Sick in Syria

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Aleppo, Syria. This is my 6th day in Syria.

Spent the first couple days in the desert town of Deir Ez-Zur, in the eastern side of the country, with the Euphrates river running through the middle of town. I was pleasantly surprised at how friendly people are and how cheap everything is (comparing prices with Turkey, that is). People seeing me walking down the street would make me stop and drink tea with them, communicating with sign language and the few words of english they may know. Actually, the people on the street here seem to speak more english than their Turkish counterparts. The hotel I was staying in cost a whopping $4 for a single room (compare to the $10 I was paying in Turkey), had a really friendly manager, but no heating, which really really sucked. On the way to see some ruins to the southeast, 80km from the Iraqi border a bedouin shepherd saw us from a distance, and came up to offer us tea which he cooked with a fire of thorns while we futilely tried to communicate about something more than "what is your name" and "where are you from"... The desert is completely flat and featureless, with nothing but occasional thorn shrubs to break the monotony of flat stony ground. The absolute silence felt when not walking is amazing. The bedouin still seem to use their black rectangular tents, but have replaced camels with motorcycles and don't seem to venture far into the desert anymore. It's quite startling to see the deep blue of the Euphrates as it runs through the featureless brown of everything else in the countryside: the houses, the ground, the rocks, even the trees all look the same hue of brown, and then the Euphrates cuts through it like a knife of blue... very bizarre.

I fell fairly ill in Deir Ez-Zur (basically a cold), and stayed in bed a full day hoping to sleep it off before it got worse... not likely when you can see your breath fog up in the room in the middle of the day. When it became clear that wasn't going to work (and feeling a bit better after the hotel manager gave me soup and tea... a much welcome change from falafels and kebabs), I decided to head out to Aleppo. The trip there was full of excitement: the "microbus" I was in was packed with young people (presumably all university students), and the guys I was sitting next to were fairly excitable and at one point one of them started "trying to teach me arabic" by leaning over and yelling in my ear the arabic names of things he saw by the road... as if that wasn't punishment enough he expected me to repeat everything he was saying. It started to get a bit much when my ear started hurting (remember, I was still fairly sick), and I tried to explain that I didn't want to play anymore... everyone on the bus understood what I was getting at... except the one guy who kept insisting on yelling in my ear. They finally moved him in front of (and facing) me so he wouldn't be sitting next to me anymore. He then placed both hands firmly on either of my knees and remained in that position for a good 10-15 minutes as he looked outside the window... I kept wondering what I'd do if his hands slowly started massaging me... Luckily it didn't come to that. The trip ended with him screaming "Rakaa! Rakaa!" (naturally 5cm from my ear) to announce that we'd arrived. On the trip from there to Aleppo I sat next to an english teacher who spoke very decent english and delivered extensively on how Turkey has the appearance of democracy but not the essence. I didn't argue.

Aleppo is great. I think it's a bit colder than Deir Ez-Zur but the hotel has some resemblance of heating, which goes a long way. Yesterday was Friday, the day of rest, so the city was essentially shut down, and I walked through the deserted Souq and the old city, both of which were definitely interesting. As I sat by the castle eating my Zaatar a boy (16 or so) came up to me and announced that he's the "Al-Mahdi" (something like "the promised one" or the messiah to those uninitiated in islamic literature). He was dead serious. Said he was the governor of Aleppo, and in fact the governor of all of Syria because God helps him. His name in english is "Jesus, Son of Man", and his parting words were "someday you'll see me I'm going to be king in Jerusalem". I was so shocked I couldn't say anything but "Inshallah"... he slowly walked away with a stoop, almost a hunch, leaving me scratching my head for a while.

Another highlight of the day was when I walked in front of a store selling what looked like camel meat: there were two camel heads (fur and all) hanging on a hook. I stopped to ask if it was really camel meat whereupon the shopkeeper proceeded to chase me with one of the camel heads, trying to touch my face with it... I have no idea what I did to elicit that response or whether there's some cultural significance that I'm missing, but it was bizarre.

The day ended with me puking everything I had eaten and having severe diahhroea, essentially adding insult to injury seeing I was already sick to begin with. Punishment for not taking the Mehdi seriously? Feeling much better today (thanks for asking), this internet cafe is the best I've been to in a while (with LCD screens and all), and I enjoyed an extremely delicious glass of freshly squeezed juice (costing around $0.50).

My apologies for the lack of pictures... forgot my card reader.

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Comments

[anonymous]

mehdi
hoca, nedir bu insanlardaki `I am the "one"` kompleksi ben anlamadim ki? Bu kacinci mehdi yahu. Herkes ulvi bir amac icin yasadigini, farkli ve ozel oldugunu zannediyor, halbuki degil, kardesim sende herkes gibi yiyip icip sican, sevip sevilen ve sevisen, olunce gotune pamuk tikilan veya tikilmayan, oole bir adamsin iste bunu kabul et artik. Yok `I am the king`,yok ` you will see one day` etc. ooffff... Neyse guzelim sen kendine iyi bak gerisine kafam girsin - battal gazi