Returning to Damascus

Yesterday, I came by car from Amman to Damascus.  (And no, I
didn’t undergo any life-changing experiences along the way.) I had told
my friends in Damascus that I’d be here by about 11 a.m.
yesterday.  But since I didn’t leave my hotel in Amman till around
8 a.m., that was wildly optimistic.  I came by share-taxi from the
Abdali bus- and taxi-station in downtown Amman.  It took a
bit of time to find a car to Amman that was close to filling up with
passengers, but finally I bought two seats in a car to fill the
complement and we set off from there at around 9:40.

The road out of the ever-increasing reaches of Amman was
undistinguished, but fairly fast along a good highway.  Then we
headed north, arriving at the Jordanian side of the border about an
hour later.  There wasn’t too much of interest along the
road.  But it had rained some over the past two weeks so at least
there was a bit of green in the median strip and along the roadsides,
making a nice contrast with the dun-colored sand and rock of the
surrounding arid hills.  We did pass two or three very new-looking
university campuses along way: the Hashemiya University, the Al-
al-Bayt university, etc.  And of course the numerous turn-offs to
various other Jordanian towns and towards the Iraqi border.  I
watched to see if I could see any noticeable military supply trucks
barrelling along to Iraq, but failed to.

The border was a bit boring, with obligatory stops at both the
Jordanian and Syrian sides.  The driver took the passports of my
fellow-passengers– a blind Syrian woman and her mother– into the
border-posts but I had to take my own in.  No problem either
side.  (Good job I got my Syrian visa before leaving the
U.S.)  The border guard guy who processed mine had a computer that
worked, bringing up information from my visa application. 

Immediately after we crossed the broder the scenery changed. 
Instead of the dun-colored rock and sand there was now reddish earth,
marked by piles of huge, blackish volcanic rocks that must have been
painstakingly gathered into these piles to clear the rest of the ground
for planting.  In some places, the rock has been piled into low
field-boundary walls.  But mainly the fields are undemarcated, but
simply studded with the big rock-piles.  And there has been
extensive planting: a lot of olive groves, plus winter wheat and in
some places some vegetables.

I don’t remember seeing such a noticeable contrast between the two
sides of the border on my previous journeys along this road. The last one was in, I believe, 1998.

As we sped along further north into Syria, there were much larger rocky
hills and distant mountains; and here, too, a number of new university
campuses.  Including the one the Syrian Ambassador in DC had told
me about, the International University of Science and Technology, which
he’d said is an almost entirely Iraqi-staffed venture.  Also
places like the Arab European University, the Syrian German University,
etc etc.

As we came near to Damascus, about 80 minutes from the border, the
traffic slowed down.  This was mainly for the pedestrian
crosswalks that now started to interrupt the vehicular flow. 
Since my time playing Extreme Human Frogger on the broad streets of Cairo, I’ve
decided that one of the marks of a civilized city is that it have good
accommodations for pedestrians (or perhaps, ideally, very limited
accommodations for vehicles in a pedestrian-dominated universe?) 
We took a small detour through  a very gritty part of the city
dominated by car-repair shops, in order to drop off the other two
passengers.  Finally, the driver– a friendly Armenian guy called
Abu George who spoke Arabic exactly like an Armenian (i.e. jumbling the
gender assignations, which is what I tend to do, too)– brought me near
to the swirling, chaotic  maelstrom of cars that is the Damascus
central long-distance taxi-station.  Abu George told me that since
he has an Amman-licensed car, he would not be allowed to deliver me to
the Omayad Hotel, my ultimate destination.  (Also, he really
should not have diverted from his path to drop the other two passengers
at their destinatin, either– “But what do they want me to do with
Blind Noura?  Drop her off in the middle of the main road
there?  I think not!”)  So his trick was to swirl around in
that horrendous traffic and find a local taxi to take me onward; and
then once he found one both cars briefly stopped while I and my wheelie
bag made a quick dash between them amid the blare of horns from drivers
behind, and before the omnipresent traffic cops could come over and
force the target car to move on before I could hop in and haul the
wheelie bag in behind me.

The Damascus long-distance taxi-station has always been horrendously
chaotic, in my 30-plus years of having experienced it from time to
time.  Another good sign of civilization would be to make it more
rational, calmer, and more user-friendly… (Dream on, Helena.)

So the hotel is fabulous.  Very centrally located; hot water in
the bathroom and wifi in the room.  Could one ask for more?

After settling in I indulged in the wifi for a short while, made a few
calls, then decided to go to the downtown souqs (markets) to search for some new knitting
needles.  I didn’t actually know the word in Arabic, but took one
of my remaining ones with me as a communications aid… (Soon
discovered the world is sinara.) 
The downtown souqs here are
truly the locus of an amazing and resilient culture.  As soon as
you go under the great arch that leads into the Hamidiyeh souq you’re transported into a
different world.  The central passageway down the Hamidiyeh is
about 30-40 feet wide, paved with broad stone slabs, and all covered
with a hemicylindrical glass roof. Along each side are extremely
colorful little stores, their wares hung high alongside and above their
bright windows.  The stores all have identically formatted signs
above them, and many have wares that are very similar– this is the
Middle Eastern market version of extremely concentrated co-location of
similar goods.  Along the main drag of the Hamidiyeh the
specialties are soft home furnishings (mainly, very intricately
decorated polliw-cpvers, table-cloths, doilies, etc), and women’s wear
(including every variety of hijab veil you can imagine– in some stores
there are rows and rows of the disembodied heads of female mannequins,
circa 1940s, displaying these.)

I was in Cairo’s Khan al-Khalili souq
with Leila and Tahani Rached just a week or less ago.  They
are both vast, historic, major-city souqs,
but they are each very different.  Perhaps because the souqs in Damascus are nearly all
covered, and much better paved.  Perhaps because the Damascus souqs are all squeezed into a
still-functioning walled Islamic “Old City”, whereas the Cairo ones
sprawl with much less form through much of the downtown area.

Anyway, both souqs are also
laced through with intriguing little sub-alleyways, and studded with
amazing, and very ancient larger khans,
wikalas (caravanserais), and
above all mosques– from the monumental to the tiny little jewel of a
mosque that you can glimpse by surprise as you turn another confusing
corner.  When I was in the Souq al-Hamidiyeh yesterday evening
there was a call to prayer, and it seemed to blare out of every coner
of the souq, very loud indeed.  (An interesting reminder of the
abiding power of the Sunni traders who dominate most areas of
commercial life here.)

So I had a rough idea of the portion of the souq where I might hope to find
knitting supplies, and turned off the main drag into a side-street in
roughly an appropriate direction.  I found a place selling all
kinds of cords and ribbons, and thought that was good place to
start.  Since I also needed to buy some yarn and vageuly knew how
to say that, I asked for a yarn store first.  The cord guy was
extremely helpful.  Did I mention that practically everyone who
works in the souq is male– even the men standing dwarfed behind mounds
of extremely large and gaudy bras, or reaching up to bring down one of
the really tackiest little “boudoir” outfits a person could possibly
imagine…

So this guy took me out into the street and very patiently told me,
“You go in that direction and take not the first street on the left,
nor the second, but the third.  And you go down to the end and on
the right you’ll find the souq
al-tansim…  And
of course, there it was, exactly where he had told me.  The
selection of yarns there was adequate.  Just.  And then I pulled
out my sample needle and said, “Please could you tell me where I can
find a set of these?”  (The set of five needles is for knitting
socks.)  This guy, too, gave me very precise instructions, to the
shop of Mr. Abdel-Karim al-Salati, where he assured me I would find the
needles I sought.  As it happened, I walked right past the Salati
shop, and a few shops further along– deep into
cheap-knitted-hat-land– I stopped to ask again where I might find a
set of sananir.  This
guy, too, was precise.  “Walk back the way you came; count eight
shops along, and you’ll be there,” he saidf.  And indeed I
was.  Mr. Salati immediately pulled from a box behind him exactly
the set of five needles that I needed.

How kind everyone was to this fairly crazy-looking foreign woman with
her mixed-up Arabic and her  fairly weird request!

I was feeling really good about having bought the needles, but my
outing was further topped off when I discovered, just near the big
entrance to the Omayad Mosque, a couple of busy guys with a handcart
piled high with pomegranates and oranges, and a juice press.  One
of them was slicing off the tops of the pomegranates and the other was
getting some excellent upper-body exercise on the juice press with
them.  “How much for a glass?” I asked.  When the cutting guy
said “35 pounds” (about 70 US cents), I couldn’t resist.  Soon the
foaming glass was in my hand and the sweet-tart red juice was slipping
down my throat. Glug, glug, and it was gone! I hadn’t realized how
thirsty I was.

Walking back to the hotel through the gathering dark of the evening was
fun, too. The authorities here have put plenty of pedestrian overpasses
over the downtown streets and made some other good accommodations for
pedesterians, too.  (Like widening the sidewalk along the street
that skirts the front of the Hamidiyeh, so walking along it– and past
the place where all the awning-canvas sellers have their shops– is
nowadays even quite a pleasant experience.)  There are still some
monstrosities of modern development around the city center, in
particular one vast square-box office block that’s been standing empty
there for a number of years now.  But in general the scale of the
whole downtown area is still human, and the streets very lively–
particularly in the early evening.  Even the nearly brand-new Four
Seasons Hotel, whose brutal and dominating structure looks in
daytime like a cross between a ziggurat and one of Moscow’s old
Stalinist edifices (the Hotel Moskva?) looks a lot nicer–
even fairly pretty– when lit up at night.

Anyway, enough architectural criticism from me.  I have met some
fairly interesting people here, too.  I shall tell you some about
them, later.