When there is no translation

My Arabic tutor Hussein used to drive me crazy.

Straight away I should tell you, he has a reputation here in Syria as one of the best tutors around. Over dinner one night, I simply used his first name and a long-time Damascene – someone who grew up speaking Arabic and would have no reason to know Hussein – knew immediately who I was talking about.

“Oh. That Hussein? He is famous,” the dinner guest said. “He is the best.”

So just like George, the one-named Damascene coiffeur who seems to have done the hair of every well-heeled woman in town, Hussein is a Syrian rock star.

His whole philosophy, he told me over a preliminary, get-to-know-you drink at a little bar in my neighborhood called The Journalists Club, is that most people study classical Arabic. If your goal is to communicate with Arabs today, that’s a big mistake.

Learning "Fus-ha", as this classic form of Arabic is called, is the equivalent of trying to learn to speak English by studying Shakespeare. While The Koran and most media reports are in Fusha and wealthy, well-educated people will probably understand what you say if you speak in Fusha, people rich and poor alike in Syria, as well as Jordan and Lebanon, speak a dialect of Arabic called “Amia”.

There was a lot more to Hussein’s theory, including the politics that inspire people to learn and teach Fusha, rather than Amia, and the history of how Arabs from Morrocco to Iraq came to speak such different versions of their eponymous language.

Suffice it to say, it was clear to me that Hussein saw himself as more than just a tutor. In a capital city where every third person seems to make money by teaching – or claiming to teach – Arabic, this lanky, squawky-voiced chain-smoker sees himself as a linguistic revolutionary. He is prying open the doors of communication between the west and the east one bumbling student at a time.

And so, over a couple of Lebanese beers, we agreed: I would be his next bumbling student.

On the day of our first lesson, however, I learned there would be a little bumbling on both sides. Just getting to Hussein’s took patience.

In the ridiculous summer heat, I would walk a mile to his house. Traipsing through the cobbled-stone souk where shopkeepers and their children stared at me, I dodged mini-trucks reversing at high speed and weaved through traffic jams of honking and sputtering cars, seemingly too large to have attempted passage through the market. Past the butcher shop where carcasses hung on hooks, I ducked through a dark passageway which opened to a maze of deteriorating, three-story buildings. Then, up a short hill, I would scoot past the hole in the path, covered with a brick to keep out mice. Coated in sweat and dust, I arrived at Hussein’s unmarked door.

I rang his bell. Sometimes, he would answer immediately, buzzing me in. Sometimes I needed to ring again. Sometimes I called his cell phone because he was still asleep on his roof, where he sleeps to keep cool in the summer. One time, after several buzzes and a text to his phone, no one appeared and I left without having a lesson.

The most annoying thing of all was that no matter whether he appeared, appeared late or never appeared at all, Hussein would never acknowledge that he was moving slowly. Or that he was sorry.

Our lessons were equally stop-and-start. We’d get on a roll with one of our worksheets and, his young assistant, Foo Foo, would come into the room and start chatting for long stretches with Hussein as though I wasn’t there.

Or sometimes, in his green-stripped pajamas that looked like a cross between a prison uniform and a pirate costume, Hussein would lounge on his sofa, puff cigarettes and sigh as I struggled to pronounce basic Arabic greetings.

“Again, better and faster,” he would say in his robotic squawk.

I considered finding a new tutor. I was the boss here, wasn’t I? I was paying for these lessons, and maybe it was time to put my foot down and find someone a little more reliable. Or at least someone who didn’t literally roll out of bed for class.

But this was That Hussein. And famous or not, I liked his philosophy and, on his good days, his teaching style. And his habit of sticking out his tongue and shrugging to express himself. Where else could I find a tutor like him?

I consulted a friend of mine, who also happened to be taking classes from Hussein.

“Yeah. He’s like that. You just have to tell him ‘Yallah’,” my friend confided.

Yallah (pronounced “yuh-la”) is Arabic for hurry up.

This hasn’t been the only instance I’ve found yallah necessary during my stay in Damascus. As the weeks piled up, I became increasingly annoyed with the pace of life here.

I’d be running late for class with Hussein or an appointment, trying to zip down a sidewalk, and a family, walking shoulder-to-shoulder, would completely and obliviously block the way.

Or I’d speed walk through the souk and those mini-trucks would be jammed, bumper to bumper, honking at one another and making it impossible for pedestrians to walk. I’d have to just stand in the heat with other pedestrians who seemed unfazed and watch as shopkeepers chatted away with the drivers.

Likewise, plans with my family seem to have this entirely up-in-the air quality that made me start and stop like a malfunctioning energizer bunny. For example, my family tells me to arrive for dinner at 9 pm. I arrive at 9:05, my usual late self, and end up sitting on a couch for an hour, waiting to go out. And once we go to the restaurant, we wait another hour to start eating.

Or we plan to do something on a particularly day, but then hours before we are scheduled to meet, I get a call that everything is off. And then we never reschedule.

At a volunteer job, writing press releases for a nonprofit, I hurry to show up on time, catching two buses to cross town, only to be offered tea or coffee when I arrive. For a good 30 minutes, my boss and I chitchat until we get down to business which itself seems to move at a snail’s pace.

In my head, I have started to call this issue The Inshallah Syndrome. Inshallah is Arabic for “it is in God’s hands”, however you can use inshallah in conversation here without implying that you are religious. It is used, as far as I can tell, in place of “Let’s hope so”.

For instance, you might go out to dinner with friends and decide to meet up the next day for coffee.

“Ok, so coffee at five o’clock at Downtown Café,” you might say.

“Inshallah,” your friend would tell you.

Here’s the confusing part: The use of inshallah in itself does not imply that your friend is saying that your plans aren’t concrete. Your plans are solid in both of your minds. However, your friend is implying that while you have decided on this plan, it’s always possible that something unexpected and completely out of your hands will happen preventing you from meeting. I guess that’s something we subconsciously acknowledge in the US, but just don’t seem to express.

Still, I’ve come to find that the spirit of inshallah is pervasive here. Often, foreigners call this imprecision “running on Arabic time”, describing how it is perfectly acceptable to show up late five, ten, even twenty minutes late or start dinner an hour after it was scheduled.

Let me be clear. This isn’t a criticism of how time works here, only an observation. It’s just to say that there seems to be a very different sense of pace here, a pace that was causing me some friction with Hussein.

For weeks, I continued to drudge along the path to Hussein’s house and together, we drudged through worksheets. I mispronounced dialogues while he puffed and said his standard, “Again, better and faster.”

We covered how to greet people, how to order food and how to direct a taxi to my apartment (which, in hindsight, I should have learned the day that I arrived here). He was still seemingly in another world, but for whatever reason, I had decided to continue with him when something strange started to happen.

One day, after two hours of repeating a dialogue about buying fruit and vegetables, I was fast-walking through the souk as usual, back to my apartment, when I heard a shopkeeper yelling out to another shopkeeper and I actually understood what they were saying. It wasn’t “Hey Buddy, move your figs!” or something forceful as Arabic has always seemed to sound to me. It was “Hey, do you have some change?”

I started watching the shopkeepers. They used their pockets as cash registers and rarely had enough change. Or enough of the right change. So often, I would see shopkeepers running across from one shop to another, borrowing coins.

As Hussein and I continued on, I began stopping in the souk on my way home to buy lunch. It was then that I met my Vegetable Man, my Hummus Man, my Bread Man and, my favorite, The Baker.

In my rush to get to Hussein’s on time over the weeks and avoid the stares I get wherever I walk on the street here, I had failed to notice that I was in an everyday farmer’s market -- the kind of market that I only used to be able to stumble around when I played hookie from work.

Call me completely oblivious, but I hadn’t realized that in the backs of these little market stalls, the day’s hummus, pita bread and flaky pastries were being made by hand. And the little trucks that had been blocking my straight path to Hussein’s? They were delivering the fruits and vegetables from a central delivery spot somewhere in Damascus where, in turn, they had been delivered from Syrian farms, my new friends told me.

Now, after class, I visit Vegetable Man, who throws in an extra peach or cucumber any time I stopped by. Bread Man, too, unused to a customer buying for one, tosses me a free pita, still warm from his oven, once in a while. And The Baker and I have formed an attachment involving his chocolate-filled croissants.

I happened to smell them one day when I was starving and bought one, devouring it immediately on the way to class. Ever since, I stop nearly every time I am in the souk to see if he has any more and he always tells me “Bookra” (tomorrow) and laughs at me, sometimes throwing in a sugar cookie.

Three cucumbers here cost maybe 25 Syrian lira, around 25 cents in the US – or the amount you’d pay for a nasty, stale piece of bubble gum from one of those machines they always have at video stores. Both still hot from the oven, a piece of pita bread might run 5 lira and a chocolate croissant around 25 lira. That is to say, unless these men had other jobs or sources of income that I didn’t know about, I was clearly better off financially. In my head, their generosity didn’t make sense. Maybe you get the odd extra piece of fruit or flowers in a farmer’s market in the US, but it’s rare. Here, it’s a regular occurrence that just doesn’t translate.

In Amman, too, I was out to dinner with a new friend and his wife who had spent time helping me get around the city as I tried to get an interview with Saijida Al-Rishawi, the would-be bomber involved in the 2005 hotel explosions that killed my relatives.

To thank them for their time, particularly because I couldn’t see why complete strangers were being so nice to me, I slipped a reluctant waiter my credit card. When we were finished with dinner, the check came directly to me. The couple erupted.

“But I invited you to dinner!” the man said.

His wife looked like she was going to cry, barely peering up to look at me.

“I am very mad at you,” his wife said as we walked to their car awkwardly.

Ahh, nothing was making sense in the Middle East! I went left when I was meant to go right. I showed up on time when I was supposed to be late. I was given free things from people to whom I should be giving free things. I had cultural whiplash.

It was only one morning, several days later with Hussein that I was able to make sense out of all of these situations.

For weeks, he had sat on his couch, telling me to repeat everything, to be better and faster. I was getting used to the spastic quality of our lessons, even beginning to enjoy the coffee breaks we took and the conversations we had about Syrian culture. As I became better and faster, he, too, seemed better and faster. But I still questioned whether the struggle had been worth it.

This particular morning, I was breezing through another one of Hussein’s dialogues when he stopped me abruptly.

“Stop transliterating,” he told me.

“What’s that?” I asked him, surprised that he was awake.

He looked quickly at the sheet of Arabic text that I had been reading. Like all of Hussein’s worksheets, it had drawings of cartoon characters doing everyday things, pictures that looked like they came from some sort of alien life manual. My sheet was also covered in my cryptic pronunciation notes. For example, for the Arabic word for dessert, I had written hal-luh-wee-yat.

“See! You are still thinking in English. You are still using the Latin alphabet. English is not Arabic,” he said, more than slightly annoyed and slowly taking another drag. “Read the Arabic letters in front of you.”

Smoking a cigarette, scrolling through God knows what on his laptop and barely looking at me, Hussein had been able to hear immediately that I was doing this so-called transliteration. He had caught me.

“You will never learn if you use English to understand it. You have to retrain your brain to think in Arabic,” he said, his tongue hanging out, expressing what I could only imagine was exhaustion in giving a speech he must have given hundreds of times.

It struck me pretty quickly that maybe this was part of my problem as I maneuvered through life here. After months of assimilating, maybe I had finally reached the places between east and west where there was no translation. (See photo above: A camel hanging in my favorite butcher shop to advertise fresh camel meat!)

Since my realization, I can’t say that I’ve started loving the traffic jams in the souk or the plans with my family that seem to get canceled half the time. Or the way my aunt continues to search for my husband instead of spending our time oh, I don’t know, getting to know each other.

But I think I’ve stopped trying to make sense of these things. I’m trying to take it all as it is.

As far as Hussein is concerned, this has done wonders for my Arabic pronunciation. The other afternoon, he declared with a big smile and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth that he was officially promoting me from beginning level to intermediate level. It seemed like time for a celebration.

“Where are the dancing girls?” I joked.

Hussein just stuck his tongue out. He didn’t need to say anything else.

‘

Noor

** A quick apology to regular readers – I'm so sorry for the delay in entries over the past couple of weeks. I have been repeatedly sick with a mysterious bacterial infection that has caused several days of debilitating fevers and general discomfort. Hopefully, a superhuman strength medicine (prescribed by my doctor in Monterey and bought at the pharmacy here for $2!!!) will soon do its work. Fingers crossed very tightly. I have also been traveling regularly to Jordan where I have met with government officials and others in Amman (an amazing city) in an attempt to interview Saijida Al-Rishawi, one of the participants in the November 2005 hotel bombings that killed my cousin and uncle. Sentenced to death by hanging in November 2006, she is now in a women's prison just outside of Amman where, according to her attorney whom I interviewed, she spends her evenings singing to herself in English. I am now waiting to hear from the Jordanian government as to whether they will honor my request. With all the traveling, the meetings and the fevers, I've been pretty wiped out, but I have so much to share with you and hope to catch you up as quickly as possible now that I am semi-up and running again -- DA **

As the intolerably hot summer rolls on in Damascus and we sleep through the afternoons and eat watermelon and wild cactus fruit through the night, there are big questions in the air.

Will Syria and Israel make peace through ongoing talks in Turkey?

Will Syria open more of its markets to foreign investors and what will happen if and when that happens?

Are Mohammed and Noor really getting divorced?

You may have heard about the Turkish soap opera Noor which has recently received attention in the Western media for its popularity here in Syria and throughout the Middle East. The Middle East Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) – or someone who sold the show to MBC - bought the rights to the show which was then called Gummush, dubbed it in amia, the Arabic "street dialect" spoken throughout Syria and Jordan, renamed the show Noor and started playing it to wide acclaim.

And by wide acclaim, I mean wide acclaim. Here in Syria's capital, Damascenes young and old, rich and poor, male and female, dig this show. There are posters and t-shirts featuring photos of the characters and tag lines like "Noor: Love and Romance" on every third street corner, around the bookstores at Damascus University and in bus stations. Perhaps I own a poster.

At 5 pm, 10 pm and 1 am, one of the three times the show is broadcast each day, you need only step outside in Damascus and be in ear shot of the Noor theme song – and most likely, you'll hear the theme in stereo.

One night, I was in a greasy kebab shop packed full of men shushing one another so they could follow the plot. Another night, I was walking through Bab Sharki (literally translated as Eastern Door), one of the entrances to the oldest parts of Damascus, the oldest city in the world, when I heard the dramatic drum beat and twangy violins and I knew immediately that it was 10 pm.

Watching Noor also happens to be a great way both to learn Arabic and have something to talk about with just about anyone on the street, in a taxi or at a party. So along with my fellow Syrians, I, too, have become entirely engrossed in the happenings of Noor despite the fact that I'm never sure exactly what's happening.

Thankfully, the plot appears to be very simple. In a ritzy mansion on the banks of the Bosphorus live four generations of the Fakri family. There's Mohammed, the hot, 30-something business man; Noor, his equally hot wife who has her own fashion line called, surprisingly, Noor; Mohammed's mother, a red-head with an intense face lift who occasionally plots against Noor; Jido (grandfather in amia) Fakri, Mohammed's grandfather, the official family peace broker; Mohammed's sister, an artist who is married to Mohammed's best friend, Anwar; their cousin Bana, a mischievous business woman who, at some point, was involved with some sort of Istanbul mafia (at least, as far as I could follow); another cousin, Fagher, who recently went on a long trip and came back being played by another actor (Don't you just hate when that happens?); and their two servants, a man and woman that recently married and always seem to have bad luck.

As is prerequisite for the soap world, every Noor character is superhumanly attractive and is prone to major life incidences on a regular, if not daily, basis. Just in my short, three-month stint as a Noor fan, I've seen at least four car accidents, three marriages, two near-divorces and a Christmas episode to boot.

But there are lots of ways in which Noor is nothing like a Bold and the Beautiful or an As the World Turns. It's a lot more innocent. While an American or British soap opera might have several extra-marital affairs, a car wreck and a miscarriage in one episode, one divorce in Noor can take up to seven or eight episodes as we find out what each character thinks about the impending divorce and the couple cry in their separate rooms to Turkish love songs.

Much has been made in the both the Western and Middle Eastern media about how modern the characters in Noor are compared to the Arab viewers watching the show. Apparently on Al Jazeera earlier this week, my Arabic tutor, Hussein, watched the woman who does the voice-over for Noor's character debate a scholar as to whether the show is positively influencing society with its subject matter including divorces, abortion and affairs.

While I can't really imagine a television show becoming such a source of discussion in the US (imagine if Jason Priestly had argued for the social benefits of Beverly Hill's 90210 on Crossfire), here it makes sense. The two other most popular soap operas, La Mise and Bab Al Hara, follow much more conservative plots.

La Mise, another dubbed-over Turkish soap opera, is the story of a man who wants to marry a woman, but fate seems to always keep them apart. Personally, I find the show really boring. However, when I lived with my Uncle Zoo, he often yelled at the characters and had to be reminded by my aunt that it was only a television show. I also know a 38-year-old businessman who recently had to stop watching the show because he couldn't handle the heart ache between the couple.

Bab al-Hara, a show that started during last year's Ramadan and will start again in several weeks with this year's Ramadan, is set in Damascus during the French mandate in the 1930s and doesn't have nearly the number of opportunities to insert the risqué situations of Noor.

So perhaps folks here watch Noor for a glimpse of what life is like in the West. Or perhaps they are watching blue-eyed, chiseled Mohammed – played by Turkish model Kivanc Tatlitug - who is H-O-T.

Modern, hot or not, most of all, I enjoy the show's wonderful Turkish quirks. Many of the key scenes in the show happen around the breakfast table where the family eats cheese and cucumbers and drinks that delicious, sweet Turkish tea in little glasses.

There is a lot of musicality to the show, too. How many characters in Dynasty, for example, belonged to an oud-playing club like Jido Fakri? In one recent episode, a good five minutes was devoted to good ol' Jido and his friends strumming their ouds and singing what I imagine were traditional Turkish songs in the mansion with seemingly no connection to the episode's plot. In another episode, when Noor and Mohammed had one of their many arguments, Noor was looking longingly over the Bosphorus as a drunken Mohammed stumbled around somewhere in Istanbul. Suddenly, she began to sing, and it seemed as though her song called Mohammed back to the mansion.

Which brings me to tell you about the strangest "Noor" episode I've watched yet.

Let me set the scene up for you. Remember my 75-year-old aunt who named her cat Nancy after Nancy Ajram, the Middle East's Britney Spears? Well, my aunt also happens to plan her entire social calendar around Noor episodes, despite the fact that the 5 pm episode is always a repeat of the previous evening's 10 pm show.

I was visiting her in Aleppo this past weekend to celebrate my 28th birthday. Between my aunt trying to introduce me to Aleppo's most eligible – and apparently oldest and baldest – bachelors and, after coming down with another high fever, going to the doctor (which turned out to be a plot on my aunt's part to introduce me to yet another bachelor), we devoted our lives to Noor.

Both wearing long gallabiyas (I borrowed one of her long muu-muu-like robes), we sat on her sofa by the air conditioning, drinking coffee or eating her special soup, and watched attentively to see whether Noor and Mohammed were going to divorce.

For weeks, our favorite couple had been having problems stemming from one fateful night. Mohammed had gone to his ex-wife's house to visit his son and, drunk or tired (I haven't figured out which), he passed out in his ex-wife's bed. In flash backs set to Turkish music, we learned that nothing had happened between Mohammed and his ex-wife (who also used to be confined to a wheel chair but somehow miraculously now walks).

Noor couldn't handle the disrespect Mohammed had shown her and she demanded a divorce. Episode upon episode dragged out as Mohammed tried to woo Noor back. He apologized. He searched all over Istanbul for her when she disappeared and brought flowers to her. Finally, he gathered his whole family and his ex-wife, who told Noor that nothing had happened between her and Mohammed, and he told her how much he loved her in front of everybody as she stood on a balcony. Still, Noor held steadfast.

On this particular afternoon in Aleppo, my aunt and I lay side by side in her bed together under the air conditioning, watching as Noor and Mohammed said their goodbyes the night before they were scheduled to divorce. Mohammed had driven Noor home after they announced over the family dinner table that they were getting divorced. At a traffic light, their special song came on the radio coincidentally and a young street girl offered to sell them a dozen red roses.

"She said, 'I hope you are able to have love with this girl'," my aunt translated for me. "See, even she knew that there is something between them!"

After putting the flowers in water and letting Mohammed see their baby, now destined for life as a child of divorced parents, Noor shut the door of her newly purchased condominium as Mohammed walked to his Mercedes.

Suddenly, heavy metal music accompanied by a chorus of Turkish singers started up. In slow motion, both Mohammed and Noor walked back to the door where they had just left one another, neither one knowing that the other was also having second thoughts about the divorce. But Noor didn't open the door and Mohammed didn't knock.

I thought this would be the end of the drama, but who was I kidding? We were watching Noor.

When Mohammed arrived back at his mansion, he found one of the long-stemmed roses lying on the floor of the car. He walked in his backyard with the rose, looking at it longingly, and finally tossed it into the family swimming pool. Meanwhile, Noor took the bouquet from its vase and, with tears streaming down her face, pushed the lever of the garbage can with her stylish boots and threw the roses away.

The choir and electric guitars continued. So did my aunt.

"I hate her! I hate her!" she screamed at the television. "What's he gonna do? He's gonna kill himself. Then what?"

Mohammed walked towards his house and Noor walked to her bedroom to check on their baby. Suddenly, both walked back to their respective flowers. Mohammed fished his rose out of the pool and Noor put hers back in the vase and placed them next to the baby's crib. Crying, though totally unaware of the absolute synchronicity of their emotions with the dramatic metal music, they looked longingly at their flowers and smiled through their tears.

And then the episode went to commercial.

Days later, when my aunt followed me back to Damascus and took over my bed as her Noor watching station, we learned that, in fact, Noor and Mohammed would get divorced. Yet, immediately after the official court proceedings, they would be involved in a dramatic car accident in which Mohammed would have to pull Noor from a burning car.

It seems our summer passion in Damascus continues.

In The Land of Old Maids and Bad Odds

For Jane Austen, it was a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife.

And, here in Syria, it appears to be a nearly universal truth that a 27-year-old, single female must be in want of a husband. At least, that’s what the older generation of my family, their friends and most taxi drivers seem to think.

When you meet someone here – at least when I’ve met people here – once they figure out your name and where you are from, the most common third question is “Are you married?” The fourth question: “Well, are you engaged?” Finally, the fifth question (if you can call it a question): “Don’t you want me to introduce you to someone?”

Just the other day, over coffee with my aunt and her friends, a former high-level military officer decided after five minutes that it was a major travesty that I was single and he would make it his personal goal to find me a husband.

“I have a long list of men for you,” he said. “But first, I take you to the beauty salon.”

Sitting with this guy under a blow dry machine, getting our toenails polished together? Wouldn’t even Sy Hersh balk at this kind of access? Tempting, tempting.

At 27, I’m a bit past the marrying prime as far as Syria goes. As my uncle kindly informed me without touching a calculator, I now have a four percent chance of finding my special someone. As the moon passed through the sky on my 25^th birthday, I apparently crossed over the marital Maginot line and into the Land of Old Maids and Bad Odds.

As arbitrary as it may seem, there is a system here, as my aunt explained to me: Once a girl hits 20 or so, she is considered eligible to start looking for a husband. But she doesn’t actually go out on a hunt for one. If she meets someone at a party or at school whom she is interested in, she tells her mother and her mother calls the boy’s mother. The two mothers then run through a check list of important factors which, according to my aunt, include the family’s reputation, wealth and education.

If everything checks out, the two families meet and, while their parents drink coffee and make small talk, the boy and girl get a chance to see if they have anything in common or have any chemistry. If one or both of the couple have an interest in one another, the mothers regroup on the phone later and plan another meeting. This time, the couple will meet without the family, but the girl will bring a male chaperone, typically an older brother. They might meet up like this a couple more times and then decide to become engaged and throw a big party.

As far as I can tell, once a couple is engaged, they can go on unchaperoned dates and really begin the process of getting to know each other. I don’t have statistics, but it seems to me that more engagements are broken here than in the US. In my eyes, breaking an engagement here is more like breaking up from a serious relationship. And that makes sense because divorce, particularly for women, seems to be a bit of a taboo, at least in my family’s social circle. According to my aunt, a divorced woman is really on the outs and will have serious trouble remarrying. Still, I’ve heard from younger people here in Damascus that divorced women are very popular for dates, however one defines popular.

Of course, there are exceptions to tradition. More and more, couples here in Syria meet at university or through friends and forgo the drawn out family-centric engagement process that is the tradition. I have a Syrian friend here who is also in her late 20s and working as a journalist. She’s lived with a boyfriend and she would never willingly let an aunt take her to a lunch on a set-up.

Whatever way you play it, by the time you reach 25, as far as traditional Syrians are concerned, you are on the brink of Old Maidom. There is actually an Arabic word for old maid – “ahhhnn-nise” (It’s another one of those Kermit the Frog words that you have to pronounce from the back of your throat). When I’ve used it to describe myself in polite company with my family, I’ve gotten some dirty looks. So as far as I can tell, it’s an insult. However, it’s a great weapon against the taxi drivers of Damascus who all seem to be looking for that special – and, more importantly, single - conversation partner to improve their English.

So for now, I am squarely “ass-bah” which I would translate simply into “single”, but it seems to actually mean “single and definitely looking.” Perhaps “looking” is just assumed for someone of my age. And as my family swarms around me, concerned about my marital status, I can’t help feel a lot like a Jane Austen character.

It struck me suddenly several nights ago when I was watching Pride and Prejudice with my cousin’s husband. We were watching the scene in which Mrs. Bennett tells Elizabeth Bennett that if she puts off marriage much longer, she will end up alone and penniless. My cousin’s husband and I had just been laughing about a strange lunch one of my aunt’s coaxed me into attending.

My aunt had been visiting Damascus from Aleppo for the weekend when she called to invite me.

“Don’t wear what you wore yesterday,” she said over the phone.

“Huh?” I said, trying to remember what I had been wearing.

“This is a nice family. High society. Very chic,” she said. “Make your hair nice. Yallah (Let’s go). Ok?”

“Ok,” I said. “So what should I wear?”

“Bye”

“What?”

She had hung up the phone.

I assumed that we were having lunch with a family that liked to get dressed up for meals and she was simply giving me a heads up so I wouldn’t make a total fool out of myself. As someone who feels most attractive in a bright red track suit, I thought this was fair warning.

I wore the nicest shirt I had brought with me to Damascus. I brushed my hair and put on a hint of lipstick (Read: I put some lipstick on and wiped it off after looking in the mirror). I honestly felt a bit over done. How fancy could lunch at someone’s house be, especially in such hot weather?

“You did your hair?” my aunt said, looking me up and down when I arrived at her house.

“Well, yeah. I don’t have a blow dryer so this is what it looks like,” I said.

“Ok,” she said, looking once more at my hair. “Well, we go, but we will put more lipstick on before we get there.”

My aunt had rung the doorbell outside of the family’s flat when she turned to me. She looked into my eyes, hers magnified by raccoon-eye sized, sparkly bifocals.

“Fix your hair. And don’t mention any boyfriends, if anyone asks. Ok? Yallah.”

I was about to ask my aunt what the hell was going on when a housekeeper ushered us into the living room of the apartment. Sitting on a sofa in a nightgown and watching music videos was the lunch hostess. We shook hands and she and my aunt proceeded to talk about me in Arabic. Every once in a while, the two asked me to clarify a point here and there, including what I had studied in college and, of course, my age.

Minutes later, my aunt turned to me, with the hostess still sitting at the next sofa in ear shot.

“Well, he’s not here.”

“Who?”

“Her grandson. He’s very good. He went to Dubai for business. He’s gotten a bit fat,” she said, blowing out her cheeks, “but I thought you might like him. Very good family.”

Of course. This was a set-up sabotage, disguised as fancy lunch! I was suddenly very glad that I didn’t have a blowdryer. I wished I had worn a paper bag.

Little by little, the hostess’ sons and their children appeared at the house, all in jeans and t-shirts. As each son came into the living room, my aunt would tell me what they did for a living.

“He is an engineer,” she said after the first son entered.

“He is an engineer,” she said after the second son entered.

And eventually, I found myself surrounded by a pack of attractive male engineers, watching Arabic music videos and smoking in silence.

In turn, they learned that I had studied anthropology in college and that I was 27, clearly my most important stats. I felt like we were pro-baseball players being introduced before the first inning of a big game. I was ready to take the bunt and get back to the dug out.

Luckily, I was seated next to one of the hostess’ teenage granddaughters during lunch. Her English was impeccable and we had a great discussion about basketball. She played for a woman’s team in Damascus. Before dessert and whatever other set-up rituals I hadn’t anticipated, I told my aunt that I had an appointment and backed out of the dining room with my ratty purse, leaving her and the hostess glaring at me.

OK. So while this whole idea of marriage here is totally alien and in some ways offensive to me, I can see it through my family’s eyes. For my aunt, I had reached a certain age and I needed to find a husband, or else spend my life alone and, in some ways, at odds with her society. For her, much like for Mrs. Bennett, an appropriate husband was one who had money, good looks and was part of a reputable family.

Taking me to lunch was, as I’m guessing she saw it, doing me a big favor.

Just as in the world of Jane Austen, there doesn’t seem to be the concept, at least among the older generation of my family and their circle, that a woman would want to be alone and care for herself or focus on a career before focusing on a family. And that’s not because they think women can’t have careers or aren’t intelligent. Not at all. One of my female cousins is a tourism consultant and another started her own clothing line. One of my aunts has her PhD and is a department chair at the University of Aleppo. Rather, I think the point is that for a woman, situating oneself in a stable family, the unit around which all activities seem to orbit in Syria, takes precedent over anything else as far as the older generation of my family is concerned.

Which, of course, explains the hullabaloo over setting one’s relatives up with potential husbands. In their heads, it’s a wild game of chess with hundreds of possibilities, requiring keen strategy and foresight. Will there be more surprise lunches? A trip to the salon with my retired military man? Undoubtedly.

Perhaps the more important question is are there any Darcys in Damascus?

.

The Turkey (Border) Trots

Yesterday, I returned from a week of traveling around Southern Turkey where my grandmother grew up in a small border town before marrying my Syrian grandfather and moving to Aleppo.

It was a terrific trip with several Arabic school classmates through cities with layers and layers of ancient history, incredibly welcoming people and delicious desserts, including my new favorite rose-flavored Turkish delights. We traded national songs and bottles of Efes, the national beer, with a group of Turks one night at the base of the citadel in Gaziantep, a city known for producing the best baklava in the country. Another night, we watched the stars, sitting at the edge of the Euphrates River where black roses grow and where, just a couple hundred miles south in Iraq, I’m sure we couldn’t begin to imagine the horrors contrasting with our peaceful lounge in nature.

We discovered the following morning that when the Euphrates was dammed in 2001 alongside the small town where we stayed, no one had bothered to remove the buildings in its path. So after breakfast, we explored an abandoned mosque, half of which was full of silvery fish and sparkling green water. Sparrows perched on hanging wires in the main prayer room and from the top of the crumbling minaret, we looked out on the tops of roofs resting at the river’s surface.

Of all our adventures, I think the greatest highlight of the trip came at the very end as my friends and I attempted to cross the border back into Syria.

As you may have gathered, I’ve been having some troubles with food illness since I arrived. Crossing the border to Turkey was apparently not the great elixir. In fact, by the time we puttered up to the border checkpoint to return to Syria, I was feverish, my joints and back ached with flu-like pain and I was ready to toss my cookies in any quiet corner. Two Seven-Ups, aspirin and antibiotics went down the hatch and I hoped for the best, but the last thing I wanted to do was take the inevitably bumpy cross-country bus ride from Aleppo to Damascus in the middle of the night.

Luckily, the customs officers read my mind and decided to detain us. Well, not exactly. One of my friends had forgotten to buy a new visa before we left. His old visa had run out. Upon this discovery, the guards led us to an air-conditioned office where a uniformed officer, apparently in charge, was smoking at a desk and told us that this was a definite no-no – or mooshkeela. His officers, he told us, would need to send a fax to an office somewhere in Damascus to confirm that John was a student at Damascus University, despite the fact that he had a letter from the university indicating just that.

“It could be one hour. It could two hours. It could be three. Four. I don’t know,” he said, shrugging.

Amen, I thought, rocking myself in the breezy, cool air of his office. This was just what I needed.

“Yes. You may sit there,” he said, gesturing to the hot lobby through the double-plated window in his office that appeared as a mirror on the pedestrian side.

“Oh! Can’t we stay with you? I want to be with you,” I blurted out without thinking. I just couldn’t imagine being in the heat again.

“Well,” he laughed, “if that is what you want. Yes. You can stay here.”

For several minutes, we looked at each other awkwardly. Would we be staring at each other for four hours? Was he regretting his offer? I was almost regretting my request. Then, The General, as we later nicknamed him, pushed a button on his desk and another officer came into the office. Perhaps we were being escorted to the lobby.

“You want something to drink? Chai (tea)? Ahh-rah-weh (coffee)?” General said.

My friends said they would like tea. I declined, telling General that I was very sick and didn’t think drinking anything would feel good on my stomach. And, by the way, could I use his bathroom as soon as possible?

“I think you eat something bad,” he said. “Chai is good for this. You try. Ok?”

Then, he handed me a set of keys, one of which opened a special, nice bathroom at the back of the customs building. I should explain here that most toilets in Syria are really just porcelain lined holes. You don’t sit, you use your thigh muscles and you squat. Instead of toilet paper, there is a hose and you wash off. I apologize for the frank discussion of all-things bathroom, but it’s important to understand why General’s offer of a special, nice bathroom was an especially nice gift. When it’s 100 degrees or more outside and you are nauseated, a bathroom with a clean floor, no flies and a semi-antiseptic scent can go a long way. A very long way.

When I returned to General’s office, my friends were chatting him up. He was 32-years-old, single and living in Aleppo, about 25 miles south of the border. He had spent his birthday, the previous day, in this office.

“When I was in university, there is an exam always on my birthday,” he said. “Now, I spend my birthdays at work.”

He shyly toyed with two remote controls at his desk for several minutes, then turned on the television. He flipped through several music channels, a Syrian soap opera and stopped at Dr. Phil.

“Docteur Phil. I think he talks about things that are very small. There are more things to talk about,” General said, pausing briefly. “I think Docteur Phil needs a doctor.”

“I like the woman,” he added.

“Oprah?” I asked.

“Yes. Yes, her. I like her very much,” he exclaimed. Oprah, unlike Dr. Phil, he explained, discusses big and small issues that affect many more people.

Gaining confidence, he flipped from Dr. Phil to a black and white recording of a singer wailing “Habbbbbeee-beee! Habbbbeee-beee! (sweetheart)” on a stage with what looked like 20 accompanying violinists and a sign that said “Je T’Aime Love”.

“This was a famous singer of Syria,” he said. “Like Umm Kathoum. You know Umm Kathoum?”

We nodded. He changed the channels again, landing on an Arabic version of “Entertainment Tonight” and a segment about Nancy Ajram, a Lebanese pop singer that could be described as a Middle Eastern Britney Spears.

It appeared that Nancy had sprained her wrist but was still continuing to film a new video, certainly an issue of national importance. I’m not kidding. Here, it seems that pop singers are for everyone, not just young people. My 75-year-old aunt, for example, named her cat Nancy after the singer. She’s on billboards all over Syria, drinking Coca Cola, for which she is apparently the Middle East and North Africa representative. She stars in a Coke commercial playing right now which seems scant on plot, but I’m sure does the trick. Nancy walks into a house wearing a leather jacket and aviator sunglasses. She’s thirsty. She finds a Coke in her fridge and chugs it in one, somehow sexy gulp. When she tries unsuccessfully to shake out one last drop, she crushes the can with one beautifully manicured hand.

“Syrian women – hellway (beautiful)” I offered to the General.

“Yes,” he said.

“How do they do it? Is it makeup or what?” I asked.

“Do you think Syrian woman are pretty? Are you saying Syrian women are pretty?” he asked, now unsure what I was saying.

“Yes. Beautiful. And the Lebanese, too,” I said.

“Yes, but not the Egyptian,” he said, tsking. “They are big and black.”

Hmm. My friends and I shifted uncomfortably in our seats. This was probably not the time or the place for an open discussion about racism. Considering his love of Oprah Winfrey, it was also unclear exactly what General meant. We continued to watch television until he stood up and said he had business to address. We would be moving to another room for five minutes.

“We will see you again, won’t we?” I asked. I don’t know what had come over me, but I felt a strange attachment to General.

“Of course. Yes. Only five minutes,” he said.

A guard escorted us to a cool, dark room full of cots. Two other guards rushed to our sides and sprayed us with a cooling liquid that also doubled as a perfume. His efficiency scared me and I jumped when the cold spray hit my arms.

“Welcome! Welcome!” one said, gesturing for us to lay on the beds. The second guard took me to the next room where there was one cot and a large fan. Weak from fever, I moved slowly onto the cot, relieved to lay down. As soon as I lay down, he put a soft blanket around me, tucked it into the bed like a parent might for a sick child and put the fan directly on me.

“You are sick?” he said, half-asking, half-explaining. “Now, rest.”

My friends came next door minutes later, wanting to make sure everything was OK in the mystery room. They sat by my bedside while guards came in and out every couple of minutes, constantly offering cigarettes, tea and water.

“You are so nice,” my friend Tyler told one of the guards. “Thank you.”

“You are also nice,” the guard said. “We are sorry about how long you wait. You are welcome.”

With another guard, we discussed the US election. This guard did not like George Bush. Unlike other Syrians, mostly taxi drivers and shopkeepers, who have expressed their dislike of our president to me, he did not then ask what happened to Hillary Clinton or say he hoped for Barack Obama to become the next president. He seemed absolutely indifferent and walked out of the room.

When he returned, he carried a giant plate full of Arabic bread, scrambled eggs covered in pepper and a bowl of peeled cucumbers and sliced bell peppers.

“My friend made this for you,” he said. “You are hungry?”

We scarfed down the food. I hadn’t eaten scrambled eggs, one of my favorites, in months and they were delicious. My fever had broken, my bones had stopped aching and it felt good to fill up my stomach again with anything nutritious, let alone something delicious. Still, I had to eat slowly. Who knew what would happen when my body registered that I had introduced food to it again.

“Dania, why you not eat?” the guard said, concerned that I didn’t like the food. “Eat!”

He rushed back out of the room and returned with three glasses of generously sugared tea and, again, pushed cigarettes onto my friends. As we tried to finish the tea, he came into the room and told us that the fax from Damascus had come. Soon, John’s mooshkeela could be fixed.

We were escorted back to the lobby. I tried to stand in line as John sorted out his paperwork, but I felt dizzy from double-dosing antibiotics and I wanted to say goodbye to the General. I went and knocked on the door, a little worried that this was not so cool to do with a guard escort. General was no longer at his desk. He had been replaced with a new boss who was wearing a crinkly track suit and seemed ready for a brisk walk.

“Do you feel better?” he said. It was amazing how quickly news spread in this office.

“Yes. Thank you,” I said.

“Anything you need, please tell me. I will help you. We are sorry for the time you wait,” he said.

I returned to the lobby and put my head between my legs. Tyler came over and suggested we might want to ask the new General for help finding a taxi to Aleppo. Our taxi driver from Turkey had jetted hours before, understandably unwilling to wait with us and lose business. We knocked on the office door. Within minutes, New General had his men searching for a taxi driver and we were watching a late night movie about a ghost town in West Virginia with him.

Shortly, a guard returned with the driver. New General asked him a couple of questions, told him in Arabic that we needed to get to Aleppo quickly because we were late and that he needed to stay with us until we found reliable transportation. Just to be clear, I didn’t understand this in Arabic. New General translated this afterwards.

We got up to leave and Tyler, thankfully, asked if we could have a photo with New General to remember our happy times at the custom’s office (see above). He agreed and we snapped some shots. Then, we started to file out of the office to grab our backpacks when New General stopped me.

“I hope we see you again,” he said. “Welcome to your country!”

Al Kindergarten

The last time I learned a new alphabet, I was about three feet tall and missing my front teeth. I remember singing the Alphabet Song, suffering through some backwards Ds and Es and generally moving on to the more important parts of kindergarten which, in my mind, included watching the class caterpillar turn into a butterfly, creating dyed macaroni necklaces and imagining what it would be like to walk on the ceiling when I was supposed to be sleeping during naptime.

I do not remember learning an alphabet being this hard.

Last week, I started a five-day-a-week, four-hour-a-day Arabic course at Damascus University. Just like learning English in kindergarten, learning Arabic begins with getting the Arabic alphabet under your belt.

Unlike English, the Arabic alphabet has 28 letters, a least one-third of which require the vocal calisthenics of Kermit the Frog to pronounce. There’s another catch: Each of these 28 Arabic letters can be written in three different ways, depending on whether the letter makes its appearance at the beginning, middle or end of a word.

In case you’re keeping track, that’s 84 new letters to learn. And these letters aren’t just simple circles connected to straight lines like a “b” or a “p”. There are curves, ovals, circles, triangles, dots and they all run from right to left.

Arabic letters are admittedly much more beautiful than those in our alphabet and involve more skill to transcribe all of the tessellations of letters. If I could write faster than a kindergartener, I’m pretty sure writing in Arabic would feel like painting. However, one missing dot here or an extra curve there and you’re into Zuzuland, a place my cousin here as introduced me to as the Arabic version of our Lalaland. Zuzuland. Of course.

So basically, reading and writing Arabic one week into lessons is like playing an Olympic-level, verbal version of Memory. I am definitely not winning the gold by any stretch of the imagination.

In fact, I think I may be the very worst student. At least, Gregory from Switzerland, who is engaged to a Syrian-Swiss girl and living with her family here, and I are tied for last. We often exchange looks of exasperation as our 10 classmates, most of who are either European or American, carry on limited conversations on topics that include vocabulary we have learned.

Thus, from 9 A.M. to 1 P.M., Sunday through Thursday, we discuss our names, our nationalities, whether or not we are married (a very key question for both men and women here in Syria) and what hobbies we like (although, at this point you have to choose between cooking, reading and sports unless you have figured out how to look up words in the dictionary).

That is, if I can get to class. While I may be learning the alphabet in class, starting to sound out words and even sharing some semi-intelligible biographical detail with my classmates, outside of class, there is a world beyond my name, my nationality and my apparent love of “al ree-yaa-dah” (sports). I have had to get creative with communication and this has caused more than a little trouble. In the past week, since I moved out of my Uncle Zoo and Aunt Alia’s apartment and, hence, lost my free translators, my linguistics missteps have landed me at a mosque when I meant to go to the circus and at the Kuwaiti Embassy as I tried to make it to an art gallery.

One morning, when I asked a taxi driver to take me to Damascus University, I ended up in a dirt lot full of mangy cats and the remains of a cement structure. I was already five minutes late for class, so I jogged through the dirt under the 90-plus degree sun towards the direction of a main road and flagged down a second taxi driver.

Panting and covered in sweat and dust, I said “Please. I want Damascus University” (“Fuh-duhl. Bid-dee jah-mee-yah dee-mossh-k”). For whatever reason, he interpreted this sentence as “Fuh-duhl. Bid-dee Four Seasons.” The concierge at Damascus’ nicest hotel, who is undoubtedly more accustomed to dealing with the wealthy visitors from the Gulf who lounge in the lobby at all hours of the day and night, looked at me with a mix of pity and annoyance as I asked him to translate: Could my driver please take me to the university so I wouldn’t miss my entire Arabic class and so I will communicate with him better in the future?

Yet, as much of a Herculanean struggle as it is to learn Arabic and as little of the language as I understand right now, it is clear that there is some real beauty when these 28 letters get together. When we are conjugating verbs and making adjectives fit with nouns, my 23-year-old teacher, Hala, often talks about “making the music.” For example, there are little symbols you can add to sentences in Arabic, simply to make the wording sound a little more formal and flow better. Here’s a (very) rough example: In Arabic, you could write “I like dogs." Then, you could add one of the special symbols to the sentence and it would still mean “I like dogs”, but it would sound like “I-yah like-ah the dogsssss." It’s not a matter of picking different words to describe something, but it’s more like singing: You have to use the words you’ve got, fit the sounds together and hit the right tone.

There are also words in Arabic that don’t seem to translate in English and capture snapshots of the region’s culture and history. For example, “sahk-er” is word used by Bedouins to describe a really brave person. Describing members of your family, particularly your cousins, aunts and uncles, is also unique. Instead of just saying Cousin Bobby, Aunt Alma or Uncle Lambykins, in Arabic, you use words that explain exactly how everyone is related to you. If Cousin Bobby, for instance, was my dad’s brother’s son, he would be called my “ibn ommi." In other words, the son (ibn) of my uncle (ommi). Without having to say another sentence, you know exactly how Bobby fits into my family, perhaps the single most important entity of one’s life here.

Just as I don’t remember learning the English alphabet being as hard as learning the Arabic alphabet, I don’t remember finally decoding English being as exhilarating as it’s been to get a small hint of Arabic understanding. I’ve started to pick out words here and there when my relatives are talking which has given me a sense of relief, having worried that they were talking about all the stupid cultural mistakes I was making. Even if I get lost in a taxi now, I can pick out bits and pieces of the news on the radio which included news today about “Fran-zia” and “Suur-riya," Sarkozy and Assad.

And just a couple of days ago, for the first time in 27 years, I was able to write my name in Arabic (see the video). It felt like a big moment. I just hope the D wasn’t backwards.

Family Fridays

On Fridays, Damascus shuts down.

Most shops close. The usually crazy traffic slows. Everyone sleeps in, and, if you aren’t waking up at a relatives' house, it’s more than likely you’ll make your way there at some point in the day. You should arrive with an empty stomach.

Fridays in Syria are the equivalent of our Sundays. After the Sunday through Thursday work week here, Friday is a day of prayer, rest and family. Accordingly, for friends my age here, Thursday is the night they go out big. Whatever the case, when you wake up on Friday, there is a palpable calmness across the city, further enhanced by a heat that could make even a Porsche move in slow motion.

On Thursday afternoon, my Aunt Alia called me and said I should come over to her and Uncle Zoo’s apartment at 11 am on Friday. My uncle Nabil was visiting from Los Angeles and so, she said, we were going to the mountains for lunch. In my head, I would arrive at 11, we’d all get into the family car with a picnic basket, drive up to the mountain overlooking Damascus for a leisurely lunch – maybe some bread and cheese (Ok, maybe I was having a bit of a Swiss Alps fantasy. Can you blame me? It’s really hot and dry here. Who couldn’t use a little Lederhosen and green grass in their lives with weather like this?) and return at 1 pm or 2 pm at the latest to go our own ways. I had to meet my Arabic tutor at a café at 6 pm. I figured I had more than enough time.

But I underestimated the rules of Friday, which are as follows: 1. Move as slowly as possible. 2. Family trumps all other cards.

There is also a third rule (3. Eat. A lot.), but we’ll get to that.

When I arrived at Zoo and Alia’s apartment across town from Abu Roumaneh, the neighborhood where I’m now living, I was nervous. Not only was I hepped up on the freeze-dried coffee and powdered milk I’m learning to love and drink each morning, but I was also eight minutes late. I worried that the whole family might be waiting for me in front of the apartment building, tapping their feet and tsking.

I spent half of the taxi ride thinking up excuses, none of which seemed quite believable: “I had to feed my cat”, “I spent 20 minutes looking for a taxi”, “The taxi driver got lost going to your house where I’ve come via taxi at least 10 times without getting lost.”

As I dashed up to the building, there wasn’t a person in sight. What if they’d left without me? Oh no. I jumped into the elevator, quickly jumping off to ring their doorbell. Mousliyah, their housekeeper, let me in and ushered me into the living room where I found Uncle Nabil in his pajamas, watching Al-Jazeera.

“Oh. Hey Ommo,” I said, giving him a hug and wondering where the rest of the family was. “How’s it going?”

“Hey Dania. Good,” he said, sitting back down and smiling peacefully.

“I guess you got the memo about the wife beater,” I said, pointing to my white, sleeveless top and his white, sleeveless night shirt.

This is not a joke I would have been able to make with my Uncle Zoo, namely because I don’t think American slang translates all that well. But Uncle Nabil, like my dad, came to the US in the 1960s so he knew what I was talking about. Still, when Zoo came out five minutes later, walking slowly to the couch, it was clear that he, too, had received the white wife beater memo.

Unfortunately, the memo about the family pajama party we were apparently going to have had not made it to my box.

An hour passed. As I drank another cup of freeze-dried coffee and watched CNN, all my relatives dressed into their nicest clothes. Then, Nabil and Zoo left to go to the mosque for prayers. I called my tutor to tell him I would be late, if I even showed up. Clearly and a bit to my frustration, I was no longer at the driver seat of my life.

Another hour had passed when Nabil and Zoo returned and, at 2 pm, the four of us got into the car and headed out of town, south towards Lebanon. Within 10 minutes, we were far away from the tall apartment buildings, cement and pavement of Damascus, and were zooming through desert. If you’ve ever been to Joshua Tree or Palm Springs, you know the type of landscape. In addition to hills of sandy rock, there were silvery orchards of olive and fig trees in the distance.

The uncles sat in front. They had their windows down. Wind was blowing through the car, muting Arabic folk music full of ouds, violins and wailing singers. On the side of the road, I saw a family standing around the front cab of a truck, each holding small Turkish coffee cups and talking. I also saw two men sitting on a rug, holding hands and laughing. We entered a small valley where there were fruit and vegetable stands on either side of the road offering fava beans, green plums, apricots and delicious smelling roast chicken, cooked on site.

After 30 minutes, we started climbing a hill. With the folksy music in the background and the winding up the incline through little towns, I started to feel like we were in the kind of movie you see when you watch television late at night in a foreign country like Italy or Turkey, the kind of Old World movie with very little plot and lots of music montages. The kind of movie that would have a tagline like “They wanted to have a picnic, but instead, they found a lost village on a hill.” or “They were four people on a desert journey, hungry for adventure, family togetherness and lunch.”

Finally, stomachs rumbling, we arrived in the town at the top of the hill, Bloudan. In the wintertime, my aunt told me, Bloudan is a ski resort. But on this day in June, the town’s power to provide breezy relief from the arid land below was a poorly kept secret: Cars were crammed together around the hillside and crowds of people moved in and out of several restaurants.

Our restaurant (see the photo above), an open-air, three level place built right into the hillside, was reminiscent of a certain genre of restaurants I’ve really loved to visit during past trips to Syria. These restaurants are like nothing I’ve actually been to in the US, but remind me of the types of restaurants featured in 1950s movies, particularly movies with musical acts. They are typically huge, with tables centered around a pool or other ornate man-made creation involving water, but they don’t feel ridiculously decadent. I haven’t surveyed guests at these places, but they feel accessible for people from all walks of life. There is practically a waiter for every two tables, running around in a bow ties and vests, and thick smoke – both from cigarettes and hookahs – hangs heavy, along with the cologne and perfume of guests. Here in Syria, you go to these restaurants and sit for hours, eat through little plates of appetizers like grape leaves and hummus, then tender pieces of lamb and chicken, and finally platters of apples, apricots and plums. You lounge, drink coffee, smoke hookah and stare at other people. It’s as much an opportunity to eat as it is to lay back and feel like you’re in another era and on another planet.

Aunt Alia told me that this particular restaurant used to be a popular place for people to find their future husband or wife. You would come to the restaurant in your best clothes and, if you saw someone you liked, you would ask your family to inquire about this particular person and go from there.

For two hours, we sat in a sunny corner under a tree, ate more food than any of us really needed. I was prodded several times to “Eat! Eat!” My family here has this way of making me feel like I’m anorexic, even when I’m stuffed. We talked and then, by the time the waiters brought small cups of coffee and tea, we were silent, simply staring at each other in heavenly food comas and with a comfort that one can really only feel with their family. Around us, families and married couples all seemed to be on a similar hedonistic continuum. I think I saw only two families leave a table the entire time we were at the restaurant. The restaurant even provided long cloaks, the same as Bedouins wear in the desert, for guests who were chilly in the fresh mountain air.

We crawled back to the car and started the drive back to Damascus. No one talked, but soon, my three relatives were singing folk songs together and so it went until we arrived back at their apartment sometime around 6 pm. They plopped on the couch, watching a little of “Noor”, a Turkish soap opera dubbed in Arabic that has captivated a majority of people in Damascus, if not the country. Soon, they said, they would all crawl into bed for naps and wake up in the warm darkness of the evening, and drink Turkish coffee on the balcony. As I ran out to try to find my tutor and see if we could squeeze in even an hour of work, I couldn’t help wanting to stay in slow motion with them.

Thank You, Qatar

All Sunday, most everyone I ran into seemed to be rushing to a television or already sitting in front of one.

They were following the election and swearing in of Gen. Michel Suleiman as the Lebanese President. Of course, the big news is all over the place, but I wanted to tell you about a report that you might not have seen.

A little before midnight, my Aunt Alia, Uncle Zoo and I were in our pajamas, still watching news roundups of the election when, in the middle of a report, a music video started playing.

First, there were beautiful shots of the ski slopes in Lebanon and the beaches in Beirut. Then, as footage of Qatar’s emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, and Prime Minister, Sheik Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani played, a chorus of male voices sang triumphantly.

“Zoo, what are they singing?” I said.

“What?” he said, growing wearier by the minute as my de-facto translator.

“What are the words of this song?”

Zoo said the song thanked Qatar’s leaders for their work, brokering peace in Lebanon after an 18 month political standoff following the 2005 assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and the recent outbreak of violence in Beirut which threatened to erupt into something much bigger, with regional implications.

Ahh. It was beginning to make sense. There was more footage: Leaders of various political factions boarding a plane for five days of negotiations in Doha, a still photo of a map of the Persian Gulf and Qatar with Doha clearly marked, a montage of one of the two Qatari leaders walking around Beirut, Suleiman and one of the Qatari leaders embracing one another.

So, a little out of left field for an average Western viewer, right? When was the last time CNN wrote a song about the November elections, cut some emotional footage of the candidates and had Lou Dobbs, Anderson Cooper and Candy Crowley sing their hearts out? What potential! Of course, our election, as I see it, is much less precarious, relatively speaking. OK and I guess, technically, the video wasn’t really a news report, but an opinion piece.

But I have to say that it seemed to capture something accurate about the tone of the day, at least among the people whom I observed in Damascus. Even without understanding any words beyond ‘Doha’ and ‘Qatar’, it was easy to sense the emotion behind the piece. It tapped into parts of my brain that I don’t normally equate with news digestion - kind of like if you woke up one morning and your newspaper suddenly had scratch and sniff qualities. I wasn’t reading or watching the news. I was feeling it and it seemed to jibe with reality.

Maybe these kinds of videos are a regular occurrence on television here and speak more largely about the way folks here understand and express themselves. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for a video montage on a Sunday night? I don’t know yet and I guess I’ll find out soon enough. I’m also curious to figure out who comes up with these songs on the fly. Is there an on-call news chorus that runs into the studio to sing every time something major happens? Are they hiring?

I will try to find the video for you!