The Damascus Art Scene

Since getting back from Jordan three weeks ago I have been too busy to blog, which presents a dilemma, because it of course means that I have an awful lot to blog about, so will have to try and resist the unnecessary level of detail I usually feel the need to include, and go for a lovely brief overview.

We arrived back in Damascus after our week in Jordan on Saturday night and on Monday evening our friend Ali, a lovely half-Arab, half-Pakistani guy from SOAS, who is in the same class as Becka and I, invited us to go with him to a poetry club night in a hotel basement in central Damascus, where local poets come and read famous works in both English and Arabic. We had dinner at the flat with Everitte and Emlyn (because apparently we’re inseparable!) and watched Indianna Jones which we managed to get hold of for 30p in one of the shops which sells pirate DVDs. We now have a collection of about 15 films to watch, some classics, some new, as they’re just so cheap it’s impossible to resist. Everybody place your orders now for Christmas, as I’m planning to buy every good film I’ve ever seen and have the best film collection ever when I get back to the UK!

We arrived at the poetry night at about 10, and it was packed full of people, some other foreigners, but mostly Syrians, drinking and smoking and talking and laughing. There was an amazing atmosphere, although it was so smoky it physically hurt my eyes and I found myself blinking non-stop. Poor Emlyn had to leave after about an hour because his contact lenses dried out, but the rest of us stayed and got chatting to a friend of Ali’s, a young Syrian poet who is known as Shakespeare because he is a linguistic genius, and some of his friends. It turns out that he is the star of the poetry club, and everybody knows him, and he is a lovely guy, albeit one with a rather alarming 1950s style serial killer haircut, so we were very lucky to have met him, because by 1am we knew all the main players at the club, including the MC, this mad long-haired middle-aged Turkish guy, who spent the beginning of the night patrolling the club, telling off anybody who spoke (or whispered) during one of the readings. We thought he was a bit over zealous to begin with, but he gradually got more and more drunk and raucous as the night went on, and by the time the place closed at half past one he was singing over the top of the absolutely beautiful Iraqi guitar player (may I just say that every single hot guy I’ve met since coming here has, without exception, been Iraqi.. they have to be some of the best looking guys in the world!) and informing us that: ‘I have two lovely daughters, but I am finished from sex’. Last night was the third time we’ve attended, and as he now knows us all pretty well we brought him a present of a water pistol, which I filled in the bathroom and handed to him and said ‘For the ajaanibs who talk during the poetry!’

It is an amazing experience being at the poetry club, it is full of very liberal, bohemian actors, writers and artists, who all drink and, unfortunately, smoke, as well as having very strong politic views. Sadly I don’t think that this is an appropriate place to discuss Syrian politics, which is a pity because it is a fascinating topic, however suffice to say we have learnt a lot from various people we’re met in the last few weeks, and mostly thanks to knowing Shakespeare and his contacts we now know a whole range of actors, artists and writers in Damascus, which is perfect, and so far from what I had imagined life as a tourist in Damascus would be like.

After the club closed Shakespeare and his friends decided we should all head back to Abu George, a little bar on Straight Street with about 5 chairs, which is many ways like a carriage on a London Underground train, noisy, hot, and packed full of people standing shoulder to shoulder and spilling out onto the pavement. It seems to be the main hang-out of a lot of the poetry club regulars, where everybody knows everybody, but on this particular occasion Hassan, this wonderful French-Canadian man in his mid-fifties, who is apparently an irrepressible womaniser, and has spent most of his life sleeping his way around the world, decided that Abu George was too full, and it would be better to buy some alcohol from a corner shop (it is very readily available even at 2am in the Christian area) and drive up to Mount Kassioun, the big mountain in the middle of Damascus.

Sadly he got called home because his elderly mother was unwell, but the idea took hold, and Becka, Shakespeare and two of his friends piled into one car, leaving Ali, Everitte and I to go in the other car with this rather strange man called Ahmed, who was in his early 20s as far as I could make out, but had slicked back grey hair and black glasses, and had sort of invited himself along, which as far as I could make out Shakespeare and the other guys were not altogether happy about. He insisted on driving home to pick up his hookah (the smoking apparatus, not the other kind) before taking us up the mountain, but in the end we were all sitting on the mountain in the middle of the night, one of the only times in Damascus when we haven’t been surrounded by crowds of people, talking music and poetry and politics, with all the guys wearing my jumpers, which was amusing in the extreme.

We ended up staying on the mountain til 5am, which was great except that it meant that none of us made it in to uni the next day, and that I had a cold for the next week! On top of this Ahmed, the grey haired man who’s car I was in, took my phone number when we said goodbye and, despite the fact that we’d hardly spoken, proceeded to call me three times the next day, and when I didn’t answer sent me a text saying ‘I insist to invite you to dinner with me today or tomorrow’. He then proceeded to call me several more times before finally taking the hint. Luckily I haven’t seen him since, but I do feel bad about the fact that I screen so many people’s calls here. In England I always answer my phone without even looking at the caller ID, but here I tend to ignore my phone more than I answer it, it’s bizarre. I think it’s just that people are more intense here after a short space of time, and think nothing of calling somebody anything up to six times a day, and then demanding to know why you haven’t answered your phone. Everitte was saying that one Syrian guy who works at the university was telling him that he had arranged to meet an American girl for a study session, but that she never showed up, so he went home and he drank and he cried, and then he texted her saying ‘You have made me so unhappy I want to die’ and now he can’t understand why she isn’t answering her phone when he calls her!

Since the the night on the mountian we have seen Shakespeare and Hassan and their friend Amer a lot, once at the next poetry club, after which a group of us ended up in the Jewish Garden on Straight Street til 5am once again (no uni the next day this time, luckily!), while Becka played the guitar and sang. She has the most amazingly beautiful voice, I had no idea, and it was hilarious to watch because she ended up sitting and singing folk songs with a group of about 10 Syrian guys staring at her in open-mouthed adoration, begging for another song each time she finished one and at least two of them seem to have fallen head over heels in love with her! After this they seem to have decided to adopt us properly, and last week we ended up going to a poetry performance in an art gallery in the Old City, where a 22-year-old Australian poet, who writes in rhyming verse, and is extremely talented, read his poems in English and Shakespeare then translated them into Arabic. Because all our new friends are passionate about classical languages, they speak only perfect FusHa when performing (the formal Arabic we study, as opposed to colloquial Arabic), so it is really useful for us to be able to hear work translated on the spot like that, slowly and clearly. Becka, Ali and I had a text about graveyard tourism(!) to translate for homework, and Shakespeare offered to help us, meaning that we ended up sitting in the art gallery long after it closed, til about 1am, doing Arabic homework with a group of Syrian poets and Hassan, who came to the recital with a 22-year-old Muslim girl he’d apparently been after for about a year, who sings and writes him erotic poetry. They left halfway through, and Hassan arrived back after the performance finished looking rather pleased with himself, especially because all the Syrian guys are so admiring of his outrageous lack of morals! Shakespeare was a good teacher, and made us do the translation, just serving as a dictionary for words we didn’t know, but he hadn’t slept for 48 hours and was completely hyper, and kept saying ‘pain is coming’ whenever we failed to recognise a word, and ‘You win, the others loose’ to whoever got the correct meaning first.

It was Becka’s birthday on Sunday so after our disastrous trip to Lattakia, which I will get to in a moment, we decided just to go to Maloula, a nearby Christian town which is famously the only place in the world where they still speak Aramaic. Emlyn has been unwell for the last week with food poisoning, so it was just me, Becka and Everitte who went and saw the old convent, and an ancient church, which used to be a pagan temple of Bacchus, over 2000 years ago, but was later converted into a church, and still has a dip in the alter for the blood of animal sacrifices. In the evening Emlyn joined us for a film, and then we all went out to meet Shakespeare, Amir, Ali and Hassan for dinner and drinks in the Art Café. They are great company, and it’s so nice to hang out with local Syrians, rather than just other British students for a change.

Last weekend Becka and I went travelling alone for the first time, as we had been planning to go to Hama and Homs with the boys, but Emlyn was too ill to travel, so on the spur of the moment Becka and I decided to go to Lattakia, a Mediterranean town 4 or 5 hours north of Damascus. For anyone who is considering going to Lattakia, a town which the Lonely Planet describes as ‘A great place to spend a couple of days’… don’t do it! We took to bus from Damascus at about 2 o’clock on Friday, which arrived in Lattakia just after 6pm, as the sun was setting. Our first discovery about Lattakia was that none of the taxi drivers have a clue where they’re going. It took two taxis and a long, long walk in the dark to finally find the street we were after, which was where all the Lonely Planet recommended hostels and restaurants were, as although it is called Moutanabi Street, according to the Lonely Planet, it turns out that it is in the Christian Quarter, and everybody calls it American Street and had no idea what we were talking about when we used the official name. When we finally arrived we found the restaurants mentioned in the Lonely Planet, but the map was wrong, and we searched everywhere but couldn’t find the hotel we wanted. Eventually gave up and decided to have some dinner and worry about where to sleep afterwards. We made our way to ‘The Italian Corner Restaurant’, which came highly recommended, but which, were I ever to review it, I would give one simple line ‘Microwave meals at restaurant prices’. We waited over an hour for what was quite possibly the worst pizza I have ever eaten, undercooked, boxed, frozen American style deep-pan pizza, and a glass of ‘orange juice’ which at £1.50 a glass we assumed was fresh, but which turned out to be orange squash mixed with water. In the end after much wandering we found another Lonely Planet recommended hotel, and discovered that the one we had originally been after had closed down. We ended up wandering around a very seedy looking area in the dark, and finally found Hotel Lattakia, and made our way up the dingy fluight of stairs of a little side alley to the main reception, where the man showed us a twin room with sheets loosely draped over two rock hard beds, and walls which were a dingy grey colour from years of accumulated grime. By this point we were both slightly hysterical about the whole thing, and took one look at the room and both started giggling uncontrollably, much to the confusion and disgurt of the hotel owner. Eventually we got control of ourselves and spun him some unconvincing story about how we had to meet some friends somewhere but couldn’t get hold of them, so were going o wander round looking for them, and left, only to return, half an hour later, after having seen a selection of what were possibly the moist disgusting, syphilis-ridden rooms in the history of budget travel. Even in India I have rarely seen anything so repulsive looking, so back at hotel Lattakia Becka and I ended up in a slightly nicer room upstairs from reception, lying on our sheet covered planks, watching an appallingly bad film called ‘Prey’ on the free satellite TV and laughing helplessly at the whole situation. We had a sink in our room, so managed to brush our teeth there, but Becka went to the toilets and the look on her face when she returned was enough to convince me that attempting to take a shower would not be an enjoyable experience, consequently we got up early in the morning, brushed our teeth and left as quickly as possible, making our way to a café where we managed to get genuine cappuccino and use the toilet! As we left the owner hopefully optimistically asked if we’d be staying another night, to which we replied that we had to get back to Damascus, before laughing all the way down the stairs about how we should have said ‘Your hotel has forced us to leave Lattakia immediately and never come back’. Still, to give the man credit, his hotel was the best of an extremely bad lot, and staying there did only cost us about £3.50 each, so realistically Im not quite sure what we expected. The hard beds didn’t bother me too much and I actually had a good night’s sleep, but I think I would happily have exchanged the satellite TV for some basic cleanliness.

Over breakfast, which consisted of some rather nice chocolate croissants, Becka and I planned the kindly letter we intend to write to Lonely Planet about their Lattakia section. It ended up being very short and sweet, consisting of one sentence: ‘Dear Lonely Planet, we have a couple of slight criticisms to make about your information and advice on Lattakia, and will be paying a short visit soon to discuss it with YOUR MUM!’

As it happened we ended up spending a lovely morning visiting Quala’at Salah al-Din, an old crusader castle about an hour out of Lattakia by microbus. It is set on top of a mountain amid beautiful pine forests, which made a nice change from desert, and sitting on the castle walls in the sun, with a view out to sea and the smell of pine in the air was a wonderful experience. In the end I think those two hours of peace made up for all the rest of the trip, we had a wonderful exploring the ruins, all alone among the crumbling walls, singing down a series of holes in the ground which lead down into a huge room full of water, enjoying the echo and the beautiful acoustics, and exploring little paths among the vegetation which has overtaken the castle, and which creates a fairytale atmosphere much like visiting sleeping beauty in her overgrown castle after her hundred year long sleep.

We had to take a taxi from the nearest town, al-Haffa, and the driver waited for an hour and a half while we explored the castle, and then when we got back to the car he stopped off at what was originally a small mountain soring which now drips through a rather manky looking pipe at the bottom of the mountain, and insisted we drink some of the water and pose for a photo beside the pipe. He then asked if we’d come and drink coffee with him in the forest, and wouldn’t take no for an answer when we told him we had no time and had to get back to Lattakia to meet some friends. At this point I wished we were travelling with the boys, as I’m fairly sure he would never have invited us in the first lace, let alone pushed it, but as we were just two girls he refused to listen and drove us to this bizarre deserted café and children’s playf=ground set among the trees, which he preceded to stop the car, order three rocket-fuel coffees from his friend who owned the café and sat us all down at a picnic table among the trees, while his friend put on some cheesy Arabic pop music which blared out through speakers which were placed up in the trees. The taxi driver asked our names and chatted for a few minutes, before telling me I had eyes like his ex-fiancee. At this point I sent Everitte a text saying ‘Please call me in 10 minutes and go along with what I say’ and just as our coffee arrived my phone rang and we had a very surreal conversation where I said things like ‘I’m so sorry we’re late, where are you guys?’ and he said ‘Well I assume we’re somewhere in Lattakia’. It was enough to convince the taxi driver, who was luckily quite a nice guy, to take us back to town where we could catch the microbus back to Lattakia, and as we were not asked to pay for the coffee, we decided perhaps he just felt bad about having over-charged us on the taxi fare and was trying to make it up to us. Maybe.

We spent the afternoon attempting to get to the beach and go for a swim, something which once again thanks to the taxi drivers, turned out to be impossible, as we asked to be taken to the Hotel Sham, which the Lonely Planet said charged 400SYP for use of it’s beach and facilities (although why we still believed the Lonely Planet about anything at this point is beyond me), but the taxi driver, speaking very fast incomprehensible Lattakian dialect at us all the while, instead took us to the filthy piece of beach miles away from anywhere and tried to leave us, telling us that it would be better to swim there as it was free. As it was also filthy, had nowhere where we could change our clothes, no showers and a selection of Syrian teenage boys who were already ogling us we demanded that he drop us at the nearest hotel instead, which he did reluctantly, mumbling ‘majnoona’ (crazy) repeatedly under his breathe. As the nearest hotel was not the one we’d originally asked for it was only when we got inside that we realised it was a five star hotel, and the men at the reception delk took one look at us in our cheap Indian clothes and dusy flipflops ad told us that we could use the beach but it cost 900SYP. As that is around 14 British pounds, and there was by this time less than three hours left til sunset we decided to leave, and ended up trudging along the motorway hot and pissed off, cursing Lattakia, and it’s taxi drivers in particular. We were stopped by a creepy sweaty man in his 60s who asked where we were going. We tokd him we wanted to find somewhere with showers and changing rooms to go for a swim, and he told us we could walk down to the sea across the barren land between hotel complexes ‘And afterwards you can come to my house just across the road here and you can use my shower and we can drink vodka together’. We ran away fairly quickly, but did in fact decide to kae our way across the desolate wasteland between the motorway and the beach. When we got there we were fairly glad we hadn’t gone to a hotel to swim, as we would never have realised what was actually in the water if the beach had been cleaned each day. Lattakia’s beautiful Mediterranean beach was covered in more rubbish than I’ve seen outside a dump, not to mention the brown water and collection of rotting dead crabs. After taking our first ironic jumping photo in front of the piles of stinking rubbish we were thoroughly put off the idea of swimming, so walked a little way along and ended up making our way back to the main road through a little village, which we realised only afterwards had to be exited through an entrance with armed guards at the gates, who were a little surprised to see two foreigners who had apparently appeared from nowhere walking out of their encampment.

We got the first microbus back to town, and after another rather horrible late lunch/early dinner of burgers (apparently Lattakia doesn’t do Syrian food) we made our way straight to the bus station, determined that we would not spend another night in Lattakia at any price. Unfortunately as it was a Saturday night, and as Lattakia is a hell hole, everybody else seemed to have had the same idea, and all the buses back to Damascus, of which there were many, were full. We met a Damascene man called Fatar and his sister, who were also heading back to Damascus in time for work the next morning, and after two hours and much shouting and confusion and moving around from bench to bench, and tickets issues and refunded, he managed to get all four of us onto a bus for Damascus which got us back at about 1.30am. Without him I think we would have been stuck in Lattakia for another night so we were very grateful to him, until he called me four times the next day insisting we meet for munch, and has preceded to call or text me every few hours ever since, even though it has reached the point where I never reply because I fear I would be unable to refrain from screaming at him, and he hasn’t actually done anything wrong.

Overall we were very happy to be back in Damascus, and as we’re now on out 9 days holiday we are planning another, longer trip via Palmyra and up the Euphrates to Aleppo, but will definitely take Everitte with us this time, although Emlyn is going back to Scotland, as travelling as two girls in Syria is perhaps not ideal.

In other news university is going fairly well I think, the classes are fun, and mostly consist of studying lots of texts ranging in topic from a story about a monkey, to graveyard tourism, to the history of the Arab people and sea trade, and every now and then we get a great moment, like yesterday, when the teacher announced out of the blue in Arabic that we’d have a three minute break before we moved on the grammar in which we’d discuss ‘tharwa a-samak’ in Britian, which he then gravely translated as ‘fish wealth’, which gave us all a bit of a laugh. The only problem is the we are given a lot of comprehension homework to do, which means translating texts and answering questions, but there is so much new vocabulary it is impossible to know where to begin, and I tend to write lots of new words down to learn, but never get round to actually learning them, which means that I now have about 10 pages of vocabulary to learn over the holiday, as well as lots more to look up and writw down from all the texts. We had an exam yesterday, and I’m not really sure whether I’ve passed or not (the pass rate here is around 70%), however it is a positive thing however you look at it, as it doesn’t count towards our final grade, and I have no idea if we’ve been doing enough work in between all the travel and poetry, so if we pass we’ll know we’re okay, and if we fail we’ll know we need to work harder from now on!

Becka has started Oud lessons, so I’m being serenaded by beautiful live music as I type this, and Everitte and I are taking classes in Arabic calligraphy, which is difficult, but a very peaceful thing to do, as I go into a sort of trance. It also means I will have birthday and Christmas cards sorted forever if I get good.

We haven’t seen much of Hiba recently as we’ve been so busy, but it was her birthday last weekend so we bought her flowers and some blinging jewellery which I think she liked, and as it was Becka’s birthday on Sunday she bought a piano shaped cake which said ‘Beki’ on it, and threw a little party with jelly and cake and delicious homemade tabbouleh, where we sat and drank tea and smoked nargileh, and chatted to her and her auntie and consumed vast amounts of sugar. She also took us clothes shopping with her, and we found this shop where everything is £3.50, where I got two dresses and Becka got a lovely shirt.

Tonight we’ve been put on the guest list for a night of live Latin music in a local club, because Amir knows the band, and after that Becka, Everitte and I are off on our next adventure. At some point we also want to go the Krak des Chevaliers, which we still haven’t managed to do as Emlyn got ill, but we will wait for him to get back and make it a weekend trip I think, as he really wants to see it. Ali also suggested we might take a weekend and go to Kurdistan, as it is supposed to be absolutely beautiful, and although it will mean going to Iraq it’s apparently quite easy to get visas, and Kurdistan is supposed to be very safe, and would be a fascinating place to visit. We also have 5 days off at the end of November when Becka and I are planning to go to Lebanon, as apparently it’s beautiful in winter and Christmas is supposed to be the best time to visit.

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