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.