Natalie's First Foods

Natalie's First Foods from Aaron Faust on Vimeo.

Pictures from Jebel Qasiyoun

Earlier this month we went up to Jebel Qasiyoun, a mountain at the northwest boundary of Damascus which the city has climbed up as it has expanded outward. There are some not particularly fancy but very expensive restaurants at the top. They charge so much because of the views, which we took in while walking along the sidewalk in front of them. Here are a few of the pictures, from top to bottom: the Ministry of Awqaf (religious endowments) building, our neighborhood (Shaalan, we live just on the other side of the park) with the Four Seasons hotel in the background, the Umayyad Mosque and Old City, a mosque in the Muhieddin neighborhood on the side of the mountain, a panoramic view looking southward out at the city, some friends we met along the way, and the presidential palace at sunset.

The Exterminator

We moved into our new apartment last weekend. It has wonderful heat (unlike the exploding gas stove heater in our last place), is bright, and well-located. The move was easy, since we were moving a half-a-block from one furnished apartment to another. Almost as soon as we finished unpacking, however, we noticed a cockroach in the bathroom. It was small and not so terrible. We just killed it and moved on. That night we saw more cockroaches in the bathroom and the kitchen. No matter how many we killed, they didn't seem to go away. After two nights of dancing around cockroaches on our way to the bathroom, we decided we'd had enough, so Aaron complained to our new landlord. He gave us spray, which seemed to us like a band-aid for a broken arm, but when he came to see our roach problem for himself no cockroaches were to be found.

Yesterday, we noticed a congregation of cockroaches on the stove and kitchen counters. After some reconnaissance, Aaron discovered that there was a colony in the side of our oven. This morning, he went to our landlord (who owns the store below us) and demanded a better solution. The landlord promised to call an exterminator to take care of the roaches once and for all.

The exterminator arrived around 6pm this evening escorted by a boy who works at our landlord's store. I couldn't quite believe that he was the exterminator when he arrive because he looked so different from exterminators in the States. Generally, when I think of an exterminator, I think of a guy named Carl who works for Terminex, wearing a brown, one-piece jumpsuit with his name sewn onto his chest. His weapon is a can that he totes in his left hand connected to a long, metal hose, from which he sprays poison in his right. This Syrian exterminator arrived looking ready for a night out on the town. He wore black pants, had black, pointy dress shoes, and sported a collared, polyester shirt, with a grey swirly pattern on it. He carried a red carry-on suitcase from which he extracted what looked like a gun with a long, pointed nozzle. He used the gun to place little brown dots all over the stove, the kitchen cabinets, and around various parts of the bathroom. We made sure that the stuff wasn’t toxic for humans, which he proved by dabbing some onto his tongue. Aaron asked him some more about how the roach poison works. As I listened to the explanation I thought I had to be misunderstanding since I kept thinking I was hearing the word for sex in Arabic. It turns out I was right—the poison “attracts” the roaches (it’s from France), and then they eat it, die, eat each other, die, etc... We should be roach free within the month! Until then, there will be a bunch of horny roaches crawling around our bathroom and kitchen.

Anybody want to visit?

Our New Neighbors

Some of our closest friends here are a family of three—Molly, her two-year-old daughter, Ava, and Molly’s mom, Cathy. They live around the corner from us in the apartment that we are moving into next week, when they return to the US. The apartment is located on a busy street, lined mostly with fashionable clothing stores on the ground floor and residences above. When the shades are not closed, the view from the front window and balcony looks across the street into other flats. Over the course of their three months here, Cathy noticed beautiful paintings hanging in the apartment directly across from theirs, and she dreamed of going over to meet the painter to see his work. The opportunity finally came Tuesday when she caught the eye of a woman in the apartment. The woman waived, she waived back, and they introduced themselves by yelling across the street, eventually meeting downstairs to arrange a time for Cathy to view the paintings that evening. When we stopped by their apartment later in the day to discuss issues related to our moving in, she invited us to come along with her to help translate and meet our new neighbors.

The six of us (Molly, Ava, Cathy, Aaron, Natalie, and me) arrived at the apartment around 5pm. The stairwell leading up to the entrance was dark, old, narrow, dusty, and slightly dilapidated. The apartment couldn’t have been more different. A warm glow emanated into the hall, and the woman, with a beaming smile on her face, graciously welcomed us into her bright, warm salon covered in oriental carpets. Beautiful paintings lined the walls. She eagerly introduced us to her husband, Wadaah, and grandson, Fred (Farid in Arabic), who speaks excellent English because he goes to an international school and spends his summers in Canada. Wadaah, it turns out, is the painter in the family. After we admired his works and those of his friends hanging on the walls in his living room, he invited us into his home studio. There, he showed us numerous smaller paintings as well as a video on an exhibit he put on after the war in Lebanon in 2006. His paintings, he explained in Arabic, represent the people of Syria and humanity in general. Those not about political subjects were mostly of Ma'alula, a town an hour north of Damascus where Aramaic is still spoken. He then invited us to visit his main studio, about a fifteen minute drive into the northwestern hills outside of the city, where we could see his larger works and better understand his painting process.

The next morning, Aaron, Cathy, Natalie, Fred, Wadaah, and I, along with two of his artist friends, Khalil and Boutros, met in front of Wadaah’s apartment for the trip to his studio, which is located in the old town of Dammar. Aaron, Cathy, Natalie, and I rode in Khalil’s car while the rest took a cab. Once in Dammar, we wound our way through streets lined by low, grey buildings made of cinder blocks, as children stared at us through our car window. We soon arrived at the studio, which is on the first floor of an apartment building. It looked exactly as an art studio should look—with two big easels, canvases in various states of assembly, and shelves filled with perhaps 100 oil paintings. Outside, there was a small yard, where Wadaah does most of his work. Something about the yard’s reddish-brown stone wall and the barren mountains nearby reminded me of the art studios in Santa Fe.

Inside, we made the acquaintance of his two friends, whom he has known since at least the 1960s. The first, Butrous, was an English teacher at the University of Damascus who still paints in his Damascus apartment. He does mostly landscapes because they sell the best (in Islam, it is forbidden to make representations of the human form, so there is not much of a market in Syria for portraits). The second, Khalil, also a painter, makes his living as a restorer of paintings for artists, collectors, and galleries. He asked to hold Natalie, and I obliged. I was a bit wary because Natalie has begun to cry when she realizes that someone other than her parents is holding her. Natalie took to him immediately, however, reaching for his glasses, his moustache, and, to my slight consternation, his fake and missing teeth. After a couple of minutes, Khalil returned Natalie to me and started to negotiate with Wadaah to buy a long swath of canvas for a restoration project. After measuring and cutting the canvas from a large tube, they began to show us around the studio.



Wadaah brought out canvas after canvas of his works, including some really incredible oil paintings of Ma‘alula, Wadi Barada, and the people of Syria. Even though he is Muslim, many of his paintings display Christian symbols or subjects because, as he explained, the people of Syria are one. It does not matter whether one is Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, they are all members of the Syrian homeland. Before there was Islam, there was Christianity, before Christianity, Judaism, and so forth. Thus, religion doesn’t matter. It is the people who matter. Aaron and I especially liked the paintings of Ma‘alula. We haven’t been there yet, but it’s supposed to be one of the most picturesque towns in Syria, sitting at the base of tall, sheer cliffs. We have our eyes on at least one painting that we would like to buy. Wadaah has already offered to let us hang some of his work on our walls in our new apartment.

After a couple of hours looking around his studio and at dozens of his paintings, Natalie decided it was time to go home. She started whining and Fred decided that she could use some entertainment. We lay her on the couch, and he played her some Britney Spears on his Gameboy while we waited for a cab. Natalie calmed down immediately and even started wiggling to the music. Once the cab came, Cathy, Natalie, Aaron, Boutros, and I piled in, leaving Wadaah and Fred in the studio to put away his work and pack up a painting as a gift for Cathy to take back to the US (Khalil left earlier to get to work).

I’m looking forward to our move around the corner and to spending more time with our new neighbors. Wadaah has invited us to go with him to Ma’alula, and I’m hoping that Natalie and I can spend some time with his wife, practicing Arabic and possibly learning to cook Syrian food.

Here are some more examples of Wadaah's work, the picture that he gave Cathy and two others with him posing with Fred:

It's Not Really a Hotel

It's just...

 

The Most Efficient Day in Syria...Ever

It takes a long time to get anything done in Syria. Signing-up for Arabic classes at the University of Damascus in September, for example, took six days. When I initially showed up, I thought that I was ahead of the game, having dutifully done my research, filled out all the necessary forms, and brought photocopies of my passport, pictures of myself, and a notarized letter from the American embassy saying they had no objections to my attending classes. But no, after writing down my name and looking at all of my materials, the secretary handed me another version of the exact same forms that I had already filled out, but in a slightly larger font, and told me to fill them out again, at home, since I would have to come back in a few days anyway to complete the process. I then had to take a 20-minute taxi ride all the way across town to the AIDS testing center to receive a clean bill of health—apparently a common formality here. The test required more pictures and photocopies (there is a photocopy and picture store conveniently located next to every government ministry for the poor souls who didn’t realize they needed ten copies of everything before entering the building). It consisted of a “doctor” who took an infinitesimal amount of blood out of my arm with what, thank goodness, appeared to be a sterile needle. Beforehand, I asked him to wash his hands.

“Why?” he asked, looking perturbed.

“For health reasons,” I said. He rolled his eyes at the nurse and told me that I could go wash my hands if I wanted to. Then he took the blood and the nurse informed me that I should come back on Sunday to get the results (it was a Tuesday).

When I returned, I entered the testing center, only to be sent outside to wait with a group of about thirty very nervous looking people standing outside the window of an office that had a perfectly good, easily accessible door in the main hallway of the building. To get your result, you had to give your test receipt to a man who opened the window. He then disappeared inside to retrieve your paperwork. I knew that the test would be negative, but the suspense was still nerve wracking.
After finishing with the AIDS center, I had to take a taxi all the way back across town to the university. By this time I had decided to use a private tutor instead of enrolling. Still, I still wanted to get the money back that I had paid for the placement test. That isn’t common in Syria but fortunately they obliged. All of that running around, preparation, and waiting for nothing.

When I went to sign-up for our high-speed internet, I had a similar experience. What in the US would have been a phone call to set up an appointment with the cable company turned into a 4-hour odyssey to find an acceptable working ATM after I discovered that I needed more money for the modem’s security deposit (Syrians don’t have to pay). In our early days here, Rachel and Natalie got used to my “running out” to “quickly” take care of something only for me to return hours later, drenched in sweat, dehydrated, and starving because it was still 95 degrees and Ramadan. I was also invariably only half-done with whatever process I had started.

So, when Rachel, Natalie, and I headed over to the notoriously bureaucratic Immigration Ministry in Marjeh (Martyrs’) Square in November to obtain tourist visas, we prepared ourselves for a long-day. A friend told us that upon arrival you have to buy a stamp from a man standing outside wearing a vest. Although armed with this information, nobody stuck out on our way into the building, and no sign informed us of the necessity to buy a stamp, let alone from a guy in a vest, so we continued up the stairs toward the ministry’s main offices. A quarter of the way up, we bought a piece of paper for a few cents, upon which I wrote my name, birth-date, father’s name, mother’s name, and nationality—standard fare for government forms here. We then proceeded up into the chaos of the ministry.
Reaching the top of the stairs, we emerged into a narrow, dingy, dimly-lit hallway bustling with Iraqis, Iranians, Africans, foreign workers, a few westerners, and at least one Japanese student standing in lines and walking every which way with concerned looks on their faces. Men in military uniforms strode past, pretending not to hear the queries directed towards them.

Directly in front of us, we saw the room for foreigners and walked inside. The room was filled with desks crammed together with tall stacks of unkempt paper spiraling above the table tops. Immediately to our right, two soldiers sat next to each other smoking and talking against the wall with two desk lengths between them and the public. Occasionally, someone would hand them a form or ask a question. Without looking up, one soldier would grab the form or direct them, as they did to us, to the two people against the far wall—really a glass window with a door leading to another long, thin room with more senior looking officers in it and more dingy desks and stacks of paper. At one point, the guys in this room had lunch delivered to them and they sat and ate while everybody in line waited outside.

I brought the piece of paper that we bought up to a soldier writing in an enormous register behind a desk. Five people surrounded him, shoving their passports in his face. He told me to go to the man next to him, two desks away, sitting behind a computer. As far as I could tell, he had the only computer in the office. To get there, I had to squeeze past three other people and then wait in a short line before he grabbed our passports. After looking us up in his computer he wrote something unintelligible (to me at least) in Arabic on our paper and stamped it a number of times. Then he sent us to the man with the register.

The man with the register took us in front of a few other people who were waiting, perhaps because we had Natalie, and asked us what we wanted. We told him a tourist visa and he looked at me quizzically.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“From America,” I told him.

“You’re not Syrian?”

“No.”

“You’re father isn’t Syrian?”

“No.” Everybody in every country that I’ve ever been to in the Middle East thinks that I must be from there “originally.” When I tell them that I’m American they say, “Ok, yes, but where are you really from?”, either referring to their own country or somewhere in Europe, where they think all Americans came from. Only after they realize that not only was my grandfather born in America, but his grandfather too, do they accept that I’m really American. This guy let me off easy. After quizzing me a little about where I was studying Arabic he asked why I didn’t have a stamp on my paper and told me to run outside and get one.
I rushed down the stairs and out the door. Before I even approached the only man in a vest standing outside (no booth, sign, nothing), he handed me a stamp. I paid him 35 or so cents for it and ran back up the stairs. When I arrived, the man with the register wrote some more unintelligible lines on our paper, stapled our pictures to it, signed it, and put a few more stamps on it. He then told us to go upstairs to the “General.”

We dutifully went up to the second floor (third in the US) and were beckoned into a room by a man sitting behind a desk who didn’t look like a general. He read what was written on our paper and underlined the part that I think said the last date that we’d entered the country (and thus the time from which our 6-months-worth of tourist visas started from).

“McCain or Obama?” he asked. Obama had won the election the previous Tuesday.

“Obama!” we exclaimed.

“Good! Ok!” he said, looking pleased. He signed our piece of paper and told us to go next-door.

In the next office there really was a military General standing in a spacious, well-kept room with numerous awards and certificates sitting on the shelves across from his desk. He motioned for us to come forward and without reading our paper, signed it.

We then went back downstairs to the original office and back to the man with the big register. He told us to go to the man behind the computer who looked at our now filled piece of paper. He input something into the computer, stamped our paper another few times, and sent us back to register man. He stamped the visa into our passports and then wrote in “two months,” indicating that we’d have to come back to renew it after that time. He then sent us to another general down the hall.

We stood in line outside of his office and in a few minutes got to the front of the line. The entire time we were waiting he was talking very quietly and in an important manner to his secretary sitting next to him, never looking up at the people waiting in his office. The secretary would take your paper and give it to the general who quickly scanned it and then signed it himself before giving it back to the secretary who stamped it yet again.

At this point we were supposedly done. We had our visas, but we also had a piece of paper with at least seven signatures and countless stamps on it that looked like it needed to go in a tall pile somewhere sitting by a desk. In hindsight, it would have been interesting to take it with us and inspect all of the stamps. Instead, however, we took it back to the man with the register who looked a bit baffled as to why we still had this piece of paper. He took it from us, put it in a pile, and sent us on our way. Believe it or not, all of this running around only took about a half-an-hour, much less than the two to three we’d been told to expect.

On the way home we bought a space heater for Natalie’s room and got Rachel a chocolate croissant. After lunch, we went to a clinic that was able to order the rotavirus vaccine for us from Lebanon, had Natalie vaccinated, and bought a humidifier for her on our way back—all by 2 p.m.! Usually this amount of activity would take a week.

Syrians are notoriously good humored about the bureaucratic mazes they have to wind their way through on a daily basis. As an example, one of the episodes of a television program that we watch in our dialect class poked fun at the bureaucratic process here. The program consists of two men who engage in 30 second to a-few-minute vignettes parodying Syrian society. In one, the “smarter” of the characters exclaims at how much Syria has advanced recently, giving as proof his recent experience to get some sort of permission from an unnamed ministry. The process requires his going on at least five occasions to various offices over the course of a week or two. In each one, an official “punches just one button on his computer” and all the man’s data comes up on the screen in front of them. The officials then stamp his paper numerous times and make him pay small sums for various things, always sending him on to another office. Finally, he gets to the general director of the office who, after all he’s been through, denies him permission.

“After all that he didn’t give you permission?” his friends asks. “How have you benefited from all of this progress?”

“You see,” he says, “I then raised a ruckus and with the punch of just one button on the computer, all of my information came up onto the screen, and within three seconds they had thrown me out onto the street—with the punch of just one button!”

“Wow, how we’ve progressed,” his friend replies.

Natalie Loves the Word "Destiny"

Priceless.