Ferris wheels

Everywhere I've had the opportunity to visit in the Middle East thus far, I see the same image; a large ferris wheel against the monochrome sky. Every time I'm reminded of a picture a friend of mine took, in black and white, of the same sight in Iowa. I suppose it's simply another symbol of the sameness of people. Everywhere you go, we are all trying to get closer to the sky, to reach the unreachable, to get away from the everyday.

The thing about being stationary

Being stationary gives you time to think, to analyze, to write, but then you run out of things to write about, thinking stagnates a bit, and if you analyze too much you forget the point of it all. So instead, I've been daydreaming, spending some time outside, and doing handstands. Most of all, I'm doing my best to ignore the ticking of the clock.

The comfort of insignificance

Ocean. Maybe it's because I didn't grow up knowing the ocean that it holds such appeal to me. Or perhaps something of such vast dimensions holds an aura of intrigue for anyone lucky enough to experience it. For some, the endlessness of the sea, the abyss of the sky, the vastness speaks of those things beyond human control and the feeling of powerlessness is terrifying. I, on the other hand, am calmed by this lack of control, for without control there can be no responsibility. I'm submissive, you might say, to the infinite possibilities of the uncontrollable. Putting myself at the mercy of the ocean or sky, when everything is beyond my control, this is one of the few times when I can truly relax. The crash of waves reminds me of the earth's indifference to individual life and this is somehow comforting. Our pain, our joy is abut an infinitely small piece of the whole of existence and this thought makes the unbearable bearable, the joy more precious.

Lost in translation

I just spent the last hour-ish watching an American movie dubbed, which is slightly frustrating as both the dubbing and the subtitles were foreign to me. However, it was literally a half ass-ed dubbing job as the language would switch mid sentence back to English and it seemed this always happened when the characters were talking about sex or relationships. As the movie was a serial killer mystery, this small bit of English here and there did little to help me follow along.

Dulled perceptions

While Iman and her family have been great to me and I feel very comfortable there, it was nice today to spend the day in fluent English speaking company. I've been out of contact with anything English for about four days now, no internet or good conversation, I even finished my book. This morning I went with my friends Justin and Hiba on a trip aroudn northern Syria visiting ruins. We started with St. Simeon, a site known for a man who decided monastic life was not severely pious enough for him so he retreated to a cave dwelling. His piousnes, however, drew pilgrims and he soon grew tired of the attention so he erected a pillar on which he could live without being touched by his pilgrims. As his tolerance of people grew less and less he built the pillar higher and higher. Living forty years like this he eventually reached a height of 18 meters, about sixty feet, from which he would preach and yell answers to his pilgrim's questions. After his death he was buried in ancient Antioch (Antakya) where I was staying before coming to Syria. His pillar here was reduced to a boulder of about one square meter by pilgrims chipping away souvenirs.

We visited a few other sites, places we would never have found had someone not shown them to us; a cemetary and 500 year old shrine, a Roman amphitheater hiding behind a hill just off the road, and a lake where the river had been dammed where we amused ourselves with a rock throwing/skipping contest for about an hour. It felt great to be outside the city again, seeing the countryside, the olive trees stretching into the distance. We laughed alot, at ourselves, being silly, and most of all at the obsessive use of the word hubibi in Arabic music (it means 'my love'). Between this mini adventure and the movie/coffee last night, I'm loving life in Syria again. I think when you become accustomed to a new surrounding you stop realizing how amazing hte experience is. I look at the pictures from today, of myself standing on the remains of a 5th century church and nI realize if I was looking at someone else's pictures I'd be impressed and jealous of their adventures. That perspective made me appreciate even more what I've been able to do here, how unique my experiences have been, and how much I will cherish these memories when I'm back in my comfort zone, sipping coffee at Wild Joe's talking politics and futures.

We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from another's vantage point, as if new, it may still take the breath away. - Watchmen

Hotel California

Lately I've been getting anxious to get home, missing the little things like being able to blend in and conversation inf luent English. Last night, however, reminded me why I'm doing this, how much I love these experiences, and how much I'm going to cherish my memories of Syria when I get home. Since Wednesday, I've been staying with a Syrian Muslim woman, Iman, and her brother and mother. They have all been fantastic, feeding me to extremes and taking very good care of me. Iman works as a research technician at ICARDA and speaks english at an intermediate level. Her borther, Essam, speaks very little English, but we get by. Last night Essam took me to coffee with some friends of his and a movie. At coffee, waiting for his friends to join us, I started writing English words on the back of a party flier and he'd tell me the Arabic equivilants and write them for me. We'd soon finished one page and were starting on the second page on the back of another flier when the waiter brought us a few sheets of printer paper. Essam's friends joined us, another Syrian man and a petite German woman. We had three languages between us but only the men could communicate fluently with each other. I drank a cinnamon latte that tasted just liek home and by the time we left for the movie we'd covered two more sheets with language homework.

The theater was in the bottom of the tallest buildling in town (a hotel) and it was probably the most comfortable I've ever been in; nothing like the run down old theaters I'm used to at home or the grimy sticky newer ones at the malls. It even had real curtains that opened and closed between films, something I haven't seen since the old days in Shel by when they still had intermission and smoking sections. The film itself was bizarre; I could tell that without being able understand much of the dialog. Almost more interesting than the movie was observing the behavior in the theater. There were far more men that women in attendance and the idea of silence was a joke. An audible mumbling could be hard through, and often clear normal voices carrying on conversations. A few phone calls were answered with no attempt to hang up quickly or whisper. The laughed at moments that made me want to cry and I never cry at movies.

Leaving the theater, we stopped for coffee. This time we didn't go to a shop, but rather the Syrian version of an espresso hut; a couple guys serving coffee from a shack on the sidewalk to people sitting in dark cars along the empty street. We ordered through the window like an old burger joint and sipped our coffee listening to music. My favorite moment was a wonderful combination oddities; driving through croded city streets in Aleppo, Syria, in an Iranian made car, drinking Turkish coffee and listening to Hotel California with the subwoofers thumping.

Trapped in the amber

I am lucky enough to have some very insightful friends, unique people who keep me thinking. One of them, about a year ago, related a thought to me that went something like this. 'I just want to know that this moment can never be redone.' That simple sentence changed how I looked at things, how I remembered perfect moments, how I experienced them. Many times, traveling with Joey in Europe, we'd rush through some place taking pictures and seeing as much as we could see as quickly as possible, then we'd stop for a moment. Be it a random immaculate room in the Louvre, the beautiful expanse of the Cliffs of Moher, or the ancient mystery of Stonehenge, we'd pause and absorb the moment allowing ourselves to simply be there, soaking it up so to speak. The camera's would go away, for while trapping moments through the lense allows me to share my journey with others when I get home, that lense narrows my view of the world and I try not to forget to take in the whole of it.

I'm reading, as always. This time it's Slaughterhouse 5, a book that has been on my to do list for a while and was waiting innocently for me in a stack at Jakoba's house. It helps me pass the time when the power goes out, reading by candlelight. The introduction to the book describes it as a 'novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales.' It reads much like I think, jumping from one moment to the next, remembering a day when I was 12, which reminds me of another time ten years later. At one point, the character asks 'Why me?' and the response struck me.

'Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? Well, here we are, trapped in the amber of this moment.'