Cutting Class

Alright, this is going to span from Saturday all the way to Sunday, so here goes…

Saturday we saw Batman: The Dark Night. It was pretty incredible; I definitely recommend it. Heath Ledger playing the Joker was tremendous.

Sunday had one particularly noteworthy happening, which occurred during mass. While giving the homily the priest stopped mid sentence and gave a stern, angry look to someone to his left, standing frozen for almost a minute. Eventually a woman with a crying baby got the message and got up and left the church for a closed room with a speaker where her child’s screaming wouldn’t be so obnoxious for the priest. But as she left the Priest saw two young people filing in. Although Arabs are notoriously late for everything, this did not go over well, and he proceeded to scold the congregation for their lack of decorum in this house of God. He cut his homily of there (a minute and a half in to it) and proceeded to skip several parts of the mass to hurry us on through Communion. After the closing prayer, before ending the mass, he returned again to scolding the congregation, expressing his disgust with un-muted cell phones, woman wearing sleeveless shirts and men wearing shorts, crying babies, and late arrivals. This all made for a very awkward mood as we filed out of the church.

Monday nothing interesting happened.

Alex and I booked a taxi to take ourselves plus Mary and Aaron (a guy from my class) to Damascus after class on Tuesday. We’d been told that Wednesday was a holiday, so by leaving after class Tuesday we had five days to work with where we would only be missing one class, so we decided to try our luck traveling to Syria. If we got turned away at the border Tuesday, then that would still give us two days to travel on to Jerusalem instead. So our taxi was supposed to pick us up at one o’clock, but he didn’t actually arrive until 1:40, at which point he drove us first back to Abdali station to check how much our taxi had been booked for with the owner. When he learned that we didn’t have passports, meaning that as Americans there would be a very long wait at the Syrian border, he refused to take us unless we would pay him more money. But we had already made an agreement with the manager of the company, who knew we had no visas. At an impasse, we agreed to pay him five Dinar for every extra hour past two that he would have to wait for us at the border, assuming we would get through.

I want to insert here that most people in the Middle East are very nice and friendly towards us, regardless of whether or not they know us to be American. However all taxi drivers are impossibly frustrating to deal with. All of them wish to hustle you for extra money, regardless of what the running meter might say. The other difficult thing is that for trips over an hour in time, they always stop to sit down for fifteen minutes and sip tea, usually at a tourist trap where they know the owners and get their tea for free in exchange for bringing in foreigners to spend money.

So resuming then with the story, we were aware that as many as fourteen other students from the language center would be trying to reach Damascus that same day we were. Knowing this, our driver’s late arrival and demands for money were especially frustrating because we knew that if that group of fourteen beat us to the border our wait would be elongated greatly. Thus, when at one of our stops for the driver to sit and sip tea for fifteen minutes the other taxis of University students arrived, we rushed our driver and urged him to get in the taxi and beat the other group. My Arabic held up and we got on the road. At the Jordan border we secured our exit stamps right as the other group was entering the building. We get in the taxi, leave Jordan for the Syrian side of the border, and then our taxi driver stopped in the middle at a little store. As we waited for him, one taxi after another carrying university students passed us by to get in line for their Syrian visas. We were livid.

So we arrived and began the process, which involves giving all of our information to a government worker who sends it off to Damascus where they verify we are not spies and have no affiliation or have ever traveled in Israel. Two students had traveled there previously and were stopped and sent back to Amman. One Damascus approves us, the approval is sent back to the border, at which time we pay the country’s entrance fee ($16 USD), get stamps, and continue on into Syria. It is a simple process, but we had to wait for its completion for six hours. By the time we got through our taxi driver was completely upset with us, even though he knew it would take a while, was being compensated, and made no effort to lobby for our visas to be expedited (most bureaucracy is open to people lobbying for favors). In fact, he was so unhappy that we were doing ninety mph on the way north to Damascus. Twice he nearly hit cars who didn’t move out of the left lane quickly enough. Then at some point he pulled off on the side of the road and got out of the car. Then another guy got in and said in Arabic he would take us to Damascus. On the outskirts of the city he stopped by a taxi and told us to take a taxi the rest of the way, which is frustrating because taking taxis is all about having leverage to avoid being taken advantage of, and he just handed our bags to this new driver and left. So we are stuck with this one driver who now has our bags in the trunk of his car, and no real position to haggle for a fair price. But we made it to the hotel (using the word loosely) with him, which is what really is most important. We thought it might be a problem to have a girl and three guys, but it thankfully was a non-issue. Following are some pictures of that place.

There are two musts in Syria, both of which were within walking distance of our hotel, adjacent to each other. The first is Hamiydeh Souk, the second is the Umayyad Mosque. The souk is one of the biggest in the world, with two long roads of innumerable shops, separated by a half mile of another myriad of shops. Things being sold here include gold and silver anything, western and traditional clothing, woodwork, spices, Qur’ans, and fruits. Truthfully, shopping in Amman compared to the souk in Damascus is like trying to stop at a dollar store to finish all of your Christmas shopping. I bought a few things for my family, which I will not list here as they may read this, while Alex bought a nice backgammon set and Aaron picked up some prayer beads. Again, the prices are meant to be negotiated, exemplified by Alex’s backgammon set asking price of $4800 Syrian Lira and final negotiated price of $2000 Lira (like $96 usd to $40 usd).

Before we visited the old Mosque, we stopped at a Shi’a pilgrimage shrine. If we were in Iraq this place would have been bombed already, but we weren’t there and the place remains intact (If anyone wants an explanation of Sunni vs. Shi’a, just leave a comment saying so). To put it simply, this small, adorned mosque houses the grave of the daughter of Hussein, who is the son of Ali, the cousin of the Prophet Mohammad. The place was the shiniest place I have ever seen in my life, everything shimmered and glistened. There was recitation, prayer, and crying all going on (Hussein was beheaded, and part of the Shi’a tradition is retelling the story well enough to bring the audience to tears). I took some videos and pictures here, but I am not sure if the video will take on the website from Amman, but I can post it from Oxford in a week.

Next we wandered the Umayyad Mosque, which was one of the first big Mosques ever constructed, built on/made of the church in Damascus that the Muslims successfully took around 660 AD. There was an expansive courtyard.

Currently housed there is a shrine to Hussein, which we were told contains his head. Here are the pictures.

A well that Ibrahim is said to have drawn water from and the wall that Saint George prayed to.

Also there is a shrine containing the head of John the Baptist, who was also beheaded. More pictures:

And finally the minaret that Muslims believe Jesus will return from when he returns on the last day (they believe he never died on the cross, but rather that he was taken directly up to heaven)

There are an equal number of stories about the difficulty of getting back to Amman that I may post at a later date, but this post is already quite long so I’ll stop here for now. Also to come is a good story about ignoring signs.