I hope that somewhere in the world, there is a bar whose bouncers deny admittance to people for being over-dressed.  “Ma’am, you’ll have to put a hooded sweatshirt over that glitter-top and push-up bra, and please, find some more comfortable shoes.”  “I’m sorry sir, but that popped collar is a bit too pointy.”

            Where ever this magical Shangri-La is, it’s not Beirut.  I have to sneak past the hair-gel soaked doormen, as to avoid the inevitable, “I’m sorry sir, I’ve never heard of the brand ‘Miracles do happen,’ you’ll have to buy an over-priced drink somewhere else.”  But once we did find a place to drink, the doorman assigned me and my Swiss friend two bar stools which crammed us elbow-to-elbow with what was clearly an awkward double date.  They looked good—chest hair and cleavage was prominently displayed by all the right genders, and their four different expensive perfumes mixed into an airy broth which hovered around half the bar.  We were all very impressed.

            When me and Swiss ran out of things to discuss over our beers, I began paying more and more attention to the double-date.  The far couple was hitting it off, while the two closest to us dawdled with their cell phones and made frequent trips to the bathroom to pass the time.  At one point the guy made up some excuse and said goodnight, making it a party of three.  The successful couple continued with their flirting, while me, Swiss, and our new friend, Third Wheel, sat squeezed at the bar watching a soccer game on T.V.

            Third Wheel began playing with her cell phone again, whose screen showed a glamour photo of a stunning Arab woman.  At this point, she had stared at the picture for the 8^th time, so I finally broke the silence and asked, “men heea Ala moblieKi?”  “Huh?”  So then I tried in English, “Who is that on your mobile?”  She pointed to the spot between her fake breasts (as if she bought them just for the sake of decorating her point of self-reference) and said, “It’s me.”  I was caught off guard for sure.  I expected her to tell me it was her favorite singer, or a loved one… someone whose picture deserved her own reverence.  But apparently narcissism knows no cultural barriers. 

            So how would you respond to her answer?  I could think of but three ways:

A.  Honesty: “Wow, that’s incredibly vain of you.  And you look a lot more attractive shrunk down to a digital 1 by 3 photo.  How’d you do that?”

B.  Womanizing: “Wow, you look great, but it doesn’t do you justice.  You’re very beautiful, [compliment], [compliment], <roofie drink>, [compliment].”

C.  Awkward: “Oh, neat… Ah yeah… I wish I could take pictures with my phone [remove Nokia 1995 model from your pocket, the one you bought off a Syrian guy on the street for $10]  But, ah… it only takes numbers.”  Shit, did I just accidentally ask for her number?  “Ah, I mean the screen.  Ah, its just numbers and letters and stuff… it’s really old… see?”

            I chose C.  Third Wheel’s response was more physical than verbal, perhaps because of the language barrier.  Without saying a word, she stood up and walked straight out the door.  I took a long drink of my beer, while Swiss leaned over and said, “Tyler, you’ll never impress a Lebanese girl with that phone, they like expensive things.”  I’m still a little bitter about being rejected by someone I wasn’t even interested in.  But I’ve recently purchased some hair gel and taped a glamour photo of myself to the back of my cell phone.  Next time I sit next to a girl void of personality, I’ll be ready to impress.

I’ve posted many new pictures of my trip to Lebanon.  You can see them on my Flicker page (look for the link on the left-hand side of the screen).

I’ve got some stories to post about the trip, perhaps they’ll be ready later tonight.  But for now there’s pictures.  Wonderful Wonderful pictures.

I realize I haven’t written much in a long time.  I keep saying I will soon, but haven’t had the inspiration quite yet.  But I’ll say it again… soon.

In the meantime, I thought I would share that I was teaching English to a group of Iraqi students for about a month before they went over the U.S. to study just last week.  To my surprise, I found out that there is an article about them in the Christian Science Monitor.  It discusses some of my former students, and has some nice pictures of them as well.  I’ll fill you in more in the future, and post some pictures, maybe video, of the send-off party we had for them last week.

I’m not sure if they’ll join us, but I invited my 6 students to Wisconsin for the winter, so maybe you’ll get to meet them.

You can read the article in the Christian Science Monitor here: http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0814/p01s07-usgn.html

Here is a very interesting radio-short on a recently developing problem in Damascus (where I live). 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2008/04/080418_syria_sex_wt_sl.shtml

If you want to learn more about this, I would also recommend watching this documentary, which is about Iraqi refugees living in Damascus and Amman (a couple hours south of me).

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6277982867673096457

My first semester of Arabic is finished, and I decided to spend my 6 day holiday with some friends in southern Turkey.  These next two posts are rough narratives of the trip.

Written on the Train before making it to Turkey

           It’s difficult to write by pen’n pad on a shaky train when your on your 26^th waking hour.  When I started this rally, I was taking my Arabic final in Damascus.  It felt ambitious to hop on a train as soon as the test was finished, but I figured I’d get a good night’s sleep once we got to our hotel in Turkey.  This very well could have happened, had I made it to Turkey.  For reasons too boring to mention, I was missing some paper work, resulting in the Syrians not letting me out of the country.  This gave me a strange feeling of clausterphobia.

            While trying to get into Turkey, arguing with the border guards should only have taken five minutes.  But when there’s a language barrier, and people aren’t telling you what you want to hear, your general strategy often becomes repeating your point over and over until the other gives up.  Like preachers on the street, you tell them how it is, and when they retort, you tell’em again.  In our case, this was the tactic of both sides, making the 45 minute dispute a constant loop of five-minute dialogue… like that episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation where they get stuck in that worm-hole (don’t act like you haven’t seen it).

            While my four friends continued to Turkey, I had to back-track in hopes of getting my paper work straightened out.  It was one hour after midnight, and one hour after I became a one-man party, when the border guards convinced a newly-arriving, monolingual Turk to give me a ride to the closest big city.  He was in his 50’s, and very jolly, laughing at everything he said.  He refused to let me pay him for the ride, so when I hopped in his 4X4, I returned the gesture as best I could by offering him one of the fancy candies I got from my new Sex-Ed teacher in Damascus (see previous post).  He refused three times, so I pulled a move I learned from the daughters of my host mother, and stuffed it into his breast pocked when he wasn’t looking.  He chuckled, and produced a twix candy bar from thin air and forced it into my hands as a trade.  Five minutes of comfortable silence passed as I looked out the window, enjoying the stars for the first time since I arrived in Syria, noticing many of the same constellations I’d watch out on the lakes of Northern Wisconsin.  This was interrupted by my driver’s inquiry, which despite my lack of any Turkish, I managed to pick out a very important word, “beer.”  “Yes,” I responded; and he reached into the cooler behind my seat, producing a large, ice-cold can of Turkish beer.  He’d outdone his previous trick with the twix bar.

            So there I was, cursing around the winding highways of northern Syria with my new friend, sucking in the night air, the clear sky, and the cold brew.  We picked up a third guy, and made a detour through the local border town to the new passenger’s house.  We got out of the car for a while in order to enjoy his dad’s company, the beer, and the stars.  It was about an hour after we left the house when I learned that my chauffer was a smuggler.  After taking a coffee break at a pull out, he ripped off the interior walls of his jeep, and began filling them with cartons of cigarettes.  Luckily, he had just finished replacing the upholstery to its rightful place when the cops pulled up.  I just pretended to sleep through the whole episode in the front seat. 

            Long story short, it turned out that I had to go all the way back to Damascus to get my paper work (another 5 hours opposite my northern destination).  But 24 hours later, I was on my way back to the Turkish border for a second try.

            The last leg of the trip to the border was uneventful until my taxi driver almost beat me up.  He tried charging me 6 times the normal fare, as so an argument ensued.  This move had worked on me in my first couple days in Damascus, but I’ve learned my lessons since.  Taxi drivers in Syria are often the scum of the country, and pull this shit on foreigners, and occasionally Syrians, on a regular basis.  After 45 minutes of arguing in cave-man Arabic, I finally gave up when he started getting physical.  With a crowd already gathered around us, he started trying to push me back into the Taxi to “take me to the police.”  I pried him off of me and told him “no problem. Good. Call the police. I want the police too.”  “No, police not here!  Get in the car!  You are Ali Baba”  I had to think for a moment.  “Ali Baba?  Ali Baba and the forty thieves?  I think he’s calling me a thief.” I argued more, but when he started throwing around George Bush references, and pushing me around, I finally gave in to our negotiator (a nearby vendor) and paid an inflated price. 

            I cheered up when I got to the border and spent half an hour shareing candies and a bus bench with the Syrian guards and their Sheikh (sort of like a preist, but for Islam).  I then walked across the ¼ mile of no-man’s-land between the Syrian and Turkish border stations.  This path was a gravel road lined with razor wire and trilingual signs warning of the mine fields beyond (see pictures).  After buying a Turkish visa, I tagged along with a Portuguese and Turk on their way to Gaziantep (the Turkish city where my companions were).  My triumphant return was greeted with hugs from my friends and news that they had been betting whether or not I’d make it.  They sat me down on the bed, handed me a beer, and I re-told the same story I have shared up-until now. 

            That night we ended up in the grass outside of the town’s Ottoman castle, drinking whisky and Turkish beer with 5 locals for two hours.  After the cops came and kicked us out, we made our way back to their house where we continued the binge, and coupled it with a karaoke contest minus the microphone, karaoke machine, and accompanying music.  They started with a Turkish song, and we answered with “I would walk five-hundred miles,” and later, some Simon and Garfunkle.  There was something close to eight of us when the night ended, and we all squeezed into a Taxi which took us back to our hotel.  The Turks insisted on paying for the Taxi, and we all kissed each others’ cheeks goodbye and repeated their most popular phrase of the evening: “I love you Liverpool!” (They thought one of us was British).  That night, before my hotel room stopped spinning, I made the responsible decision to drink about 5 glasses of tap water to ensure a better tomorrow.  But my heart sank the next morning when I overheard my Australian friend teasing one of my other travel partners for almost drinking the tap water—apparently it’s unsafe to drink.  Sigh. 

            After a hefty lunch, we went to a park and lied around in the lush grass (something we lack in Syria).  There was a group of 6 children who came and joined us.  They were all under 6 years of age, no parents in sight, and survived by the coins they made by selling tissues and shoe-shins to the park-dwellers.  We didn’t bring any business their way, but shared our pistachios, juice, and shade for a good hour (see pictures).  Being with them was very bitter-sweet.  They were adorable, and very friendly.  But it was clear they had a hard life, and were not in school, nor going to be.  And here we were, lying next to them all sluggish from the night before when we spent more money on whisky and pisaciotes than they will on food in a month.  Thankfully, for our sake, the wonder inspired by the local museum of mosaics was a good distraction from this feeling of guilt.

            We moved onto another Turkish city where good ol’Abraham had spent a lot of his time, since his hometown was just down the block.  The sights were beautiful (see pictures), but the weather unbearablely hot—hence we spent our mid-day in an air-conditioned cinema watching the new Indiana Jones movie.

            Our final night in Turkey was spent in a small village on an eerie lake.  It was recently formed by a dam on the Euphrates River.  Like La Crosse, Wisconsin, the village was previously squeezed between the narrow river and the cliffs behind it.  However, since the dam, 70% of the village was swallowed rising water.  So at the lake shore, instead of a beach, you have underwater roads, sidewalks, houses, and a half-submerged Mosque (see pictures). 

            When we finally set out for our return to Syria, we bade farewell to our favorite friend Will, who was not returning to Damascus with us.  Instead, he thought it would be cooler to move to Budapest with his girlfriend (gay).  Before arriving safely at home, we spent a good 4 hours at the border waiting for our friend’s paper work to go through.  But instead of being a frustrating, mind-numbing wait, we had another adventure.  My travel companion Dania has the ability to charm strangers at the bat of an eye-lash.  So, we got to hang out with the General in his air conditioned office, drinking tea and watching Dr. Phil on cable.  When we asked him what he thought of the show, he said with a heavy accent, “I think maybe Dr. Phil… he need doctor.  But I love Oprah.”  Then we moved to the guards’ barracks, where one guard fed us his wife’s cooking and more tea while we witnessed the hilarity of Syrian bureaucracy at work from the behind the scenes (with a rack of AK-47s on the opposite wall).

            Sitting in the back of the candy store, 53 year-old Samir was waiting for my response.  He looked at me with an inquisitive, slightly concerned gaze that a silent-film actor would use to convey, “What do you want to do with your life young man?”  But this was not what he was asking.  You don’t have to be fluent in Arabic to realize that when a man simulates copulation with his fingers, he’s asking you something very different.

            Always a fan of the random situational humor, my heart was immediately filled with joy over this horribly awkward and confusing moment.  “What the fuck did he just say?”  Any time you find yourself in a real-life situation you would only suspect in a poorly written movie, stay there.  They make for good replies to “How was your day,” or for good filler on your poorly written blog.  The game is to not let-on to yourself, or your company that you may be accidentally re-enacting a deleted scene from Seinfeld or David Hasselhoff’s Nightrider.  Composure is a must.  Take a deep breath… don’t look at his pulsing hands… “I don’t know,” I calmly responded.  “No you idiot, look at my hands,” he inferred by firmly bobbing his head toward his lap, as if I hadn’t noticed he was giving his left-hand a hand job.  I was impressed at my ability to keep a straight face.

            So how did I find myself in the back of a Syrian candy store trying to decipher this man’s Arabic and sign language?  Well, of all the God-related phrases I’ve learned in Arabic since my arrival (“God is great,” “God willing,” “Thank God”) “God only knows” has yet to make it to my wordbank.  But that would certainly be a fitting answer to the question.  But lets assume God has more important things to do than to explain his demented creation, and back-track in the story a bit in order to figure it out ourselves.

            I had just finished practicing Arabic with my conversation partner in one of the many mosques of my neighborhood.  On the way out, I repeated what is becoming a pattern; I stopped into the nearby candy store.  It’s owned by a family whose 19 year-old son has taken an interest in sitting me down in the shop and stuffing me full of sugar and caffeine while he asks me about America.  Naturally, I cooperate.

            With his little English, and my pitiful Arabic, I quickly accomplished my first three goals of every “what’s America like?” conversation: we all don’t like George Bush, American is nothing like Hollywood movies, and we aren’t all rich.  The reason for distancing myself from my President in this region is obvious.  But let me explain the other two.  Based upon the questions I get, and the odd way people occasionally treat me, I get the impression that there is a great deal of larger-than-life perceptions of the American lifestyle.  Either you’re a celebrity, a hardened and violent criminal, or, at the very least, a very rich dude who loves Bon Jovee.  As you can imagine, when people suspect this of you, they give you a lot of attention which I’d prefer to avoid by distancing myself from such misconceptions (Bon Jovee sucks).  Often this attention includes a lot of questions (e.g. “What’s the Mafia like? Was JFK killed because he said Palestine was an Arab state? Are there places in the U.S. that go weeks without day light?… I’m assuming this last one was inspired by the recent vampire movie “30 Days of Night,”… staring Josh Hartnett… rated R).  They also like to give you instructions of how to improve yourself by adopting some of their own behavior and beliefs.

            So this is the best context I can provide in order to explain the man in the candy shop who’s serious gaze didn’t match his 6^th-grader’s imitation of sex.  [This is a hand gesture you can re-create at home; make a peace sign with your left hand, now penetrate the “V” with your right-hand’s pointer finger, and vigorously saw it against the rim of your palm like you’re trying to cut towards your elbow.]  It turns out that there is no transition necessary between questions of Texan geography to sexual promiscuity.  I had just finished explaining how far Dallas was from Chicago when he dropped this bomb on me.  But it was all the same topic to him.  He wanted to know about America; and as I’ve mentioned earlier, the U.S. is less known for democracy promotion around here than it is for its loose women.  According to his son’s translation, the pious Samir wanted to save me from the debaucherous life he assumed I led (I was flattered).

“Not good,” he said.  “Wife, that’s it.”

I practiced my Arabic: “Yes.  Of course.  I agree.  No women.  Not possible. Now, in Damascus, I study.  That’s it.  No problem.”

“You’re a good man,” he tells me.

“Thanks.”

This is my friend’s segment on the show “This American Life.”  Although it came out on Showtime a month or two ago, I was only now just able to see it.  It’s about an Iraqi (him) traveling around the U.S. talking to people about the war.  It’s about 20 minutes long, and very well done.

Enjoy!

Part 1:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPEX0PnV-LU

Part 2:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPfLdxEr0jk&feature=related

In this post, I will seamlessly weave together frat boys, the Persian Empire, fetishes, and fruit juice.

Cultural obsessions often lead to overwhelming desires in the minds of the individual.  Whether it is idolizing fame, wealth, sex… people learn what to want and which venues are deemed expectable in order to pursue it.  But what happens when people are simultaneously told to want one thing, but not allowed to indulge?  Well, some seem to develop fetishes.  This struck me when I was at a soccer game between Iran and Syria.  Imagine, thousands of men packed together into a stadium with fantastic colors and lights, the echo of whistles and yelps, the wave of a flag in every-other fist… yes, getting hopped-up on nationalism is a good outlet for the fact that you can’t touch a woman until you’re married; but it certainly isn’t a solution.  One girl learned this the hard way.

When my friends invited me to the game, I told them no.  But who can resist a face-off between two of the three axes on the world’s 1982 Toyota minibus of Evil?  …surely no freedom-blooded American such as myself.

Keeping with the tradition of walking to any destination more than 10 minutes away, we stopped at a juice bar before reaching the stadium.  In our group there were four Americans, one Australian, and one Brit; also keeping with tradition, we picked up two Syrians at the juice bar.  What seemed like a casual, quite common befriending of some locals turned out to be a God-send.  Sure, we could’ve found the stadium by ourselves; but getting in is another story.  What I can only describe as a bid for lifeboats on a sinking ship, getting through the entrance gates, even if you have a ticket, is a competitive sport in itself.  And while a crowd of anxious young men pushing themselves through a small hole is intimidating, it is even more so when the hole is not a door, but a gap in a long line of billy-club-clad riot police.  You don’t want to get pushed into them. (A side note: Syrians tend to use grand hand gestures while talking, even about the least animate topics.  This is also true of the guards with large bats in their hands, making a friendly instruction like, “You can’t get in through there,” seem like an attempt on your life.) 

As our two new Syrian friends shepherded us through the crowds, the two American girls with us were immediately grabbed by the guards.  They weren’t going to let them through (we later learned that there is a separate entrance for the women).  This was very alarming to all of us non-Syrians, as we didn’t know why they were being grabbed.  I can’t imagine what was going through the girls’ heads, but I immediately felt myself reaching for my glasses, knowing that with my luck in Syria, I would be the first to be clubbed as we all clung to each other and argued with hand gestures and broken Arabic trying not be separated.  Thank Allah our new Syrian friends jumped in and half argued/half pushed us all through the line of guards with an authoritative smile.

Once in the stadium, the now-shaken girls insisted on not sitting in the rowdy (student?) sections of the stadium, which constituted about 85% of the stands.  After purchasing $1 Syrian flags to wave from our seats behind the Iranian goalkeeper, we quickly attracted a small crowd of curious Syrians, all wanting to meet the Americans who were cheering for their country….  or so I thought. 

And this is where I will pull the whole story back to the discussion about fetishes and the unfortunate girl.  You see, as Syrian male, your chances of getting any romantic action are slim.  Reason being that Syrian girls rightfully guard themselves and their reputation like it’s their life… cause it is.  If it is found out that they have broken the rules (and given the lack of privacy here, people usually do find out), they will have a very hard time ever finding a husband, not to mention be a huge embarrassment to their family.  It is not the same for men.  They are not supposed to indulge either, but if they do, they are not scared the same way a girl is (both literally in the case of the physical deflowering of a woman’s body—I serious, they even have reconstructive surgery for that sort of thing here—and metaphorically in regards to their reputation).  This makes Syria a country full of horny men (I mean more so than a normal country).

Despite Syria’s conservatism, sex is saturated in the images of advertising, music videos, movies in the cinema (mostly American), and the way each gender dresses (aside from the more conservative individuals).  If Syria was REM’s “Everybody hurts” video (youtube it), the caption of the girls’ parents would read, “Here’s a push-up bra, five pounds of make-up, and some heals, now make sure you come right home after school.”  I can’t imagine the captions of the younger folk, but I’m sure these mixed messages are not easy on the psyche.

In some cases, this frustration turns perfectly normal sexual interest into intense fetishes and leads to the desperately-immature objectification of women.  Pair this with the double standards of behavior, which leaves room for the males to bend the rules, and you have a society where any women perceived as being “loose” is the center of everyone’s attention.  “Here’s my chance,” they seem to think.  And thanks to Hollywood’s portrayal of Western women (at least the particular movies which make it to the cinema here), any foreign girl who is obviously not Muslim is assumed to fit the bill, and therefore coveted.  This leads to aggressive flirting from some men towards foreign women, and in rarer cases, public molestation, or sometimes worse.

Much like the drinking culture for U.S. college students (kids who are shown in movies and told by parents and friends how much fun drinking is, but not allowed to indulge until being 21), in Syria, a dangerously-immature obsession develops in some people about women and sex.  They don’t ease into things with innocent kissing and long, horribly-awkward relationships that (hopefully) demystify the opposite sex, for example, by teaching one not to see women as just a set of boobs to be grabbed in a soccer stadium.

At the game, the girls we were with were constantly being gawked at.  The guys sitting behind us didn’t seem to care that me and my Australian friend were staring them down for about three minutes straight as they pointed, stared, and laughed at our friends’ bodies.  We decided to rearrange our seating so that we formed a sort of a phalanx (perhaps inspired by the former Persian Empire in the neighboring section) with the girls in the middle.  But this didn’t stop who we originally thought were just friendly Syrian men from coming over to chat with all of us.  It quickly became clear who they wanted to talk to.  Their flirt was quite intense, and their insistence became so discomforting that we had to leave the game early to avoid further harassment and what would’ve been a rowdy conclusion to a 1-1 game.  But this was only after we saw a great commotion in the stands behind us.  I looked up to see roughly 40 teenaged Syrians running over to take pictures of who turned out to be my friend from Britain.  He was escorting a girl (she looked American or Euro) out of the stands.  I pushed through the disturbance to pat him on the shoulder for a surprise hello (he had left Syria two weeks ago and we figured we’d never see each other again) when he told me what happened.  As riot police were pushing us out the door, I learned that the girl he was with was getting her chest grabbed by some kids.  He decked one of them, and now they were being escorted out of the stands before things escalated.   

The night before this, at the only dive-bar in Damascus, I watched my German friend literally dodge some 40-year-old Iraqi lips from smooching her.  She had been flirting with my other Australian friend, while three middle-aged Iraqi guys watched from another table.  One of them must have assumed that it was a free-for-all, because he pursed his lips and went right for her.  He must have really put his weight into it too, cause when he missed, he fell right over, only to be caught by my the Australian. 

Man that was awkward. 

The Iraqi then apologized and invited them both to his house for dinner….

I don’t mean to paint a bad image of Arab men, these individuals are certainly the minority, and sadly, their behavior seems all too familiar to other dip-shits I’ve seen in the good-ole U.S. of A.  But I guess it just goes to show that we’re all the same, in a sad, sad way. “Global solidarity via sexual assault”?  Yikes.

Check out my flicker page for some new photos…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/midwestinthemideast/