marhaba from damascus

It's Friday afternoon in Damascus and most things are closed, but I'm hanging out in a big cafe that seems to be a hideaway for the cool kids - there's free wireless, plenty of shisha in the air, and Sean Paul coming from the speakers. I just ran into a guy I recognized from Yale, small world as always. I've been having a great time so far and insha'allah I think I'm going to learn lots of Arabic and enjoy life here.

Damascus is a a good place for walking and my housing search gave me an incentive to get to know the central areas of the city quickly. I wore out my feet by walking from 6:30AM (thanks, jetlag) until 11PM on my second day (minus breaks for tea, Turkish coffee, and various juices with real estate agents and landlords). Damascus is both livelier and more cosmopolitan than I anticipated; it helps that I set the bar so low by spending last summer in Yemen.

I started off by seeing rooms for rent with families in the old city with the help of a local from my Arabic school. I'd expected that this might be a good option, but after seeing plenty of small, dark rooms featuring foam mattresses that had known many of my sweaty Arabic-studying predecessors, I decided to do some searching on my own. After inflicting my broken Arabic on shop owners and the old men who congregate on corners, I saw some much nicer places. The old city is lovely, but it is also very used to tourists and seems like the kind of place where the roles of both sides (local/tourist) are entrenched, for good and bad I suppose. I lived in the very beautiful and much less touristy old city of Sana'a last summer, so I decided to try something different.

I didn't know how to go about finding an apartment and I ended up trying lots of things – including accosting an American woman I spotted on the street (blond, wearing shorts and a t-shirt…which seems sort of okay in the fancy embassy neighborhood she was in). No good leads there, but I did find some good options through a real estate agent. I'll skip over the details of how, in order to see two apartments, I spent more than 4 hours sitting around drinking tea and chatting with him and all of the other characters that passed through
his office. My vocab has expanded to include some dirty words. I think I might start hanging out there...seriously.

I settled on a tiny studio in a lovely neighborhood called Muhajarin on a hill overlooking the city. The family who owns my place lives in a big, lovely apartment next door and has had me over twice during my 24 hours there, so I hope to have some of the benefits of living with
a family along with luxuries like privacy and my own kitchen. I have a slice of a view of the city from my window and it's a short walk downhill to shops and the minibuses that will take you all around the city for a few cents. The area is really pretty - mainly small apartment buildings divided up by tiny alleys- and the hills are so steep that many of the sidewalks have steps built into them.

When I took my first walk around to explore the neighborhood, one thought was on repeat: I want to eat that. There were mounds of chickpeas about to become falafel and hummus, 20 cent pita-sized pizzas, cherries in neatly arranged piles, little snack shops that carry all varieties of nuts (including the cornnut - I'd always thought they originated in a warehouse in Jersey or something; i guess that could still be the case, but they're ubiquitous and available by
the kilo here), as well as people wheeling around other delicious looking things like corn on the cob.