “Baba?” (daddy) he asked, and I shook my head, pointing at me and then upstairs. Reluctantly he turned to go and didn’t yet see the man hurrying towards him from the left…
(Baba = Ahmad???)

The next knocker thankfully was indeed Caesar. And he let my phone ring before knocking.

When he had cooled down a bit in my air conditioned living-room (sitting in one room with me, without me ever having breastfed him, oh! the scandal! ) we went and bought some salt and black pepper (which I’d definitely need now that I had overcome my fear of using the stove) and dishwashing liquid.
A man with two kids came into the store, the eldest of whom was the boy who had been knocking at my door. I’d say he recognized me as well, for he kept hiding behind daddy from me.
Then we went to another store and bought a few bottles of coke and brought it all back to the flat. Fascinating, yeah, I know, that’s why I’m telling you.

We wandered about some more, and after having received an SMS from my sister, complaining about the father calling her cos he got no reply from me in the morning, we made the long overdue purchase of a 1000-unit phone card.
In a handy square we sat down on a bench to recharge my phone’s account and send off some SMSs, then moved on.

To the embarrassment of my guide we kept getting lost, so he decided to take a taxi to Bab Touma.
They either wanted to charge a ridiculously high amount of money or wouldn’t go there at all. We stayed lost for a while longer until a police officer was kind enough to point us in the right direction. It had been just around the corner, basically….

We ambled about a bit, admired the alcohol on sale and had a dinner of pizza and shwarma respectively.
Caesar took me to the square at which we had gotten off the taxi on the night of my arrival to see if I’d recognize it. Evil man, testing a senile old woman that way…
But I remembered it all right.

As my poor host had to work the next day we returned to the flat rather early’ish.

By the way, on one of our many rounds across the suq someone said “nice tattoo” in Arabic in passing. *grins manically*

The ants in my flat turned out to be a weird migrating bunch. They mostly stayed out of my bedroom that day and populated the living-room and kitchen instead. Did they somehow take notice of the large number of them that I had squashed? Did they hear me mention ant poison on the phone the other night? Or were they just weird??
Either way, the sofa had stayed ants free (except for a few dead ones, *cough, cough*), but I didn’t trust that state of affairs enough to put my stuff back on yet.

Furthermore I was starting to think that the bed was killing my back…

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Thursday, May 31st

Got up, showered, dressed.

Cut up two more potatoes, the last zucchini and an onion and bravely lit the stove and heated up some oil. Although I singed my overly heat sensitive hands a bit, I equally as bravely kept stirring the new veggies and the leftovers I had added a while later until they were partially crisp. Now I remembered what I also hate about cooking with gas: the heat.
I also added some of the newly-bought salt and pepper. It’s amazing what this most primitive spice mix can do to the flavour of a meal you have been eating without any spices a day earlier. Tasted like the food of the gods…

the tools & some leftovers

While I was eating Caesar called to check on me. I padded into the kitchen to escape the noisy air conditioning and saw a piece of zucchini peel I must have dropped. It was covered in ants.

ants invasion

When I had hung up I quickly poured some poison on them and on the kitchen main trail and finished eating.
After doing a bit of laundry, the washing-up and spreading some poison in the living-room, I sat pondering the idea of venturing out into the warren outside on my own. Asking my travel diary to wish me luck, I set out…

I managed to find the suq which made me hope I’d also be able to backtrack later on. This was when I found out the suq was larger than I first thought, as I explored the streets branching off on the right and left.

At around teatime I was sitting on a bench (in the shade, yay) in a square in front of the Agricultural Cooperative Bank, which, incidentally, was the same square we had stopped at the day before to recharge my phone credits. I was quite confident I’d be able to find my way back to the flat.

I decided I had to take back what I had said to Caesar earlier. If a half-naked tourist lady is walking the streets alone the vendors are more persistent and she does attract the odd stare.
Apart from that I was feeling dizzy and short of breath. Ozone or just a mix of rather high temperature and a high humidity level? Guess I’ll never know. (Although my guess’d be on the ozone as that is my usual reaction to it. You may call me the Walking Ozone-o-Meter. )
A girl in hijab on the next bench flashed me a friendly smile while I was looking up pondering what next to write.
I discovered that I was running out of book, so I decided to use both sides of the pages after all, even though the book consisted of some rather cheap see-through paper. (Don’t buy at our store, even if the note-book cover looks cool, lol.)
When I was done writing I continued my stroll.

I spent ages getting flat feet and working up an honest sweat walking the suq and its side alleys. I even purchased something. A sponge with a rough side to scrub my cooking pot. For… ta-da-da-dum… 5 SP.¹

I SMSed some with my friend C. back home and with Caesar. After telling the latter that I was heading home I saw a street I had not walked through yet (If you are about to leave the suq in the direction of the Omayyad Mosque it’s the last side alley to the right.), so I walked into it of course. A guy in an olive-green shirt looked at me and stopped at a stall and let me pass. A while later I noticed he was walking half behind me, which was kind of annoying, so I slowed and let him pass in turn. Shortly after that the main merchandise seemed to have been reduced to old ladies’ panties and huge ugly bras so I turned back and left the suq. When I had crossed the square and was talking a left turn into the alley behind the mosque Green Shirt was suddenly beside me, asking “How are you?” As this meant he must have been dogging my steps for between 10 and 15 minutes by then, I was feeling anything but polite and simply walked on, ignoring him. Unfortunately he kept pace, and it was dawning on me that I should not go home if I didn’t want him to see where I was staying. After a few more paces and some desperate thinking I stopped in my tracks and headed back to the highly frequented square. Right enough, he turned as well…

At one of the Roman arches a couple of men were sitting, two of them in what looked like some kind of uniform. I half-approached them, stopped, crossed my arms and glowered at Green Shirt who was keeping some distance now and staying on the street right in front of the mosque. Either he didn’t quite get the message I was trying to send or he was simply reluctant to leave as he kept hovering. So I approached the guys. Like so many people there they spoke no English. After having verified that I spoke no Arabic and that the gibberish I was urgently addressing them in was English they referred me to the bearded old man sitting in the hintermost corner of the arch. I explained my problem to him, he said something the the young men, and they all shuffled their bums aside to make room for me to sit with them for a while. As my exchange with the men had taken quite some time this wasn’t necessary anymore though. When I scanned the crowd for Green Shirt he was gone. Apparently me really turning to other people for help had spooked him after all. I thanked the men profusely, pointing out that my stalker had disappeared, and headed home, stopping behind corners and watching out for Green Shirt, feeling like someone had dropped me into a silly spy movie. More fun to watch than to star…
I made it home without further incident though.

By the time Caesar arrived I was already pretty hungry, so we stopped at a stall close to the mosque and ordered falafel and mango juice (Germany should be sued for not having mango juice on sale…). While we were sitting and eating the guy from the stall was getting into a heated discussion with an older man sitting at another table. Caesar said it was something about the rent.
A while later an Iraqi couple ordered food and sat down across from us under an awning to wait. Suddenly a cockroach dropped onto the woman from somewhere, and she squirmed and hastily shook it off. They kept waiting for their food, but at an outside table.
After bravely finishing our meal we did some more ambling about which included ambling through the Christian quarter Bab Touma again.
At the square at Bab Touma (the gate) we ran into B. (some American spending a lot of time in the Middle East whom Caesar vaguely knew; ask him about B. if you need to know more) and his local guide O. who wanted to invite us to some huge party with DJs that they were going to by bus, but we declined. We had already been on the way back home anyway.
Not much further on I couldn’t walk anymore, thanks to some evil blister I had developed at the front of one toe, so I peeled off the offending shoes and my socks and continued barefooted. Poor Caesar was constantly being afraid I’d step into pieces of glass or - later at the suq - pins.
We arrived at the square I had been sitting at earlier in the day, and Caesar wanted to turn into the street to the left of the one leading to the suq. So the tourist said to the guide: “Actually, this is a short cut. It leads to the suq.”
We rested a bit on a bench, then continued on our way home.

Shortly behind the mosque we had to wait a bit and then wind our way through a wedding party taking place in the street.
But somehow we made it home.

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Friday, June 1st

I needed new food, so I bought a few tomatoes and three sorry peppers at the store next to my lodgings. Payment was achieved by the guy in the store indicating I should show him the contents of my wallet. When I timidly showed him a 50 SP note that seemed to make him happy, so I handed it over and got a few coins back.
On I went to try and find shops with fresher vegetables, exploring side alleys, but not finding any.
Upon returning from one of those alleys one of the many vendors there accosted me. I told him I had no time as I was hungry and looking for some place that sold vegetables, preferably fresh ones. He described how to get to the daily vegetable market (but not without handing me his business card): up the street I had just come from, then to the left, and right into the next street. And indeed there was a vegetable market where I bought eggplants, onions, parsley and garlic (a monstrously huge bunch of parsley for 5 SP, the garlic for 10 SP, evil, half-naked tourist lady cheating garlic vendor…).
On my way up the street to the market an older man kept pace with me for a while, smiling and saying hello. “Just to say hello, be friendly,” he labouriously brought across. I said marhaba, and soon had to add that that was about the only Arabic I knew. He smiled again, increased his speed and said good-bye.
The two young men closer to the veggie suq on the other hand were a major nuisance. One kept doing stuff like indicating the shape of breasts with his hands, saying “I love you” and adding god knows what in Arabic.
They re-emerged after I had finished my shopping and only pushed off when I stopped and threatened violence.

On my way back I thanked the vendor who had sent me to that suq and - once home - set about making some food. Even if I say so myself, it was really good.

food

Caesar wanted to take me to the cinema but was somewhat late, so he called me and asked me to meet him at the square in front of the mosque.
The carpet, etc. vendor accepted that I was - again - in a hurry but said that I had to drop in at some time. Yes. Definitely. *cough, cough*
I already met Caesar at the steps leading up to the path around the mosque, where he was standing and talking to Amer. We arranged for him to come by Saturday evening to fix the satellite tv.
On we went through the closed suq and grabbed a taxi.

The cinema was showing Spiderman 3 and the Mr Bean movie, the latter of which poor deluded Caesar would have liked to see, but we went into Spiderman anyway.
The cinema was a bit chilly, so we walked out after the movie in happy anticipation of the balmy air soon warming us up again - only to walk into a rather cool and stormy evening. I sure was glad I had brought my long-sleeved hoodie along.
We got lost a bit, had a burger and hommus respectively at a restaurant, then headed back home, making a stop at an internet café.

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Saturday, June 2nd

I didn’t hear the alarm…. again. Nevertheless I woke up around 11, showered and warmed up some breakfast.
Shortly after that Caesar arrived. After hanging around a bit at the flat we headed to the Omayyad Mosque.
I had a long-sleeved shirt and a scarf in my bag, but female tourists had to pay an entry fee of 50 SP², presumably for the rent of the dreadful, stifling cloaks they have to put on. Don’t let the seemingly low price fool you, 50 SP is what we paid for most inner city taxi rides.
I duely took pictures of paintings, arches, minaret towers and Caesar in the inner court of the mosque.

one of the many famous wall paintings

anti-gravity drive girl in court

one of the minarets peeking over the roof

Caesar (hopping around in a short-sleeved t-shirt) seemed to consider my getup amusing and worthy of a picture, so here it is:

me in fashionable garb & kids playing on ancient cannon cart

Yup, this thing was as warm as it looks.

As my friend J. pointed out upon seeing the kids on another picture, “You can clearly see that this picture was not taken in Germany. German children would not have climbed over that chain to play on that cart.”

What was even less amusing than the heaviness and warmth of the cloak’s fabric was that I am suffering from a mild hypothyroidism. As long as I eat loads of iodized salt that’s no problem, except for me feeling like I am getting strangled if I’m wearing shirts with tight collars. That cloak thingy was way too tight around the throat, and I could not follow Caesar’s advice of simply undoing the uppermost Velcro fastener because the next one was at lower chest level, and I of course had not put on the decent t-shirt over my summer clothing before donning the cloak. I was starting to simmer anyway…

nicely shaded place for making wudu

Tourist woman getting stifled to death by rental cloak?

We sat down in the shade for a bit, then went inside. The mosque is very beautiful, but there was some serious renovation going on, so we didn’t stay for long.
Having been born a Christian I felt I should take a picture of the shrine inside, which is said to contain the head of John, the Baptist.
Funnily enough, only women were allowed to enter the roped off area you can see on the right, to approach the shrine and take pictures. When Caesar tried to follow me he was politely but firmly denied access.

Shrine of John, the Baptist’s head

Afterwards I only felt like getting out of that cloak and getting the hell out of there, so we (sadly) skipped paying a visit to the shrine of Saladin.

Saladin’s Shrine

At one of the souvenir shops around the square I bought a bunch of postcards for the relatives, friends and colleagues.
Caesar was feeling lazy but said I could show him the vegetable market on the way home. After maybe a third of the way though he got (presumably) kidney pains and - understandably - wished to go back.
He rested a bit at my place before going home for further, in-depth resting.

Shortly after he had left I dozed off on the sofa (yeah, old people tend to do that ), which was not a clever thing to do, as the armrest tried to establish a symbiosis with my head, even with the cushion in between.

Caesar felt better after some rest and a shower and came back over. He didn’t feel like walking around though, so we stayed at the flat, waiting for Amer to see to the fixing of the satellite tv, but the half hour he had promised on the phone stretched into two hours, so we went to an internet café.
It was a wise move to leave the flat as the idleness of waiting for Amer had driven Caesar to trying the contents of several of the mysterious spice and tea jars under the sink. No wonder the man is having weird pain attacks…

At the net café I chatted some with Khalid who only then realized that I was already in Damascus. How did he think I had been able to SMS him from a Syrian phone number then…? Poor confused man.
When the connection broke down we left. They tried to cheat me by 10 SP, the buggers, shame on them. Thanks to Caesar I only paid the 70 SP that I really owed them.

.

1. Which is € 0.075. Go figure it out in your currency of choice yourself. Ok, I’ll be nice. At that time that was about $ 0.10. [back]
2. € 0.75 = $ 1.00 at that time [back]

Today it happened again.
A customer asked if we had cow mulch.

I say the time has come to stop this barbaric shredding of cows!
What sane person can pour bits and pieces of cows onto his or her flowerbed and feel nothing wrong with it?! (Not to mention the blood seeping into the ground water….)

Run, cows, ruuuuuun!!!!!

Or…

… maybe they meant bark mulch?

Let me give you a quick German lesson:

Mulch - - - mulch

Rind - - - cow
Rinder - - - cows
Rindermulch - cow mulch

Rinde - - - bark
Rinden - - - barks
Rindenmulch - bark mulch

Dear customers, the only cow product you can buy for your garden is cow crap dung (Rinderdung).
Ah, you think Rindermulch is bark mulch? Sorry, no. Please go back to school and learn the basics of your mother tongue. While you’re there maybe someone’ll teach you the difference between going to and after people as well…

*sighs mournfully*

Halloween Cat

My sister’s tom, Ferris, wishes everyone a belated happy Halloween….

Dear Audience, you may or may not have noticed the link in my blogroll to a German Omar who - surprise - mainly blogs in German.

He now posted that he recently married a Muslim woman - Kathrin - whom I remember seeing commenting on his blog.
What does one do after a marriage? Right. Go on a honeymoon.
So they rented a house for a week in a small village in the Lüneburger Heide, which is supposed to be a very nice region in Germany. (I wouldn’t know; I have never been there.)

On the evening of day 5 someone was suddenly hammering on their door. The wife had been lying on the sofa (probably dozing off; she didn’t elaborate) and was too stunned (her heart was beating wildly, she wrote) to move and open the door.
Omar came hastening from the bathroom and after a shout of “Police! Open the door!” opened said door just in time, or else it would have been kicked in.

Several police officers pushed past him, without a warrant, the second one vaguely waving a badge in his face, pushing his arm and his plea to wait while his wife finishes dressing aside.
In spite of this Kathrin had succeeded in covering her hair in time and approached the leading officer who was entering the living-room with Omar and offered him her hand in greeting, which he pointedly ignored.

All in all there were four officers searching the house, while a further four had the house surrounded. All of them in bulletproof vests.

After they were done searching the house they told the couple that they had received the information that an Oriental looking couple had arrived on Saturday night without a car and in the dark.

Yes.

So???

Apparently that combination already makes you look like terrorists.
The police officers themselves had been dragged from bed to perform this anti-terrorist measure.
Omar and Kathrin had to explain why they had arrived at that late time and without a car, and the officers called in to have their passport numbers checked for any convictions against the two.

The wife demanded to know what this whole affair was supposed to mean and was told that this was a routine check, comparable to checking for drunk drivers….

Finally the phone rang with the info that the two had a clean record. The officers made ready to leave, now being able to shake their hands.
Kathrin asked the final question “What kind of country are we living in?”, to which she got the reply “A safe/secure one”.

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If you understand German, you can read a short summary on Omar’s blog and a longer version on Kathrin’s.
Newer post by Omar here.

Eid mubarak!

Monday, May 28th

Thanks to the fabulous genes my father unkindly passed along to me, I was starving for most of the day.
Well, I should be thankful that I merely inherited a general tendency to travel nervousness and not the exact same thing he has.
That way I hadn’t really been able to eat anything, as my stomach kept tying itself in knots. He can eat all right, but he soon goes and vomits it out again.
Better half unfed and hungry than bulimic and hungry…

The lady at the baggage check-in thought that it was rather unusual to
a) travel all alone and
b) to Syria.
Not a usual choice for a holiday. Hm. Maybe I should have given her my travel guide book. Loads of tourist things to do listed in there.
And anyway, there was a Caesar to meet.

The new safety regulations were still bearable. Only two people asking after liquids (or cosmetics) in your on-board luggage.

The guy at the x-ray thingy admonished me to next time only bring one jacket (one was my hoodie/zipped sweatshirt…) but thankfully that was only a joke. When he started to struggle with the clasp of one of the outer pockets of my knapsack I told him that those weren’t working too well. He complained that I surely had caused that on purpose, just to annoy him. I agreed and said I had ’specially smashed them with a hammer.

While we were boarding Türk Hava Yolları flight number 1528 and settling down in our seats some mildly annoying folk music was being played over the speakers.
In self-defense (most of the senses not involved with reading shut down when I’m absorbed in a book) I started reading “Fragile Things” by Neil Gaiman which I had bought at the airport.
My stomach seemed to be unknotting itself somewhat, so I was starting to look forward to the on-board meal.

Take-off was about 20 minutes late.

The food was………. adequate. A mixed salad of (German aka curley leaf) parsley, some red leaves, rucola, spinach (?), and something dreadful. Couldn’t bring myself to finish it.
The main dish consisted of rice with corn and some dreadful spice, rubbery carrots, spinach and red and yellow peppers.
As an aside I had a small wholemeal…… bun (Brötchen!), Becel diet margerine (no, thanks) and the brand of breadspread that I usually buy myself, only I’d have never picked the “Olivera” flavour of my own free will.
Dessert was a peeled, sliced orange. Ever tried eating that with a fork? You should try it; it’s fun.
Oh, and I had a coke.
My stomach had quit its games for the moment, but still I could hardly eat up, so the meal was adequate indeed.

Remember my romantic babbling about what Amman looked like from above? Well, it seems that every bigger city looks breathtakingly beautiful if seen from above by night. İstanbul as well looked as if someone had scattered a big handful of jewels. Only in this case not across some hills but over a flattish surface.

Sometimes I think airport personel exist to make people’s lives miserable - at least the ones responsible for flight plans (or for filing lost luggage reports…). At Atatürk International Airport in İstanbul they had changed the gate for my flight to Damascus. Oh, well.
After having located the gate I asked my way to an eatery that accepted foreign currency. Service has its price, it seems, so I paid a staggering 3.64 Euros (around 4.85 US Dollars at that time) for a generously sized plastic cup of coke. I was a bit thirsty, and I needed something to wash my aspirins down with, as I was having a splitting headache.
To make the day (or rather evening) brighter I was suspecting that I was starting to smell like a skunk. Changing from a chilly plane to a warm one (during the landing) and an even warmer airport without the opportunity to throw off some clothes before finally staggering into the toilet is not my thing - nor is washing at a sink in a public toilet without any deodorant around anyway. That was a long and totally dreadful (content-wise) sentence.

Well, it can’t have been so bad, actually.
Back at the gate a boy sat down on my left with his little sister on his lap. After absent-mindedly kicking me a few times (she was fidgeting around on her brother’s lap) the little girl started telling me stuff. In Arabic. And didn’t find it the least odd that I was babbling back incomprehensible gibberish (English).
She pointed at my festival bands, pulled at my left sleeve, fingered my tattoo…. all the while talking with me.
Her brother spoke a bit of English and told me that his sister didn’t understand English (no, really?).
I also learned that they’re Iraqi.
After a while they got up and went over to the rest of the family again, the boy telling them excitedly about his chat with the foreign tourist. He kindly started his account in English, so I could follow some of it.

Food on board the second Türk Hava Yolları flight was…… hm.
It was a slice of something truly dreadful on a salad leaf. I didn’t even taste it, as the taste it had transferred onto the pepper slices was more than enough to nip any curiosity in the bud. There was also a slice of tomato and a few slices of grilled eggplant.
Dessert was melon and orange.

Furthermore every passenger got a card with about the same formalities I had to fill out on my visa application form already.

Later at customs (much, much later; long, slow queues), that card was to be handed over to a guy who stamped it with hardly a glance and gave it back to me while handing my passport to the other guy at the pc. That other guy entered some stuff (probably along the lines of “Ugh, what a scary mug shot; this woman surely is a terrorist and needs watching”), then he handed it back to the first guy to stamp.
Even so the guy standing right beside the booth needed to look at my stamped visa before indicating that I could move on and wishing me a pleasant stay.
A guy a bit further on inquired if I was from Turkey. I told him I had come in via Turkey but was from Germany. He also wished me a pleasant stay.

Thanks to the slow procedures my luggage had long arrived, hooray!

For a while now Caesar had been making fun of my preferring written chats over voice chats and joked that we’d need pen and paper to converse on this holiday of mine.
So…. I unpacked the three notes I had prepared for him…

Hi!

It’s so good to finally meet and talk in person!

:p

… grabbed my belongings and trundled to the exit.
I tried shoving the notes into Caesar’s face but he was too distracted by my arrival to actually read them there and then.
He did ask to see them again in the taxi though and was sufficiently amused.

We got off at the square in front of Bab Touma (the gate, not the part of the Old City - although both pretty much amounts to the same). Caesar let Amer, the guy renting me my lodgings, know we had arrived, and he came to pick us up a while later. He tried to wrestle my luggage from Caesar, but Caesar hung on to it.
Men.
Arab men.
*rolls eyes*
I think that he regretted the hanging on rather soon while we were following Amer through the maze to the house.
It was the middle of the night, I was tired, and it felt like we endlessly hurried through small streets, taking random, confusing turns. Soon I’d have been unable to find my way back to the square.
All the while Amer was making small talk with the both of us and pointing out points of interest like his own house (and I can’t shake the feeling he made a detour just to be able to pass it…) - as if I at that point had any clue of where I was….
Finally we arrived at a white metal door, which he unlocked. He ushered us in, showed us the rooms and the roof, handed over the key and left. Caesar organized something to drink for me, then left as well.

Tesbah ala khair.

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Tuesday, May 29th

My lodgings were in the Old City, the original Damascus, so to speak.
That part of town could be out of some old movie, you know, the kind in which the hero is being chased through some quaint Arabian city and finally loses his pursuers in the maze of small streets. Totally cliché.
A few of the streets are even too small for a car to pass through.

The house… sure has seen better days. When you entered the building there was an open (knocked out?) doorway immidiately to the right which led into some kind of store/junk room. It also smelled a bit musky.
A couple of metal steps led up to the first floor of the building which contained the bathroom and the bedroom. The bathroom could have been a bit nicer.

stairs up to first floor (complete with Alien blood stains)

water heater & wiring

And, no, I did not electrocute myself while using the water heater and the shower…

A steep open metal staircase (Did I mention that I was afraid of heights?) led to the second floor containing the kitchen and air-conditioned living-room.

stairs up to second floor

stairs seen from above

Please note the sink on the wall for later reference.

kitchen sink & stove

stove, fridge & washing machine

the living-room

The cable you can see in the background belongs to the air conditioning by the way.

tv and stuff

The bottle in this picture is a mysterious water bottle which had been left behind by some former resident of the house…

Even steeper than the stairs was this metal ladder that led up to the roof and that you could only use if you closed the toddler safety gate at the top of the stairs, as that gate would otherwise peek out between two of the rungs and trip you up.

ladder and open toddler gate

The aliens are coming to get me, aargh!!!!!

the… er… sofa

The roof was searing hot and for some reason the light there also seemed brighter than in the street. It was the ideal place to dry your washing. I always left it for about two hours, but I think it could have been dry even earlier.
The sofa…. might have been a cool idea at some point, but today it’s certainly not a good place to sit down in. Not that this obvious fact kept Caesar from sitting down anyway - in a rising cloud of dust….

I wasn’t living alone in my lodgings though. Maybe it had to do with Caesar’s persistently referring to the place as a mini-house, I don’t know. Fact is, I was sharing it with a small colony of mini-ants, most of which were dwelling in the kitchen. Yes, mini-ants. They were totally pale and spindly.
I already killed a few of them in the first night. And a mosquito.

My first night/morning was rather dreadful. I tend to sleep through basically anything, but a combination of tiring journey and new surroundings seemed to be keeping my sleep light. There was a constant rush of people and cars outside which woke me up way too often during the course of the morning. Evil people. They should have been flogged.

While I was jotting down notes on the above, someone outside seemed to be giving a guided tour in French.

Around noon Caesar arrived at the house. He had felt compelled to do a little shopping for his honoured guest, the crazy cute little man and trundled in laden with oil, veggies and soap.
We headed out of the maze going past the Omayyad Mosque. I wish people would make up their mind about how to spell that period in English. (The most official Jordanian web pages spell it Umayyad.) Crazy Arabs.

Anyway, on the other side of the square in front of the main entrance of the mosque stands a lonesome Roman arch - all that has been left of the Temple of Jupiter. This arch now makes an impressive entrance to the Suq Al Hamadiyya.

Roman arch at the Suq Al Hamadiyya

After having taken the above picture (and one of Caesar ) we went over there and entered what at first glance strikes one as a rather small bazar (or more correctly suq), a huge roofed passage lined with shops running from this arch at the one end to the Citadel at the other. But the suq is not restricted to that passage; every once in a while streets branch off on both sides that then either peter out and turn into regular city streets (mostly the case on the left hand side if you’re walking from the mosque to the Citadel) or intertwine with each other in a small labyrinth (on the right hand side).
You can buy just about anything from icecream over shoes to head scarves.
And ugly socks.
It seems that everywhere several vendors are gathered in one place, there’s always one or two waving ugly socks at you. I came to the conclusion that this must be some kind of suq rule.

After having traipsed around a bit we went to a Commercial Bank of Syria branch to exchange the US Dollars I had brought because some hotels only take Dollars. Amer was ok with either 400$ or 20,000SP (Syrian Pounds), so I figured I might as well go and get the Pounds myself and make a small win. According to their receipt I should have gotten 20,180SP. The cashier gave me 20,000. When Caesar went back to complain he got another 150.
Cheating Commercial Bank of Syria bastard.
Apart from this annoyance it was baking hot inside the bank. I must have lost 5kg in sweat while counting and recounting my money.
But they had some nice potted plants on their stairs (sorry, no pics).

For lunch I had some “special” vegan hommus at a fast food joint, which looked frighteningly creamy but didn’t contain any milk products.
I am still seriously pouting at Caesar and the waiter for finding it amusing that I was being afraid of the food. Buh, evil Arabs.

On the road in front of the Parliament building a group of people were chanting “Bil rooh, bil dem, nifdeek ya Bashar” (Our blood, our souls, we sacrifice for you, oh, Bashar), the same thing Caesar said people used to chant for Saddam, only here for Bashar of course.
Unfortunately they were done doing that (sounded impressive) by the time I had my cam out. But I filmed a bit of song and dance (from afar). Enjoy.

Amazing how all those people spontaneously got together to celebrate Bashar’s re-election…

On our way back to the flat someone shouted after us from a café. It was Amer, who invited us to tea and coffee. He was sitting there with an Australian woman whom we briefly chatted with before she took off again. I guess much to Caesar’s annoyance Amer used the opportunity to show off a bit with his German skills, but we soon switched back to English.
Afterwards he took us over to his shop, where I gave him the money for the rent. Just because I am German, and because he knows it’s done there that way, he thought I should get a receipt. Which he expected me to write. Ok, hehe.

We continued on to the flat. In one of the small streets a girl asked my name, and I gave my usual “My name is (Melantrys), and what is yours?” response. She gave her name, then demanded to know Caesar’s. I was about to tell her, starting with calling it a boring name compared to mine, when the lying bugger unashamedly told her that his name was Francesco. Tch.

Amer had told us to expect a cleaning lady.
What we actually got was a plumber who put the mat/towel from in front of the bathroom (flakes, the same all around the world…) into the sink on the corridor wall opposite the bathroom. (Remember the sink from the photo earlier?) Then he - basically - tore the tap (that hadn’t been yielding any water) out of the wall, helping along this slow and laborious process by hammering out chunks of plaster. Hence the towel, so the sink wouldn’t get blocked. When he was done he threw the liberated tap into the sink as well.
Then some kind of problem seemed to arise and he and his helper/apprentice/winner of the Against All Common Sense Award left - but not before the young man had given in to the urge to lift the towel, shake the old tap and plaster into the sink and throw the towel on top of the mess. The burning question that he left me and Caesar with was: WHY?????

A while later another guy with a big wrench arrived who fixed the tap in no time.
He was accompanied by an associate of Amer who seemed to be the announced cleaning “lady”. The guy made a token effort of tidying up a bit in the kitchen which - thankfully - included heaping the mysterious bowls of food that had been in the fridge onto a tray and handing that tray to a boy who had come in bringing a bag of cement.
After stashing the cement bag under the kitchen sink the cleaning “lady” left with the promise to come back to fix the satellite problem (the tv kept saying that it was getting no signal, and everything was plugged in and turned on).

We waited and waited, and no sign of the cleaning lady/satellite repair man.
More as a joke than for real I suggested arm wrestling to keep us entertained. Caesar agreed though.
After a loss he blamed it on the moving table cloth, removed it and got himself one draw and another loss.
The poor man.
The poor Arab man.
*laughs a bit in a good-natured way*

At 6 pm we decided we had waited for long enough and headed out again.
I still didn’t want to buy ugly socks, thank you.
We saw yet more festivities to celebrate my arrival at Damascus (idea © Caesar), er, the outcome of the elections.

fountain & Bashar

Bashar on yet another building

After the fireworks that ended the party, or rather during the fireworks and trying to escape the noise, we went off in search of a falafel place. It was a longish search but in the end we were directed to one eatery where I got a falafel sandwich with heart-shaped falafels.
Damascus wasn’t just happy I was there, it was also in love with me. Wow.

We walked for a bit until Caesar admitted that he was tired and worn out and wanted home. (The poor man had been working all of yesterday after all, then picked me up at the airport in the middle of the night.) So home we went.
Caesar checked for monsters under the bed and stayed a bit, read my travel diary, had his picture taken and whatnot.

Caesar reading my diary

After he had left I headed into my bedroom where I eventually discovered that the ant colony consisted of quite a large number of the spindly ones and a few normal sized ones with a big head (like the one I took a picture of in Amman, together with the Red-Arsed Fly) and not just a few.
Their trail erupted from one of my jacket’s button holes, went across the jacket, a piece of the sofa, my jeans leg and down the sofa and in the direction of the door. Furthermore everything I lifted off the sofa (my travelling bag, the jacket, the jeans, the bag with the electronics…) had ants crawling underneath it.
I’m not much of an ants expert but these at least seemed to be mainly night active.
Yes, I squashed a lot of them, but far from all.

The new tap had ceased working by the way…

I undressed and crawled into bed. It wasn’t all that late (I think?) but still I found myself unable to continue the diary.
So instead I sent Caesar an SMS about the ants (which he apparently never got) and SMSs to my friends C. and A. Sadly I dozed off while writing the last one, so I merely managed to send it at some point, while totally forgetting about the smiley I had wanted to include and my name. Fortunately A. is a clever girl and SMSed me on my German number the next day, asking where I was roaming around again.
Unfortunately I was out of credits, so an answer had to wait.
Whoops, I’m running ahead of the narrative…
After I had managed to send off the half completed SMS, switch off the lights and crawl back into bed, someone called me to tell me he had arrived home safely. Which puzzled half asleep me quite a bit as it felt like he had left a very long time ago. Yet I managed to mumble something about ants and poison before hanging up and falling asleep for good.

While I was away from the till, tidying up some shelves, my colleague A. kindly took care of some of the customers so I didn’t have to run to and fro.

An older man merrily announced “Ooh, it’s the boss himself at the till!” then asked him where he was from. A. avoided a direct answer by claiming that he had forgotten, hahaha.
“Well, which language do you speak?” He should have said “German,” but my colleague somewhat truthfully replied “Kurdish.”
The man then launched into a diatribe against all those foreigners who just come into our country to do nothing and get paid for it by the state. (As opposed to my good, busy, dutiful colleague.) “Isn’t that so?” “Yes, yes, you sure have a point there,” my poor colleague agreed.
“In Thailand people asked me where I was from, and when I said “Germany,” they always said “Ah, the country where you get paid for doing nothing.” It’s all the fault of Die Grünen¹.”

Finally - after repeating himself a few times - he took his purchases and left. I drifted over to my colleague and asked him how anyone could be so far removed from reality to talk that way to a foreigner and expect him to actually agree. A. said he really couldn’t say, “… and what was that man doing in Thailand anyway?”

Good question. A very good question indeed. Why do most German men go to Thailand?

.

1. lit. “the greens”, ecologically (and socially) oriented political party that only recently had any political influence, and certainly none concerning welfare for unemployed immigrants [back]

A regular customer insisted today that she had paid less for some plants yesterday. I told her that could not possibly be, as we only had one batch of them and they all had the same price.
As she would not believe me I wanted to call my colleague A. to verify what I was saying. Then I remembered he was still on his lunch break and said so.

“Oh no, I just saw him.”
I looked at the watch and realized that might be true if my colleague was being overly punctual, although I usually note his return. So I asked my colleague S. to go and get him from the “garden” (as we call the outside space with the plants and garden mould) where the lady said she had spotted him. S. came back and said he was not outside; only two customers.

*brain between shutdown and overload* “Um, I just had two Turkish customers who went back outside to get some cypress trees. Maybe you mistook one of them for my colleague…?”
While I was saying that A. was approaching from the other side, which S. commented upon, which in turn kind of drowned out what exactly I had been saying there.
“See, I told you so. It’s not as if I tend to imagine things.” (like the prices of plants… )

After she had left with her plants (paying the price I had told her they were…), A. had disappeared to somewhere, so I asked S. if she had asked him whether or not he had been outside.
“Of course I did. He wasn’t.”

This woman has been coming to the store for years. And she mistakes some stranger for A.? (I don’t recall having seen those two customers before.)

Oh, right, sorry, I forgot. One beer-bellied Turk in an ugly cardigan looks like the next slim Turk in another ugly cardigan…

Ramadan kareem!

This weekend my sis and me went to see 28 Weeks Later (more interesting but rather graphic official trailer from FOX; contains zombie-like creatures and blood) at the Cinemaxx in Bielefeld.

There is a school of thought that insists that Bielefeld doesn’t exist, but so far I didn’t care much about that cos we either had gone to the cinema in Bielefeld anyway, or we had been hallucinating a lot of good movies in some non-existent place.

Getting there was already a bit confusing though this time. There was a bypass halfway between Gütersloh and Bielefeld. “What’s so confusing about that?” I hear you ask. Ah. The bypass was announced on some sign a bit before it actually happened, depicting the road ahead as blocked and showing a bypass to the right of it.
Mildly confused we drove past a bypass sign pointing away to the left at the next crossroads. When the road ended we were forced to take the bypass for trucks which also turned off to the left. Er?
Close to Bielefeld the bypass was done with/ended, which they announced by a crossed out bypass sign. Only… for persons not constantly driving to Bielefeld from all four corners of the earth it might have been helpful if the sign had also mentioned that this meant we were on the road again that was blocked due to repairs…. but heading back to Gütersloh again! Fortunately my sis recognized the huge building opposite the petrol station, so we were able to take the correct turn after a detour across that station without confusedly driving back to Gütersloh again or something (you can use the road in that direction, just not in the other one).

So, ok. After the movie it was kinda late and we wanted to drive back home. (Keep in mind that we were still in the middle of the city and nowhere near the bypass outside of the city limits.)
Left the park deck, went through the roundabout, made the right turn……. drove past the next right turn leading onto the highway sort of road leading out of Bielefeld, as it was crossed out on the sign. Road closed, bugger.
We kept on going on the basis that a big road should have signs later on that’d help us find another way out. Not really…. the road was leading to Herford, which was definitely the wrong direction.
Sooooooo I turned the car around. The road to the highway thingy was closed coming from that direction as well. We kept going until a sign told us that that road was also leading to Herford. Er?
At some huge crossroads my sis urged me to take a right turn, as she thought she recognized one of the buildings there and might have a hazy idea of where we were.
And soon enough we were able to follow signs leading to “all directions”.
Next up came a turnoff onto the highway thingy… which was crossed out.
A car with a Gütersloh plate followed it anyway, so I followed him on the basis that if the road was really unpassable he should hopefully know how to get back home, and we could follow him.
Only…. it wasn’t closed.

Drunk with relief we hit the highway thingy, with an old song by the Eagles playing itself in our minds…

Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
‘Relax,’ said the night man,
‘We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!’

But we made it, we made it!