My Friend J

I met J in a bar on my second night in Damascus. This bar, like basically all the other bars in Damascus, is in the Christian Quarter of the “Old City.” The Old City is a sort-of oval shaped section walled in and packed full with shops and old houses navigated between primarily by ancient stone alley ways that look like they have really not changed since the 13th century or so. I fell in love with the alleys the first time I was in Damascus with Dylan, and it was also during this first time in Damascus that Dylan and I discovered the bar that I would find J in upon my return to Damascus.

J is a character. He is Syrian, but he is also American thanks to studying and working in the U.S. for around ten years. Furthermore, he is rich. He is this big gregarious man who loves to drink and smoke sheesha (which they call Nargile here) and has called me on a few occasions to “go party” or "come to Beirut for the weekend." This is pretty much what he does.

One of the first such nights that he invited me out happened the day after I met him. Me and my first American friend in Damascus, Sarah, and a Dutch girl I met in my hotel had gone to dinner with him at his favorite restaurant only to have the whole affair build into an all-night affair. After dinner, J had declared that we were going to a bar where foreigners are supposedly only allowed in with the company of Syrians. The reason for this supposed exclusivity (since proven false) was that the children of rather high-level Syrian government officials apparently go to that particular often bar and they don't want foreigners going off and talking about it. This night involved champagne bottles with sparklers attached to them sent to our table, literal fires on the dance floor, and seeing Syrians grinding like I had only ever seen Arabs dance in Beirut do. I have a few great pictures of the night, but this lovely country partially blocks Blogger, so I can neither look at my blog or post pictures.

J also likes to go to the same small hole-in-the-wall restaurant many times a week at which I have had some of the best food in my life. He goes so often that the owner and chefs will actually lend J cash when he forgets it, because they know he will be back tomorrow or the day after that. What's more they will literally make him whatever he wants, even if it means going to the restaurant next door, walking down to a juice shop for a jug of his favorite concoction, or picking up a bottle of his favorite liquor from the liquor store around the corner.

Frankly, I don't know how I feel about the guy. He tells me stories about partying in Mexico, Qatar, Beirut, and then he goes home to his decidedly conservative Muslim wife and two daughters who he is only allowed to see on weekdays during a 2-hour window between homework and bedtime allowed them by their mother. If you ask J abou this religion, he will tell you he is "lost." His daughter are being raised to be able to choose their religion on their own. And these are just a few of the rather interesting facts about J. There's more I could write, but I've mostly written all that in order to give context for his younger brother's wedding which I got to go to a few weeks ago with Sarah.

The night started out with J's friend Bashar picking up me up near my house. Why was Bashar, a 50-something year-old owner of fruit shops who speaks literally not a word of English, in charge of picking me up, you ask? I don't really know. Maybe simply because he knew where I lived, having dropped me off there the night before from the pseduo-bachelor party/private hammam party. Maybe because he didn't seem to know that many other people at the wedding. I don't really know. But we did have a nice, if tortured, Arabic conversation in the car.

(I know I just left that Arabic term unclarified, but I'll explain what hammams are in another post)

Upon arriving at J's house, I walked in to find the groom, J's brother, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I had met J's brother a few times before, and I just thought to myself, "Haha, oh J's brother, you crazy guy, still wearing your regular clothes at your own pre-wedding celebration...." Then a troop of dudes wearing full-blown kitschy Middle Eastern outfits with scarves around their waists and red fezes atop their heads paraded in sing-chanting and playing instruments, including a trumpet, drums, and a bagpipe (According to the Oxford History of Music, apparently the first mention of a bagpipe in history was in some place called Eyuk near Turkey.) As they started singing, all the men in the room (there were no women) began clapping and singing along--that is all the ones who weren't recording it all on their phones. Seconds later, the groom was standing not two feet away from me on a chair taking off his clothes to much cheering and hollering. It was only then that I remembered vaguely hearing about something to do with some dressing-of-the-groom ceremony involved with Middle Eastern weddings.

Basically, the ceremony consisted of watching the groom strip down to his underwear and then put on his tux with a little help from some of his friends. I feel like this ceremony probably involved more bathing and cleaning and stuff originally, but it has now probably been adapted for more modern weddings. There was sort of a funny moment when it turned out he was wearing like 6 layers of pants/underwear, each of which he pretended to take off as if it were the last ones. Then some of the dudes carried him around while he stood on the chair--but not too high, since his head was basically at the ceiling already--and some of the others did the default Arab dancing in a circle while putting eachother's arms on eachother's shoulders.

We then filed out of the apartment and outside for the first of many opportunities for photographing of the groom doing stuff while the band executed various actions with other stuff (fire and swords and aerosol cans, to name a few), as we watched on. The energy was already sort of waning as we filed out of the apartment, but I tried to stay engaged even though no one seemed particularly interested in talking with me (which is fair, because this was a group of friends who hadn't seen eachother in a very long time). We then all hopped in various cars and drove, caravan-style behind the flower-adorned, white BMW carrying the groom to some distant, random suburb of Damascus in order to wait around for an hour and a half for the bride to arrive for...more picture-taking with swords and fire. It was during this time, and the half an hour stuck in traffic that I discovered the appeal of the one game on my crappy Syrian phone involving some as-yet-not-totally-understood system of moving little jewel things around. By this point my energy was seriously lagging, and Sarah. who had not yet joined the girls' party had received a number of bored text messages from me.

Finally, after the two hours of waiting for about fifteen minutes of photo-taking, we hopped back in cars to head to the hotel whose conference room was being used for the reception. This hotel is a 5-star establishment: shiny, polished gold and marble everywhere and definitely made for the rich and fancy, but the real class had clearly been supplied by the groom's family as far as I could tell. After processing slowly inside the hotel and down a spiral staircase--all along as the band continued executing their various fiery-swordy activities--everyone but the bride and groom entered the ball room to have a seat and watch the couple's grand entrance.

As I walked into the room I saw about 300 Arabs of almost every style of dress seated around 50 or so tables. Actually, I should say, I saw 150 or so Arab men all wearing suits, and about 150 Arab women wearing all manner of clothing. There were rail thin twenty and thirty-somethings wearing tight strapless dresses that stopped 6-inches above their knees, and then their were some nigh-full blown muhajibat, though none had their whole faces covered. Interestingly, no one seemed to care what anyone else was wearing--or at least not visibly so.

I also noticed their were two big screens on each wall with footage of what I realized was live footage of the bride and groom. It turned out that the camera that had been assiduously recording everything while walking backwards in front of the couple of honor everywhere we went had been broadcasting everything to the conference room! Now of course, the shots were alternating between that camera and one on a crane doing aerial shots of the dance floor in the middle of the room.

As I sat down at my table with Bashar and his wife, dramatic music sounding like something from the climax of Ben Hur erupted suddenly over the speaker system and smoke filled the dance floor. It was time for the couple to make their entrance. They entered and walked slowly, ever so slowly, across the floor, letting the cameras take it all in as they waved and smiled at their guests like a Presidential candidate and his wife at a fundraiser. They then took a seat on a raised white couch framed by vines and flowers wrapped around a trellis (is that the word I want? like a fence thing?). Finally, they sat down and the music's volume decreased, signifying it was time for us to sit down.

What followed was a more elaborate sword-dance involving shields and choreographed hits by the band and then a buffet-style meal with a lot of delicious-looking traditional Syrian dishes that tasted sort of bland. All throughout the meal, black vest-wearing waiters prowled about getting drink orders from the many guests. Surprisingly, coke, 7up, coffee, tea, and an undefined juice were the only options. The bride and groom then took one of the swords from the band and cut every level of their 10-level cake together. This was succeeded by perhaps that most stereotypical of Middle Eastern dances, the one where the guests hold the celebrees up on chairs and dance around with them to the delight of the crowd, and then a full on dance party mostly to Arab pop music, but also to a few western hits, like Pitbull's “I know you want me.” Sarah and I danced for a bit with the rest of the younger guests (as well a few of the skeezier-seeming uncles it would seem) and then decided to head out when the music started to turn to much older-style Arab songs that required some actual knowledge of Arab dance styles.

All in all it was certainly a remarkable and extravagant wedding by any standards, but given J's shenanigans in the past, I think I had set some impossibly high expectations for the level of opulence I would see at this affair. I realized also, this is actually the first wedding I had ever gone to as a guest.

Since the wedding, J has unfortunately taken to calling me quite a bit more frequently than I would like, every time asking me if I want to "go party." I like going and drinking at bars just fine, but I just do not have the urge to go out as much as this guy who is over twice my age. He has invited me to go partying in Beirut, in fact, something I neither have the time, nor the money to indulge in. So, although I really do like him, as so often happens with foreigners and their Arab friends, I am getting sick of his invasive calling that can get a little claustrophobic. Still, I don't want him to think I just wanted to go to his wedding, so perhaps next time I'll let him talk me into going out. Maybe.

The Everyday in the Revolution

A poster seen in Midan Tahrir yesterday. The red Arabic script on the upper right says "The most expensive newspaper in Egypt. The Price: Freedom." The red script below that atop the fake newspaper says, "Egypt, where are you going?"

Increasingly, as my time here in the Middle East stops just being "my trip to the Middle East" and starts becoming "what I'm doing with my life," I've felt more unsure about what to write here. I forget that the things I do here are strange and fantastic and worth writing down. I've even started to feel like it's not that abnormal for revolutions to break out all around me. Because even as they do, I'm just as caught up in what my job is going to be after this fellowship period ends and where I'm going to be for that.

Every day, I become more and more intent on finding some way to stay in the region longer--probably in Cairo. I'm visiting there now, but I find myself wondering what I'm supposed to post here these days, as this journey ceases to be something fantastic and strange and instead becomes everyday.



I came back to Cairo and felt instantly energized. Something about the size and the frantic electricity of the city, amplified post-revolution immediately found its way into my blood. Yesterday, Friday, we walked to Tahrir through a few mini protests, past the barbed wire remnants around the Media Ministry, and past the inevitable opportunistic Egyptian salesmen with 25th of January and I-heart-egypt paraphernilia everywhere we looked. Flags billowed everywhere we looked as Egyptians red, white, and black face paint sung and danced in the streets to Egyptian music blaring from a battery of loudspeakers. There obviously weren't anywhere close to as many Egyptians there as during the revolution's hey day, but there were probably at around a thousand or so there spread out in the circle still. One shy looking Egyptian man carrying an "oud," a traditional Middle Eastern musical instrument, saw me carrying me my camera and asked me to record this video and post it on the internet. I think the song is their National Anthem.

So in short, the spirit of the revolution is alive and well (though the implications of the recent referendum may not bode well) here in Egypt, and judging from the continuing cross-cultural, cross-sectarian solidarity rallies going on as well, it is certainly still something that many different Egyptians are paying attention to.


Indeed, when I stopped by AUC's campus to see my old fusha teacher (and take advantage of their awesome gym and outdoor track), she told me how seemingly every Egyptian has become addicted to politics, following the news obsessively and discussing it all constantly. About the extremely high participation in the recent constitutional referendum--36 million compared to the 6 million election turn out of the elections just last November--she simply said in Arabic incredulously "What's that? What IS that?"


And so, I've all but concluded that I have to find a way to stay here. Leaving this all for America feels like it would mean I'm sort of giving up on ever actually learning Arabic, a fate I'm not yet ready to accept. This means I've got to a find a job out here is all. I'll be accepting suggestions or job offer any time.

Stop Gap Picture Plug

I've been seriously slacking with Oh palm of late, but I did finally get around to putting my pictures up of my travels with Dylan through the UAE, Damascus, and Lebanon, here and here.

I'm almost done with a post about my Syrian friend, J, and his brother's wedding, and Also, I'm hoping I'm going to figure out how to put pictures up on my blog here in Syria and update my twitter soon.