The Whale

"Now having a night, a day, and still another night following before me in New Bedford, ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver, - So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north with the darkness towards the south - wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price, and don't be too particular."


At various points along my ten hour bus journey from Philadelphia to New Bedford, Massachusetts last Friday, I was nagged by a persistent feeling that I’d heard the name of my destination somewhere before.

It was a long journey with several stops on the way. My last stop before New Bedford was Providence, Rhode Island. As I had an hour before my bus left, I decided to take an impromptu tour around the enchantingly named capital of Rhode Island, which is the smallest US state. From the perspective of an aimless, completely uninformed wanderer with an hour to spare (on Friday early evening), the centre of Providence was a slightly bizarre place. Despite an appropriately metropolitan backdrop of appropriately grandiose public buildings, clean streets, pretty shops, take-away chains, churches etc, the streets were disconcertingly devoid of people. The few representatives of Providence that were out and about were hard to square with both each other and their environment. Right by the station muscled, topless (male) teenagers were artfully combining casual aimless hanging out with multiple somersaults; by a nearby fountain, toddlers ran around parents who, spliff in hand, would pick them up and thrown them in the air playfully. Young, vaguely bookish types, presumably students at Brown, the Ivy League university based in Providence, would occasionally scuttle in and out of view. Brown is Providence’s second largest employer. The fact that school hadn’t started yet was probably important context.

On the way back I came through Providence again, but this time I got to spend an afternoon with some cool Providence residents. They were the kind of charming people who seemed to effortlessly weave a life of interesting ideas and meaningful productive activity into a sluggish, messy pace of existence. One was a musician-cum-hotel worker; another two worked with unions in the area and all seemed enviably attuned to their environment. Among the highlights of my afternoon was a ‘Monte Cristo sandwich’, apparently of (at least) regional renown. The sandwich was composed of ham, swiss cheese and a fried egg - inside French toast no less - and with a smattering of maple syrup. My inherently conservative, risk-averse British brain was initially resistant to such a brazen example of American sandwich-making maximalism (“we will take the egg and the cheese and the maple syrup”) but, with some slight prodding from my hosts I took the plunge and was thoroughly impressed. I was also treated to a quick trip to a beach enclosed in a beautiful stretch of nature that is owned by one of Providence’s art colleges (such grandly utopian set-ups are typical of the US’ private higher educational institutions, many of which seem to be drowning in money).

In between my times in Providence, I was visiting a friend from Syria who was staying in Fairhaven, Boston, next door to New Bedford which, I was quickly reminded, is the first place Moby Dick’s protagonist heads to in search of whaling action. Ishmael, as he asks to be called, is the man quoted above displaying the kind of honourable abstemiousness you’d expect of a good sailor. New Bedford, where I ended my bum-numbing bus journey, greeted me with more hospitality than it did old Ishmael as I had a car waiting for me ready to transport me to warmth, food and beer by the sea in Fairhaven.

In the end, Ishmael sailed not from New Bedford but from nearby Nantucket, which historically had been New Bedford’s main competitor for whaling. In Moby Dick, Ishmael chooses Nantucket in spite of New Bedford’s evident leading market position in the whaling business, because Nantucket, in his view, was “her great original”.

New Bedford’s glory days are of course well and truly in the past. With the disappearance of whaling and the rapid shrinking of New Bedford’s manufacturing industries, the city has been in a historical decline for decades. Melville’s novel, comfortably perched atop the modern American literary canon, offers a poignant immortalisation of the Whaling City's past glories, all the more so in view of the current state of affairs in New Bedford. A satisfyingly measurable index of social deprivation offered itself in the observation that, in the one hour my hosts had spent waiting for me at New Bedford bus station, they overheard an entire drug deal from start to finish.

There was, in my time in both Fairhaven and Providence, an unmistakable common theme of once-great American towns and cities traumatised by the gutting of a historic trade or manufacturing base. Providence’s textile mills, once the mainstay of its thriving textile industry, face a typically post-industrial, compromised existence as either conversions to modern apartments or homes to small, local businesses, some of which recall Providence’s heyday as second-hand clothes stores or costume shops. Sometimes the future would seem a lot more straightforward if the past wasn’t still around, casting its pesky long shadow.

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!

a few months on...

It has been a while…

For those in any doubt about the cyclical nature of things, I am writing this entry from Damascus’ Old City, the place I vowed never to return to three months ago. I had spent two months with a Syrian family in the Old City, an initially charming but eventually exasperating experience. Damn novelty - it always gets in the way of actually seeing what’s what. Two months of sleeping with my head by one of Damascus’ busiest streets, being woken every morning by screaming kids/adults and constantly feeling like I was in the way culminated in an intense distaste for the Old City and its horrendously tourist-congested streets. Away!

So for the past three months I had been living in a part of Damascus called ‘Mezze Jebel’ (Mezze mountain) in a nice apartment (with a balcony). Mezze Jebel was very much another side of Damascus. Whereas the Old City was all winding paths, old Arabic houses and the occasional epic Roman arch, Mezze Jebel is a sprawling neighbourhood on a mountain populated by ugly, not-quite-finished-looking apartment blocks. If it appears haphazard, that’s because most of the buildings were built without planning permission and, as such, were built bloody quickly. My neighbour, a divorced man who woke up 11 every day and seemed to be in pyjamas most of the day, was fond of pointing out how his wonderful view was spoilt by the hulk of an apartment block that had been hastily erected in front of our building.

I liked Mezze Jebel. There was absolutely nothing going on - brilliant. Primarily a residential area for lower middle-class Damascenes, it was fantastically unexceptional and, more to the point perhaps, I felt as anonymous as a paving stone. Also I was a short stroll away from ‘Falafel Ala Kaifek’, arguably Damascus’ most famous falafel shop (it’s been around for 40 years according to informed falafel-eaters), where a sandwich that could feed a small family is yours for the equivalent of roughly 50p. Many of my phone conversations with Syrian friends would end with “….do you think you could pick up a sandwich from Falafel Ala Kaifek on the way? Ok…[discussion in background]… actually can you get five?”.

So now I’ve moved back to the Old City; I had to move at short notice after my capricious landlord decided that the sinful arrangement of a man and woman who aren’t married living together was outside his comfort zone. It’s quite a familiar story - in the conservative parts of Damascus (i.e. most of it), neighbours and, more pertinently, landlords assume that their values, which appear incomprehensible to the majority of Westerners, are universal, in casually expecting them to be adhered to end up imposing them on their tenants. It’s strange to come face-to-face with that genre of wilfully idiotic ideas that springs from conservative social values and find yourself unable to laugh them off. Because you’re homeless.

Anyhooo, I am, as I say, back in the Old City and actually I’m rather loving it. I live in a very nice, clean house which manages, I’m not quite sure how, to be smack bang in the middle of the Old City and yet be wonderfully quiet. For example, I left the World Cup final halfway through because, well, I was tired (this was the highly unimpressive culmination of my attempt to generate enthusiasm/interest for the World Cup which, by the way, Syrians were CRAZY about) but, even though I fell asleep outside, I didn’t even know that the game had ended because I didn’t hear a peep - the horn-honking, screaming and general commotion couldn’t scale whatever it was that stood between my lovely new house and the masses. I’m very excited about all this because I am an extremely light sleeper and Syrians are, in general, pretty noisy. Actually I don’t know if I can even justify that national classification - I may just be talking about human beings (who I generally tend to find noisy).

I live with all Arabic speakers which is wondrous, perfect for my Arabic. There are lots of plants everywhere. Overall, it’s great. I feel like I am experiencing the Old City in the manner that I would have expected myself to be experiencing it first time round but for some reason I never seemed to get round to. This means going for pleasant aimless wanders through the web of tiny paths that offer the only way around the majority of the Old City, discovering what lies behind big, wooden doors that reveal nothing from the outside and focusing my mind on my continuing research into Damascene snacks. I seem to have, one way or another, replicated that delicate mix of anonymity and sociableness that I find so irresistible and feel both engaged in an exciting little adventure and able to socialise with interesting people when I fancy it.

As may be evident from the above, life in Damascus is (mercifully) approaching something of an equilibrium after a six month period where it was difficult to pick out a coherent theme or even an idea of what was being aimed for. I’ve embarked on an internship with the UN office here and am writing for a newspaper on the side, which, together with my Arabic lessons, is keeping me nicely busy. My Arabic improved like crazy for about two months but, perhaps because of the excessive ego-stroking that ensued, the pace of development seems to have slackened somewhat. Maybe I have reached the ‘intermediate plateau’ (I think that’s a proper name) but I have certainly noticed that improving has suddenly become harder work - the learning curve has flattened out and I have found myself able to construct sentences but with a vocabulary gap the size of the Pacific Ocean separating me from native speakers. The search is on for some kind of a solution. I suspect that patience may have something to do with it.

In any case, I now live in Damascus. In many ways, I feel like my time here has only just started.

Personal pronouns and far away places

Greetings, me hearties. 

For about a month now, I have been living with a Syrian family in Old Damascus. The main reason for this move was a desire to live in an environment where I could effortlessly practise my Arabic. My family don’t speak English so that has been a success; the family span three generations, but I only really talk to the oldies, as they are very friendly and warm. It’s nice, I get to eat the family’s AMAZING food and am regularly in the vicinity of hyperactive children and doting old women.

I’ve also just finished up my second level at the university, which was at a rather brisker pace than Level 1. Arabic. It’s quite a language. The level of complexity in the grammatical structure borders on the ridiculous. Really. For example, personal pronouns. For our “you” there are no less than five second-person personal pronouns, each of which require a different verb conjugation (in the past, present and imperative form…). In the third person (He, She, They), there are six of them, with a differentiation between a dual female and dual male form that I, for one, can’t imagine anyone using. Ever. In any event there seems to be no room  for the kind of Neanderthal indifference to grammar that is cultivated by the British public education system. Words literally change depending on where they are and what they are doing in the sentence. Although it’s quite enjoyable studying the stuff in many ways  – grammar is very logical and there is a wonderfully satisfying sense of  making out the broader picture of the language.

Also another very important point about Arabic is that, in order to be able to read, write and speak Arabic, I actually have to learn two languages. This is because written (and sometimes very formal spoken) communication takes place in the standard Arabic (foos-ha in Arabic) while oral communication is in the local dialect (or ami’a). And when I say dialect, I don’t mean a charmingly different pronunciation of vowel sounds but, you know, different vocabulary, a different way of conjugating verbs, dropped sounds… Part of the challenge is how to approach this. 

My life continues to be full of change. I am not returning to the university (far too expensive, full of English-speaking people who remind me of the people I wasn’t friends with at university…) and it’s highly likely that, despite the charms of my family home, I will be moving yet again in the near future (my flat is insanely loud and very expensive; I am making enough Syrian friends that the benefit of speaking Arabic at home is less important; also the Old City is nauseatingly chock-a-block with tourists and foreign students). Although I now feel quite settled in Damascus, it’s tricky getting myself to something approaching an equilibrium because I don’t know what exactly I want; it’s more a case of sniffing out what you want more of, what you want less of. Part of the problem was that I hadn’t envisaged exactly what kind of life I was to be leading out here. Not necessarily a huge problem apart from the fact that human nature/the allure of convenience mean that you’re likely to end up following the herd. Which in many ways is exactly what I have done so far, studying at the very popular UoD and living in the Old City, where all the foreign students live. Yuck. Anyway, more change soon come. Don’t know what exactly, but the next few months should be rather different from the previous few… Other than that I’ll still be in Damascus… probably….

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When I was in London at the end of last year, someone asked me if I was having fun; because, they said, adventures always sound fun when you describe them, but that’s not to say that they’re necessarily as fun as they sound when you’re doing them. It’s a great point which touches on so many things; part of it is about the difficulties that arise when you’re trying to create a life that fulfils a certain goal (in my case, learning Arabic and about Syria) without a clearly defined programme of action. There are also the romantic ideas (in the philosophical rather than amorous sense) associated with 'travelling'. I think that even me, with my stereotypically-Generation-X-esque cynicism about things that, you know, other people have done before, couldn’t help but be infected by the temptations of the idea that something magical happens when you cross borders.

Part of the draw of this idea is that, particularly when you are going from your normal, established life to do something completely different, is that, by cutting yourself off from so much that defines you – your friends, family, work, routine, whatever it might be – you are, in a sense, subjecting yourself to a “Who am I exactly?” test. Surely something dramatic could happen then? I suppose it’s possible you could find out that you’re actually a raving sociopath or that you no longer love your wife and kids (etc). I don’t know. When I first came here, I felt a bit nervous. Now I don’t. I’m starting to recognise the re-emergence of characteristically “Admas” patterns of behaviour. Lots of pyjama time. The absence of guilt when turning down social invitations. Taking pleasure in impromptu conversations with strangers. I even got told off for being a copy of the Economist to a nightclub. I’m rather happy about it all.

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At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

Making friends in Syria: dead easy

People in Syria are bloody friendly. This cannot be overstated. Strangers talk to you all the time. Where are you from? What are you doing in Syria? You welcome. You ask for directions and people escort you to your location, buying you a pastry or a cup of tea on the way. People come up to me all the time and ask me if I want to be their friend. It’s not personal. They just like making friends. Part of it is that young Syrians in particular are really curious about the Western world and Western perceptions of Syria/the Middle East, so they hypnotically gravitate towards foreigners.

One man I met on a bus talked to me incessantly about God and various quite technical religious issues (the different kinds of hell and what have you); it was really a one-way affair, but I liked the innocent way his face lit up when he talked about it so I let him go on for longer than I would normally. At the end of it, he hugged me tightly and then kissed me about five times. Then he kissed my head and told me he loved me. Perhaps sensing my confusion, he said:
- Do you know why? Because you are a human being. And I want you to go to heaven.

It would be easy to laugh but I thought this was quite sweet. Beneath the dogma, there were warm, universal human thoughts and feelings. It can be easy to forget this about religion and religious people. Perhaps the sunshine had softened up my brain but I enjoyed this little exchange. After the hug (I don’t think I told him I loved him back) we stood there for a while longer, in silence and then he added:
- You know, it really upsets me when people go to the fire. It hurts me so much. Why do they do it?

I thought about it. I told him that it was good of him to care but he could only do so much; he couldn’t help everyone. This really pleased him and he gave me another big hug. I felt like I’d turned a sermon into a tiny conversation.

Snow

So I went snowboarding on Saturday. After a six-year hiatus, Admas was back on the slopes. I fell over so much (and so violently) I think fellow snow-cruisers began to suspect I was some kind of ski-slope-masochist. I cut something of a clownish figure as I queued for the ski-lifts amidst all the impeccably chic Lebanese skiers with their stylish all-in-ones and Gucci sunglasses. My ski-clothes were rented and didn’t match. I was covered head-to-toe in snow from all my falls. I looked like some kind of badly-dressed snow-monster.

In the end I only managed an afternoon on the slopes. My sampling of Lebanon’s ski scene coincided with the best snow so far this year AND a weekend, so me and my host had the pleasure of being joined by half of Beirut’s ski-ready population (i.e. half of Beirut) on the roads. So what should have been a 60-minute drive took three hours. Also, (the usual disclaimer preceding racist comments applies) Lebanese people are bloody awful drivers, so every traffic-related difficulty was invariably exacerbated by about ten cars trying to go up the one-way road the wrong way at once and blocking the route both ways. Ahhhh.

After passing my Level 1 exams with flying colours, I have just embarked on Level 2 Arabic (each level lasts four weeks and we get a little break in between) and it's great. It really feels quite different from Level 1, which was rather cuddly in comparison. This time, we have two teachers; one focuses on new grammar and vocabulary while the second does speaking and listening. With both teachers there is a noticeably steeper learning curve; far less time is spent going over new material than in Level 1, but both teachers are excellent so (speaking for myself) it feels pretty comfortable. Needless to say, I still feel a million miles away from expressing myself properly in Arabic but, I am told, some things take “time”. A lot of it. In fact this may well prove to be one of the most useful things learning a language is going to teach me: patience. The notion of taking, say, an entire year to do one thing has always generated a fair bit of scepticism in yours truly. 'Surely there's some inefficiency somewhere?' is usually my first thought. No better antidote for such crass impatience than learning something that has to take a long time. One year is the bare minimum for learning a decent chunk of Arabic, I am repeatedly told. If this patience thing goes well I might learn to play an instrument too.

So what else has been going on? I am soon to move in with a Syrian family in Old Damascus. Plus points: lots and lots of Arabic practice every day. Minus points: living in tourist-central and away from the snack-heaven that is Souk Sarouja (my current area).

Some readers of this blog have scornfully inquired as to why there aren't more photos. I have put aside the visceral distaste for photography that can only come with having studied it full-time for long enough to snap a few pics of Beiteddin, a beautiful village in the Shouf hills southeast of Beirut. Some people call this place home...

 

  

  

  

 

Breakfast.

I thought I'd give people a little insight into the gritty, austere life that I'm leading out here in the Syrian capital. I invariably get my breakfast from the local baker/pastry-man. I haven't quite got the hang of leaving the house exactly in time to catch the pastries coming out of the oven, but I am working diligently at it. These two guys are a representative sample of what the bakery has to offer.

Specimen 1 is my favourite. When it's fresh from the oven, it's really unbeatable. Let's take a look inside.

The soft pastry houses a rich nut/cinnamon/sugar mix. The perfect start to a day of studying Arabic (or doing anything). Specimen 2 is less distinctive, but still has a lot going for it.

Mmmmm. What looks like a mere doughnut with fancy chocolate icing in fact has more to offer: specifically, some delicious custard-like filling. Good show.

Normally, I would have a pastry with a freshly squeezed juice or, if I'm short on time, I wait for a cup of sweet tea at the university. 

Goodbye 2009, an eventful year...

New Year's Eve in the Old City. I got a bit lost on the way home.

Speechless

I am learning a lot about the centrality of language to our day-to-day lives. As in, if you can’t speak the language that people around you are speaking, you really have problems saying things like ‘Do you have any digital Dictaphones that are Mac compatible?’ or ‘I like the look of your freshly squeezed juices but can’t be bothered to choose – could you recommend one?’. Obviously once my Arabic classes get into full swing I will be reciting menus and making erudite jokes about the news in Arabic effortlessly, but until then, I have had to develop something I’ve never really bothered with – non-verbal communication. Is that a highbrow-sounding term for waving your hands around like a moron? You bet!

My favourite piece of non-verbal communication so far has been ‘dictaphone’, which I attempted to convey to a bewildered shopkeeper by holding an imaginary object in my hand, saying ‘Salam Alekum’ [hello] into it, pressing an imaginary button and then, in my best 'dictaphone' voice (i.e. in a squeaky voice out of the side of my mouth) saying ‘Salem Alekum’ again. Just as if I'd pressed Play on the imaginary dictaphone. Bloody genius, I thought. The old shopkeeper responded by looking even more confused and animatedly pointed at something, probably the world outside his shop.

I’ve been doing a lot of pointing. That certainly gets you far. But I am getting by. I had a masterclass in non-verbal communication last week when I made my first Syrian friends – two seriously boisterous students at the University of Damascus. They got dragged into my taxi.

I was in the process of registering for my Arabic course, which for the purposes of studying at the University of Damascus, involves (amongst other missions worthy of the Crystal Maze) a trip to the AIDS clinic to confirm you are not HIV positive (clearly an important prerequisite for the study of Arabic). Having picked up my results (which I couldn’t even read – I assumed I was negative – the man who handed me the results gave me a little smile) I jumped into a taxi with a taxi driver whose English was ACTUALLY worse than my Arabic. He even looked confused when I said ‘Hello’. He also appeared to be illiterate, so I couldn’t just show him my letter with the University of Damascus header on it to show him where I wanted to be heading. After hassling some pedestrians, he seemed to get it – or so I thought. He took me to the wrong side of the campus (it’s a huge campus) and was not entertained when I refused to get out of his taxi. At this point, he started asking random people on the street if they spoke English (p.s. this is totally cool in Damascus – people are very friendly and helpful). Two young guys, full of smiley exuberance, came up to our taxi and I’m pretty sure one of them said ‘No’ to the taxi driver’s question but they both proceeded to give English their best go. The sound of words that he didn’t recognise was enough to impress the driver, who asked them to jump in the back!

This was how I met Oosam and Ibrahim, whose English was only slightly better than my Arabic. The driver seriously perked up when he had someone to talk Arabic to; the taxi ride to the other side of campus was all rowdy laughter. I occasionally sniffed out the broad subject matter of conversations and made modest contributions in Arabic, which the driver found hilarious. I correctly answered ‘No!’ to a question which went along the lines of ‘So, you’re from Eritrea, are you a drug dealer?’ which entertained all. I also answered appropriately when asked ‘How’s your health?’, ‘How is your mother?’ (nothing suggestive about this question in Arabic) and ‘How is your penis?’, which was accompanied by the driver poking playfully at my willy while I was sat in his front seat. You wouldn’t get that in a London taxi.

I spent a cool afternoon with my new Syrian friends sitting in the university canteen eating a ‘chip sandwich’ (sounds lacklustre but incredible – the Syrians take sandwiches very seriously), drinking sweet tea and smoking some sheesha. I conveyed most of my life story using mime, although I wasn’t able to do ‘lawyer’.

Happy Snacky

In Damascus, there are some things that they do really well. Delicious cheap snacks, for example. This makes me very happy. Here are some examples of the things that are less than 5 mins from my bed:

- ‘shwarma’ – a chicken doner but served with yoghurt, gherkins and chilli oil in a thin wrap. Unreal. Why on earth all chicken doners are not served like this is beyond me. Cost: 70p
- ‘falafel’ – nuff said. With humour, gherkins, salad, tahini, etc etc etc (foams at mouth). Cost: 25p
- Freshly squeezed juice – apple, orange, pomegranate and more. Cost: 70p.
- Freshly baked bread all day. Cost: 5-7p per piece of bread.
- Freshly baked delicious pastries all day: Cost: 10-20p

I could go on.

My room

I have found a room. Entirely predictably, my patience with house-hunting amounted to something infinitesimally greater than non-existent. The first place I saw was pleasingly cheap but was (despite factoring in housing-cultural-relativism) a total dive. I mean, the wiring went THROUGH the bedroom window. Mmmm, that delightful ‘sleeping outdoors’ sensation, in the middle of a sub-zero Syrian winter. The second place I saw was actually reasonable and my brain started firing instructions at me: TAKE THIS PLACE! TAKE IT AT ONCE! But it was way over my budget; it was already taken; in fact I’d had to wake up the tenant (not to mention his wife and child) in the middle of the night to see it. Sigh sigh sigh.

So, when I saw a room with lots of ‘potential’ in a charming old-school Arab house with rooms around a courtyard (like the house I was born in!), I was actually reasonably decisive about the whole thing. Once I’d taken out the ‘torture chamber chic’ light-bulb (a merciless white glare) and put in a rug and few bits of nice cloth things the room actually looked kind of alright. Anyway, step 1 is out of the way...

Dinnertime conversation

“Everyone says they’re in Syria to study Arabic. Then you find out what they’re really here for.”

While humoured by this wry observation, I felt the need to clarify my position.

“But I’m really here just to study Arabic.”

Eyebrows were raised.

Landing in Damascus

Somewhat ominously, it was pouring with rain when I arrived in Damascus. Things prior to that had started nicely, with the driver my hotel sent to pick me up still being there with a bit of cardboard holding my name, despite the fact that my flight had arrived two and a half hours late.

A couple of days later, the sun came out. It was glorious.

Anyway, I'm here now. Bring on the Arabic...

Jamaica Farewell

Last days. As a rule, they tend to be good. I become emotional and everything feels very meaningful. Also, it tends to be sunny, although this is hardly out of the ordinary in Jamaica.

So it was no surprise that my last day in Jamaica was action-packed. Perhaps my piss-poor planning had something to do with the fact that so much stuff got lumped into the final 24 hours (or thereabouts). Perish the thought…

I was leaving Friday afternoon.

Wednesday night was spent the way every single Wednesday night of my time in Jamaica was spent: at the Pegasus hotel in Kingston. I have no reason to believe that any IJCHR intern that has ever existed has spent their Wednesday night in any other way. In a set-up wholly typical of our gregarious boss, interns at the IJCHR were permitted entry to a special weekly one-hour ‘party’ where free booze and delicious snacks were dutifully handed out. It was not an arrangement to be scoffed at and normally provided an ideal kick-start to an evening which consisted of moving upstairs to another bar at the Pegasus and discussing possible plans which, after being doused in a sea of gin, rum and Red Stripe, invariably failed to take off. As this was my penultimate night, there was a traditional sending-off ceremony involving a cake (with personalised icing), Jamaica-themed presents and, most important of all, a certificate to prove that all this had actually happened.

An evening of drinks and merriment was wrapped up late into the night, although I couldn’t take the traditional English approach to things and drink until I couldn’t walk, partly because I knew I had some big stuff to do the next day. I had to deliver a lecture to a group of about 70 new police recruits about what the use of force and human rights. I’d never done anything like this before.

Also, there was my scheduled visit to the Bobo dread rasta camp. Jason, the second of the IJCHR’s permanent staff, had promised to take me several times, and failed each time. This was his last chance.

Jason was both a sounding board and gateway for prospective Jamaican adventures. His response to my casual proposal to go photographing around Tivoli gardens, one of Kingston’s most notorious slums, was typically to the point:
-- Admas dem a KILL you.

We kept coming back to the idea of going to Tivoli Gardens, at least partly, I felt, because Jason so enjoyed the dark humour of this particular piece of forecasting. I also found it very entertaining. I would suggest variations on the adventure that would tease out ever more dramatic predictions of the future or, even better, tangential insights into the Jamaican street. Couldn’t I just hide the camera?
- Admas dem spot you a foreigner.
But… how can they tell?
- Every ting. Way you walk.

Jason then went on to demonstrate how a homegrown Tivoli ‘badman’ might strut and contrasted this with an impression of my walk – which looked really geeky. Did I really walk like that? Everybody in the room laughed loudly, anyway. Much to the amusement of Jason (and anyone who happened to be around) I carried on practising the badman walk and Jason, not a man who gives out compliments easily, was moved to tell me that by the end of my time, my badman walk had gotten ‘better’.

In the interim, I had learnt a fair bit about the different ways people I can tell I’m a foreigner; my walk, certainly (even Jamaicans who had lived abroad and then returned to Jamaica can apparently be spotted immediately…) but also the way I look around (gawping wide-eyed at everything instead of looking coolly ahead as if I’d seen it all before) and of course the way I talk (Excuse me, do you have any Dennis Brown?).

My plan was soon dead in its tracks in any case because, coincidentally, just days after I had the idea (and felt like I was slowly getting Jason down off his high-horse), the US government went and spoiled it all by issuing an extradition request for the don who ran the area, the most influential gangster in Jamaica. Instead, I had to entertain myself by watching the Jamaican government perform the difficult balancing act of dragging out the extradition for as long as humanely possible while not looking like it was taking political hits for the benefit of a gang lord. It would take a book to cover the issue in the detail it deserves, but here are two facts to chew on; a) in Jamaica, gangsters have for decades guaranteed the political loyalty of garrison communities for Jamaican politicians; b) Tivoli gardens is the Prime Minister Bruce Golding’s constituency. Those with sharp ears may notice that even when being interviewed by the BBC, Jamaica’s PM doesn’t go as far as deny a link between politics and criminality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5I8IWCL_Bk

Phew, what a diversion. Where was I? Oh yes, the Bobo dread. I had to go and see them. Every time I mentioned it, Jason grinned with enthusiasm at the prospect of introducing me, Ebte Selassie, as the prophet born again come to emancipate the rasta man dem and normally spent a few minutes doing impressions of some well excited Rastamen.
-- Raaaaaaas claaat, Ebte Selasie!

Unfortunately the trip was quite short because I had to rush back to the office to sort out some stuff for my lecture – pretend gun, pretend baton, stuff to say… The Bobo dread would have been delighted to have me stay overnight or for a few days but instead me and Jason hung out in their reception and had some serious chat about their world. Basically, their whole raison d’etre, as they saw it, was to organise the repatriation of all Bobo rasta to Africa. Asap. That was it. This was the crux of their entire ideology, their other political views and their understanding of history. Everything seemed to either lead to or stem from this central idea. One of the members talked to me and Jason for a good thirty minutes non-stop; the idea seemed to consume him in that half-compulsive, half-disturbing way that political ideas can take over people.

The community had their own little world, shut behind a locked gate.

Everyone was greeted with the title ‘Prophet’ – so I became Prophet Admas. Their world was a pleasant one and their décor and clothing had clearly been infected by the rich spectrum of the Jamaican countryside. Bright reds, yellows, greens and blues unapologetically danced around. On our way up to the camp, we had seen a Rastaman strutting around comfortably dressed in a rainbow-coloured man-dress kind of thing. He walked past again while we were inside listening to the lecture and gave us a warm greeting; “Blessed love, Prophet Admas, blessed love”. It really did feel like a different world.

The head rasta man explained, in painstaking detail, the steps that had been taken by the Jamaican and foreign governments to frustrate the goal of repatriation to (an unspecified) Africa and the burning need to effect the Bobo dread’s goal with the intensity of someone who was haunted by truly sincere political beliefs. I was interested in what his beliefs reflected about him more than the beliefs themselves. Actually, I drifted off, as I often did in Jamaica, into the natural beauty of the country – our setting was incredibly tranquil with lush, verdant hills rolling off in the background, clear blue skies, butterflies innocuously flitting around outside. This all provided a somewhat comical setting for our host’s burning desire to get the hell out of Jamaica. There was a striking absence of national pride in the man’s ideology.

After a quick fire forty minutes or so in the camp, Prophet Admas had to zoom back to the office, collect a gun and baton lovingly made out of cardboard, silver foil and plastic bags by his colleagues and then off to the police recruit training centre to deliver a lecture on the use of force and what ‘oooman rights’ (this denotes a class of organisation as well as a set of principles in Jamaica) have to say about it.

In the event, the lecture went well. I achieved my main goal, which was to try and get a reading on what the new recruits actually thought about human rights. Interestingly, while professing to find it distasteful and incapable of extending its universalism to the welfare of police officers, they did actually agree with all the content I covered. I came away from the session – there had been some fantastically energetic debating – with the feeling that the new recruits were a largely untapped force for good as far as Jamaican society was concerned.

After a long day, I rounded off my last day at work by attending a drinks reception at the British High Commission. With the kind of painful irony that is only possible in environments of the highest seriousness, the reception was being held to celebrate the arrival of a senior police officer on secondment to assist the worryingly trigger-happy Jamaican Constabulary Force; this was none other than Cressida Dick, the police chief who oversaw the Jean Charles de Menezes operation.

Being brought along to such events was one of the many perks of working at the IJCHR. One of the best conversations I heard was between Yvonne Sobers (a remarkable lady who ran an organisation called Families Against State Terrorism that campaigned against police brutality in Jamaica) and the senior judge of the Court of Appeal, Jamaica’s highest court. Pleasingly, despite (or maybe because of) her unremittingly serious day job, Yvonne was a rambunctious chatterbox of a woman, constantly giggling. The judge and her were having the kind of discussion about COMPUTERS that creates inter-generational conversation gulfs that are simply unbridgeable; I was reduced to a nodding smiley face. The senior judge, free of his court outfit and the look of constant exasperation that he wore whenever exercising his duties, had been recast as a slightly bumbling, rather cute old Jamaican man. The conversation started with some basic chat about computer literacy, which naturally enabled the judge to demonstrate just how great his mastery of Microsoft OFFICE and EMAIL were, following which things got more light-hearted:
- But this is the really important question – this shows how in tune you are with computers –
- Yes?
- Are you on FACEBOOK?

Sadly the Commissioner’s wife had, it appears, gone slightly ‘cold’ on the IJCHR intern cohort. Allegations that it had something to do with individual interns’ behaviour at the last party we attended at the Commissioner’s house have yet to be substantiated (but the assumption is yes).

Anyway, that’s it. Stories of Rastitutes, my thespian side, solicitors wearing panties and barristers wearing boxers, entire afternoons spent in the sea bobbing around to Gregory Isaacs and near-addiction to straight rum will have to wait for face-to-face conversations, sometime, somewhere.

Jamaica. What a country.

Alpha Boys School

There was no way I was going to leave Jamaica without visiting the Alpha Boys School. Not some kind of training ground for future investment bankers but a care home for orphans and disadvantaged children run by the Sisters of Mercy. The Alpha Boys band has nurtured some of Jamaica’s finest musical talent, for example the insanely amazing (and actually insane) Don Drummond.

I got the opportunity to have a private concert by the cream of the crop – the older boys band. Typically for a bunch of 16 year olds, they had two personalities: one for the adults and one for themselves. When they talked to me they were excessively polite not to mention painfully shy – I don’t think a single one of them made eye contact with me throughout their performance. As soon as they had to talk to each other however, they were brash and strikingly direct in their criticisms of each others’ performances. The drummer was apparently below par – ‘im new sa’: not only did he have to undergo the humiliation of listening to the band leader apologise profusely (and largely unnecessarily, as far as my tone-deaf ears were concerned) for his performance, he was promptly replaced by a drum beat on the electronic keyboard and ordered to cease shuffling in the background, so as not to distract the others.

When all was said and done, however, the music was sublime. The song that made my heart open up was their version of ‘Jamaica Farewell’, a song that is so wonderful that (a bit like ‘I’ve Got Rhythm’) it seems to sounds brilliant no matter who performs it. That’s not to downplay the wonderful performance that the Alpha Boys Band gave. As I listened to it, I had that (by now familiar) feeling of complete and utter happiness that made me want to never leave Jamaica…

Down the way
Where the nights so gay
And the sun shine daily on a mountaintop

I took a trip on a sailing ship
But when I reach Jamaica
I made a stop

Sad to say, I’m on my way
I won’t be back for many a days

My heart is down
My head is turning around
I had to leave a lickle girl in a Kingston town

….I must declare my heart is there
Though I’ve been from Maine to Mexico...

Ficshun

So it finally happened. I knew it had to. Sooner or later. It couldn’t last forever.

I found a cool nightclub in Kingston.

It’s called ‘Fiction’ though all the uptown Jamaicans I hang out with call it ‘Ficshun’, a pronunciation I occasionally didn’t laugh out loud at. Ficshun! The hyperactive DJ was incapable of listening to one track for more than 45 seconds and was likewise hostile to the idea of mixing songs of similar genres into one another. I loved the man. What else to do but mix ‘Wake me up before you go go’ into Vybz Kartel?

Anyway, the DJ had something which is increasingly rare in his profession: he played music that actually made you want to dance. Once you’ve got that, you can’t help but like a club really. I also got a terrific opportunity to witness the miraculous spectacle that is young Jamaicans on the dancefloor; never have I seen a nation of amazing dancers. It must be part of the national curriculum, or a requirement before you get a passport, or something.

Blue Mountains 1 Admas 0

Me and Liz had decided that we were going to go the Blue Mountains; the picturesque mountain range that greets me every morning as I stroll to the bus stop. Remember those?

Being a man, I naturally wanted to go to the peak, which was the highest point in Jamaica. Some cursory research revealed the following facts:
- the view is best at sunrise
- the peak takes three to six hours if you leave from a very remote place near the mountains
- said remote place was a good 3-4 hours from where I lived

Adding these new bits of information together, it quickly became clear that the itinerary was not going to involve a lie-in. The plan was to head up for Sunday. Today was Saturday. Saturday evening.

-------------------------------

I don’t tend to miss appointments that I have to wake up for. I think this is because I am both a worrier and a very light sleeper. So when I have something important to do the next morning, it usually weighs so heavily on my mind that I wake up repeatedly in the middle of the night, terrified of oversleeping.

So, come Sunday, I woke up and the time on my mobile phone read 00:35.

I had woken up early. Fifteen minutes early.

As I stumbled out of bed in the pitch black and turned on the light, my body and my brain were trying to talk to each other. My brain was on surprisingly good form, given the hour; it was ticking off the list of items I needed to take in my rucksack (bananas, jerk chicken from previous night, cereal bars, snickers bars, juice, bottle of Pepsi) and telling my hands to do various things (make bed, put on clothes). My body was definitely trying to communicate something, mostly, I suspected, sheer confusion at what exactly was going on. But I ploughed through. The taxi was due to arrive at 1am.

The plan was as follows. Our housekeeper had sourced us a taxi through a friend that would take us to Mavis Bank, our drop off point. My predictably last-minute efforts at organising the trip (start time for making plans: 4.25pm the day before) had resulted in a somewhat stripped down approach to the adventure. So, ideally, one should be taking a ride to a remote drop-off point near the bottom of the biggest mountain. This is still some distance from Mavis Bank and the roads there are seriously dodgy, so ideally (there’s that word again), you’d need to source a 4 x 4  for the second leg of the trip. Really smart people with guide books and planning skills do things like get there at a reasonable hour, spent a few hours kipping in a little hotels and then jump out of bed in the middle of the night to make the trek in time for the glorious sunrise.

Hmm. My planning had started a bit later and those pesky guides who would escort me from Mavis Bank to the interesting part of the Blue Mountains proved really very tricky to get hold of. I should have anticipated that. In fact, none of the numbers listed in my guidebook seemed to get me anywhere. One of the numbers took me to a gruff man who, while having impeccable taste in Jamaican music (he was listening to some wondrous, heart-stopping rocksteady when I called), really didn’t know what I was talking about and was positively incensed when I called back to double-check whether I had dialled the right number. I almost gave up at this point. My next thought was that I should just do the trek without a guide. My knee-jerk ‘How hard can it be?’ instinct began to take over and I started to imagine myself in a fine tradition of impromptu explorers of beautiful yet challenging natural landscapes. Rose, our housekeeper (a rock of common sense), was not having any of this. ‘Ye mad?” she inquired. When she said this (not the first time I have heard her say this to one of my plans), I knew that I was suggesting something stupid. Crap.

In the end, I used some local knowledge to find something of a compromise – my co-worker at the Council, Jason, told me that if I just popped along to the Mavis Bank police station, they could put me in contact with a local guide. Ah, Jamaica. I yearned to trust the flippancy of such a typically Jamaican set-up, but deep-down, I obviously didn’t believe it – I had to at least check that the police station existed. It did. As to be expected, the police officer on the other end of the line was bemused at my clearly socially unacceptable insistence on details. Just turn up, ok?

As I hadn’t been able to get hold of any of these hotels and given that my plan had only taken form at around 9.30pm on Saturday, it seemed sensible to adjust the timetable accordingly. So, a 1.00am departure it was.

The taxi ride to Mavis Bank was really wonderful. I was so tired I felt like I was in a trance throughout. The town we passed through was eerily quiet; garish neon signs illuminated an occasional group hanging out or a meandering night-walker. Slightly unusually, we were being driven by two people: Rose’s friend, whose extreme friendliness would have been a bit more palatable had I not been trying to get by on two hours’ sleep and his cousin, a quiet but very nice young Rasta.

And the music was sublime, classic roots – the fiery heart of Jamaican music. Creaking out of a barely functioning car tape-player (the way all good old music should be heard) Peter Tosh was coolly incensed, Bob Marley sang his heart out before his voice broke and Jacob Miller pleaded with the police.
- Please, Mr Officer
- don’t lose your temper

I was amazed that someone was actually at the police station when I turned up. The young officer had (not unreasonably) been napping but dealt with it all, getting hold of the guide and telling him to get his ass down to the station. While the young officer went back to bed, me and Liz entertained ourselves by eating bananas and hoping that when the guide did turn up, it would be in a 4 x 4.

He didn’t. And it took him a couple of hours. Also, for good measure, my dreams of reaching the peak were laughed off by the guide. We’d be walking for 24 hours! he said. I settled for a smaller peak. Our guide was fine, if a bit aloof. He certainly didn’t start off well – once he’d got me down off my mission to climb the peak, he proceeded to just point at the nearest peak (more of a hill) and ask if that was ok. I had to keep prodding him until he pointed at something halfway decent which would take, you know, at least six hours and give me something to talk about. Also, he didn’t exactly win my confidence when, upon us coming across a river right at the beginning of the walk (still dark) he uttered a loud, surprised ‘Oh!’. Not what you want to hear.

Anyway, in the end, it rained heavily. I don’t think I’ve ever been as tired and hungry as I was on the way back down. Lesson: something about planning things.

When we got back, I did some wide-eyed enthusing about the music in the car-ride to Rose, who responded in her wonderfully unruffled, typically Jamaican manner.
- Rastaman ‘ave good music.