It’s been a year!

So….it is the 13th of December. Two days ago was the one-year anniversary of my arrival in Syria. About a week ago, it rained in Syria for the first time this year. Yesterday, it started snowing. And didn’t stop. I was told by a 26-year old Syria colleague that she had never seen this much snow in her entire life in Syria.

Currently I am sitting in the American Language Centre in Damascus, where I teach English part-time, typing away frantically on my laptop. The main reason I am here is that there has been no electricity in my house since last night, so I am using the ALC’s miraculously resilient electricity supply to ‘fill up’ my laptop and phone, before they close for the day at noon. Also, the ALC has some strange set-up with its internet connection which means that you are able to access sites that are otherwise inaccessible in Damascus, such as facebook and - my blog! So I thought I’d spend the 14 minutes remaining until the ALC shuts down to post a quick entry.

After all, it’s been a good five months. In both senses. The tentative equilibrium hinted at in my last entry has developed into a relaxed existence in Damascus that mostly evades my hyperactive attempts to question what exactly I am still doing here. Perhaps this relaxedness is also what has made writing blog entries seem less appealing. Once I’m relaxed, as I normally am in London, I seem to lose interest in maintaining regular communication with people. Nice, right?

On the face of it, the overriding rationale for me being here remains pretty clear. I came to Damascus to study Arabic; I’ve still got a long way to go. I finish my internship with the UNHCR in a couple of weeks and am pretty excited about returning to intense Arabic study.

I decided a few months ago to extend my time in Syria and, in the process of doing so, mercilessly razed a very coherent, clear plan for the next few years of my life that had taken a lot of effort to put in place. There were some very sensible reasons for this; my Arabic was nowhere near as good as I wanted it to be; I wasn’t so sure about the kind of work that the plan obliged to be getting into when I returned to London. However, the momentum for my decision came from somewhere else, really. Living in Damascus, studying Arabic, reading for pleasure, sniffing around in a very different society…. These things together felt exciting enough to warrant a little more of my time and attention.

As a self-confessed man of extremes, I have, I feel, in the past five years or so of my life, become exceedingly, indefatigably sensible. It felt nice to do something just because it felt like the right thing to do (the sensible reasons were of course there as a supporting act - I don’t want to become reckless). I don’t know when this little adventure will peter out, or if it will lead somewhere else, but I feel assured that a life of sensible slogging will not become magically inaccessible at some point.

So in other news I moved house AGAIN about two months ago, although the good news is that I seem to have found an area that is perfect. The part of town I live in is called Muhajereen. It’s leafy (not easy around here), quiet and there are hardly any people around. So far so good. People are conservative, although they (mostly) keep themselves to themselves. It’s also right in the middle of town, close to everything, but on the massive mountain at the north of Damascus (Qasiun), so I have a super view out of my bedroom. Photos will follow shortly.

One of the most funniest things about my time in Syria is the difference between my life as it looks from the outside (calm, relaxed, snacking, reading, moving around nice parts of Damascus) and my internal life (in roughly chronological order: unrelaxed; homesick; study-obsessed; hating Damascus so much I wanted to move somewhere else in the Middle East; and then a slow, gradual falling-in-love with Damascus alongside a re-evaluation of what kind of life I wanted in the immediate future). This is the inverse of what my life has been like recently pre-Syria, with lots of internal stability and equilibrium and lots of changing and new experiences going on outside. I don’t know what the significance is. On the plus side, I sometimes feel like I am a character in a novel. Can’t ask for more than that I suppose.

I am now being accosted by a very gregarious and loud student of mine (last time I saw him, he had taken off his shoes and was throwing milk everywhere) so I should move on. More soon!