This was first published in March 2009 and later turned into an article for the Honolulu Advertiser.
Dear Concerned Local Citizens of the United States (and many other countries, actually),
Most of you know I spent the last year overseas, nine months working in Baghdad and the remainder doing volunteer work in India, Zambia and Thailand. Returning to Hawaii for a week, I then left for a week to visit friends and family on the mainland, in SF, NYC, DC and Detroit.
The whole journey was an exercise in culture shock. Having gone from months of rocket barrages, helicopter rides, armored convoys, morning security briefings, international development bureaucrats, 120 degree heat, dust storms, hyper-efficient Singaporean subways, Mumbai slums, Indian rickshaws, Zambian skies, stupendous waterfalls, African Safaris, Thai family dinners and beach parties on Indian Ocean islands, it was quite a flip to see bong shops on the streets of Hippiedom in Haight Ashbury, watch my 4 year old nephew playing a Polar Bear in a NYC Bear Show surrounded by parents with hundreds of digital cameras, attend a surprise bachelor party with a bus and Secret Service escort, take the Chinatown Bus from NYC to DC (which is far more cramped than the $20 sleeper-bus I took from Singapore to Kuala Lumpor), visit the massive new visitor center at the US Capitol complete with a statue with of King Kamahameha, and go out drinking with my identical-twin-engineering-major-cousins who live together in good ole’ middle American Ann Arbor, Michigan, and are graduating this year from the University of Michigan (Go Blue).
And it was at U of M, that bastion of Middle American Public University Mass Education, that I had a truly cultural experience that I’d like to share with all of you.
I was hanging out with Jason Kerwin, one of my best friends growing up at Punahou (I mention future Dr. Kerwin II [his dad is also a Dr.] because he’s gonna be famous and I want you guys to know I know him…also, Barack Obama went to my high school). Jason applied to the PhD program in Economics at UofM, and was there checking out the campus and meeting the grad students. One of the grad students turned out to be a very nice young lady whose undergrad minor was Persian studies, which encompassed Iran and Afghanistan. She mentioned this minor when I said I that I was not a prospective grad student, but was only visiting my friend. I told her I had graduated from Georgetown with a major in Middle East Regional Studies and had just gotten back from a year long global tour, which included 9 months in Baghdad working for two sub-contractors, one under USAID. THAT instantaneously sparked a debate on the merits of the war in Afghanistan and an analysis of our chances to win.
Her conclusion was that we would be crushed in Afghanistan just like the Soviets were. One of her reasons was that our nation building program would undoubtedly be incapable of properly restoring services to the country. She proclaimed we’d just end up building gas pipelines through pasture lands, which would anger farmers, who would then join the Taliban, and, over time, would literally bleed us dry. We would lose, just like the Russians did.
I then launched into a speech about why we are going to win in Afghanistan.
The definition of winning is always a topic of fierce debate. Whatever it is, no one would agree that it is the situation in Afghanistan now. Winning would most likely look like a stable, democratic Afghanistan, next door to a stable, democratic Pakistan, which is at peace with India over Kashmir. It would mean peaceful and free elections in “Af” and “Pak,” the elimination
of the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s safe havens in Western Pakistan, and most likely their utter destruction, their top leadership being killed or captured.
Here is why that will happen.
1. We will win in Afghanistan because there has been a paradigm shift in policy with Obama’s election. The shift is that everybody now recognizes Afghanistan is a regional problem and must be met with a regional approach. This is a significant break from Bush and Rumsfeld, who viewed Afghanistan strictly through the lens of counter-terrorism. They funded warlords in Afghanistan to maintain stability and focused on trying to kill Al Qaeda leaders. Rumsfeld specifically said he did not want to engage in nation building in Afghanistan. The Bush administration’s focus on Al Qaeda, and later Iraq, distracted the United States’ intellectual resources from the real problems in Afghanistan: the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency’s support of the “Jihadists” in Pakistan.
Now we are having the correct debate, on TV, in the papers, in D.C. When both John McCain and Barack Obama say Pakistan is the problem, you know you’re on to something. The realization, by both parties at the same time, that Pakistan’s security concerns vis a vis India must be addressed in order to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and Al Qaeda is the key to our winning in Afghanistan.
What are Pakistan’s security concerns? It was Pakistan’s “Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Complex” (PMIIC) that created, and continues to maintain and protect, the Taliban. In the 1990s, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) believed they needed to create a “strategic depth” of support into Afghanistan in case the Pakistani army was ever overrun by India’s. Pakistan is 14% Pashtun, while Afghanistan is 44%. The Taliban is a largely Pashtun organization. The Pashtun people live mostly in North West Pakistan and South East Afghanistan. If the Pakistani army was overrun by the much larger Indian army, which had defeated them in virtually every war they ever fought, the Pakistani generals figured they could retreat into the arms of their Pashtun brothers in Afghanistan while they prepared a nuclear counter-attack against the Indians. In addition to that, the PMIIC also created dozens of “Jihadist” groups to battle the Indians in Kashmir. These groups are not regular Pakistani army. Without going into lengthy detail, the Pakistanis and the Indians have been fighting over the Kashmir region since both countries’ independence from Britain in 1946. Pakistan knew they could never drive the Indians out of Kashmir directly, so their long term strategy was to fund terrorist groups who would go to Kashmir and kill Indians on behalf of the Pakistani government, but under the cover that they were independent operators. The thought was that these hit and run terror operations would be so exhausting to India, they would eventually give up and leave Kashmir.
Today, the Pakistanis are still afraid of India and they still want India out of Kashmir. The Pakistani generals think that the US will leave Afghanistan soon, and then they can get right back to installing the Taliban in Afghanistan and inciting their terrorist friends to drive the Indians from Kashmir. The problem with this thinking is that Pakistan’s Taliban friends are friends of Al Qaeda’s. Al Qaeda is not primarily interested in driving the Indians
from Kashmir. They want to install a caliphate over the entire world. One of those terrorist groups is called Lashkar-e-Toiba and was responsible for the Mumbai attack. Other Kashmir Jihadist groups have also claimed responsibility for attempts on former President Musharraf’s life and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, wife of Pakistan’s current president. The Pakistani Taliban has been and continues to be responsible for murder and suicide bombings in Pakistan’s cities. Thus, the Jihadists the ISI created have moved beyond Kashmir.
The problem we have is that the ISI still supports them. They support them because they think we are going to leave. But now that the paradigm shift has happened in Washington, we can now press, from both sides of the aisle, upon Pakistan’s newly legitimate and elected government, that they must rid the PMIIC of its fundamentalist elements. We can now confidently and without partisan bickering, restrain Indian responses to Pakistani terrorist incursions (as we did after Mumbai). And we can finally focus, without insulting the Administration or the opposition in the US, on rebuilding Afghanistan, re-establishing democracy and rule-of-law in Pakistan (which we could not do before because of Bush’s unending support for Musharraf), and convincing the Pakistanis that India is not a threat to them by helping to resolve the dispute in Kashmir.
2. We will win in Afghanistan because we cannot afford to lose. Losing in Afghanistan means we pull out, the Taliban returns and Al Qaeda once again has a safe haven from which to attack us. That puts us right back to 2001, where we started. What’s the point to having a military if we concede to our sworn enemies a base from which to continue to launch attacks against us and our interests? If we withdraw from Afghanistan without resolving Pakistan’s security dilemma, the PMIIC will simply reinstall the Taliban in Afghanistan, or worse, the Taliban, in cooperation with the fundamentalist elements within the PMIIC, will take over the government of Pakistan– including its nuclear arsenal. Failure is not an option.
3. We will win in Afghanistan because there is no force on earth strong enough to drive us out. When we drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan, we spent billions of dollars buying and funneling weapons and ammunition directly to the mujahideen, with the aid of the major European powers, China, Pakistan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. While many countries say they oppose us in general, there are not enough of them with the political will to oppose us in Afghanistan. And even if they did, they do not have the resources to purchase the type and amount of weaponry needed and funnel it to the Taliban. We would certainly find out and stop them. Further, the old sponsors of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, mainly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, no longer have the money or they are our allies. Iran hates the Taliban and Al Qaeda and the Pakistani people will hate them soon enough as they keep murdering and bombing Pakistanis.
We also posses a level of legitimacy the Russians did not have, namely a UN. The Russian occupation of Afghanistan was not seen as justified, whereas our NATO operation is seen by the international community as a legitimate response to an act of aggression.
Ultimately, we will win in Afghanistan because the Afghans want us to stay and help. The Pakistani middle class wants us to stay and help. They know we are the best country on earth, the most decent country on earth, the richest and yet most generous country on earth.
They know that we are the only people who are going to help them rebuild their democracy and that we have the money to do it. The Chinese certainly will not help them build a democracy. The Russian idea of nation building is evident for all to see in what is left of Chechnya. The Europeans do not have the resources. No major power on earth has a stake in the resurgence of the Taliban. So, even if the world does not help as much as we would like, neither will they stand in our way.
Now that Washington and the country is aware of the fact that Afghanistan cannot be solved simply by bombing Al Qaeda and leaving, all minds will focus on how best to rebuild Afghanistan, stabilize Pakistan and resolve Kashmir. Expect debates on increasing troop numbers in Afghanistan, on the probable spike and then decline in casualties as we move against the Taliban and improve security. Expect disagreements about adding more NATO or UN troops, increasing funding for building schools, effective nation building programs and how best to resolve Kashmir. Expect more elections and more talking, and in about a year and a half (after the next Spring offensive) a lot less shooting.
Sam King
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Unite for Sight in Chennai!
This was originally posted from India on January 28, 2009.
Here you see our volunteer opthomolgist resident (far right) next to an Indian residency student. I'm the nearly bald guy next to the Indian opthomologist and the fellow in the yellow shirt is another volunteer. The third volunteer and I are handing out glasses and recording who got glasses.
The kids LOVE seeing foreigners come through.
The weirdest thing is that we keep getting congratulated. In this picture I'm getting thanked by a church with a towel. This picture was before I got a haircut and a shave.
Also at the church. We pay 200 rupees for every camp we go to (the volunteers) which pays for the gas for the van and for our lunch which we always end up eating with our hands. There is a trick to it actually: you pick up the food with your fingers as a spoon and push it into your mouth with your thumb...I am not demonstrating that in this picture.
A happy customer.
Volunteers looking cool in the free shades we brought. The guy in the middle is our driver, Mr. Mutu. He is the resident badass.
Of course, as impressive as this may look, I am not destined to be an opthomologist. It was a good thing the goat was dead, because I ended up stabing the eye through the iris. Oddly enough, that didn't prevent me from finishing the surgery, as the lens is under the iris. But it would have screwed the goat for life.
The place where we did the goat's eye surgery was in a great location. They do not use pig eye, though.
AFTER:
Of course, one of the issues we have had to deal with is a disporportionate amount of glasses donated.
The picture above is of the +1.00 and +1.25 power reading glasses we have for passing out. When the optomotrists hand out glasses, the age of the patient is a huge determining factor, and many people we see fall into the +1.00 and +1.25 range. Unfortunately, we don't get as many of these glasses donated as we need.
We DO however get just about everything else! The box on the far left is +1.75 (btw, this picture is taken AFTER Thanraj, the volunteer coordinator, and I cleaned up and reorganized). The next box is +2.00. The box on the ground below it is also full of +2.00. After that is an empty box of +2.25, then another double set of +2.5, empty +2.75 and then two full boxes of +3.00 and +3.25 which are off the right side of the picture.
So! Besides traveling around Delhi and visiting Pongol celebrations, I bet you are all wondering if I have actually done any volunteering...
In point of fact, I have :)
A typical day here in Chennai consists of waking up at about 7:30 am, getting ready for the day and then heading to Hande Hospital to observe cataract surgeries. The amazing thing about the surgeries is that the head doctor, Dr. Varman, makes it look easy. After a while you start to think it is all the same. In fact, he is the fastest cataract surgeon in the hospital, able to finish a surgery in 7 minutes. We usually see about 4 in half and hour.
After surgery we head to camp, and that's where most of the fun and the best pictures come from.
Here you see our volunteer opthomolgist resident (far right) next to an Indian residency student. I'm the nearly bald guy next to the Indian opthomologist and the fellow in the yellow shirt is another volunteer. The third volunteer and I are handing out glasses and recording who got glasses.
The kids LOVE seeing foreigners come through.The weirdest thing is that we keep getting congratulated. In this picture I'm getting thanked by a church with a towel. This picture was before I got a haircut and a shave.
Also at the church. We pay 200 rupees for every camp we go to (the volunteers) which pays for the gas for the van and for our lunch which we always end up eating with our hands. There is a trick to it actually: you pick up the food with your fingers as a spoon and push it into your mouth with your thumb...I am not demonstrating that in this picture.
A happy customer.Volunteers looking cool in the free shades we brought. The guy in the middle is our driver, Mr. Mutu. He is the resident badass.After camp we sometimes go to the clinic to watch the doctors work. I'm not a medical student so I usually leave that time to the other volunteers. We don't help around the clinic as much as we do at the camp and they are generally really busy.
However, we did get a chance to do some surgery on a goat's eye!
Of course, as impressive as this may look, I am not destined to be an opthomologist. It was a good thing the goat was dead, because I ended up stabing the eye through the iris. Oddly enough, that didn't prevent me from finishing the surgery, as the lens is under the iris. But it would have screwed the goat for life.The place where we did the goat's eye surgery was in a great location. They do not use pig eye, though.Of course, being me, going to camps, watching surgeries and harming innocent goat's eyes is not enough. I also took it upon myself to clean up the office where the eye clinic stored all the free glasses everyone donates.
BEFORE:
AFTER:
Of course, one of the issues we have had to deal with is a disporportionate amount of glasses donated.
The picture above is of the +1.00 and +1.25 power reading glasses we have for passing out. When the optomotrists hand out glasses, the age of the patient is a huge determining factor, and many people we see fall into the +1.00 and +1.25 range. Unfortunately, we don't get as many of these glasses donated as we need.We DO however get just about everything else! The box on the far left is +1.75 (btw, this picture is taken AFTER Thanraj, the volunteer coordinator, and I cleaned up and reorganized). The next box is +2.00. The box on the ground below it is also full of +2.00. After that is an empty box of +2.25, then another double set of +2.5, empty +2.75 and then two full boxes of +3.00 and +3.25 which are off the right side of the picture.Now, when giving out reading glasses it is acceptable to go up or down +0.25 on a prescription, so not having +2.25 and +2.75 is really not that big a deal. According to the opthomologists, there isn't even that big a difference between +1.00 and +1.50.
But empty boxes bother me so I emailed the head of Unite for Sight and now the website has a note for all future :
Eyeglass Note: Uma Eye Clinic has an abundance of eyeglasses with a
prescription of +2.00. Please do not bring +2.00 glasses. Instead, the clinic
needs +1.00, +1.25, +2.25, and +2.75. Additionally, Uma Eye Clinic needs
negative power glasses, but remember not to bring any glasses with a cylinder
prescription (See Instructions For Collecting Eyeglasses for details)
Sweet :)
My final project was to try and get a survey done of the patients who got cataract surgery done so UFS would have some more statistics on their overall impact. Unfortunately, I couldn't finish but there is a chance that my fellow volunteers can carryt he tourch :) Good luck guys!
Anyway, I'm typing this as I'm about to go to the airport and head to Mumbai! NO time for editing!
The Arrival...and a quick trip to Delhi
The story that follows is the story of my quick trip to Delhi on Jan 7th, 2009. As many of you know, I came to India with the intention of volunteering for Unite For Sight in Chennai, starting on January 10th. After that I planned to fly to Zambia to volunteer with Habitat for Humanity on February 2nd.
The problem with this plan was that, according to HFH, I needed a visa to get into Zambia. I checked various Zambian government websites and even spoke with the Zambian High Commissioner's office in Singapore, where I spent Christmas, and they all confirmed this story.
So, naturally, I assumed I needed a visa. Unfortunately the Zambians in Singapore were unable to provide such a visa. The only Zambian embassy capable of such a feat in the nearby area was in Delhi, India...
Lucky for me I was going to India, then, I thought. I re-arranged all my flights so that I arrived in India on Jan 6th. My plan was to then fly from Chennai, where I was volunteering with Unite for Sight, to Delhi on Jan 7 and figure out my visa thing for the next 3 days.
The first part went according to plan. I arrived in Chennai on Jan 6th.
I was greeted by this lovely neon sign above the airport in Chennai. For the uninitiated, the ISO is the International Organization for Standardization (I have NO IDEA why they don't just call themselves the International Standards Organization...).
Normally this sign would have just been viewed as slightly odd, but some friends of mine in Iraq were quite obsessed with getting the Iraqis "ISO certified", so when I arrived in India I was actually aware of the organization's existence.
The fascinating thing about the ISO is that it appears to be quite popular in India. Besides the fact that Chennai's Airport advertised their certification in Neon, many other stores on the streets of Chennai and Delhi also advertised their ISO certification. I don't know to what degree US companies abide by this thing (I assume they all just do it), but it is apparently a HUGE deal everywhere else. Given that many developing countries lack robust regulatory regimes and legal systems, I imagine the ISO enables good companies in developing nations to gain an amount of legitimacy not possible with a simple certification from their home countries.
This makes perfect sense to me, but it actually speaks to something greater, although perhaps not obvious at first glance. I have long held the position that the United States ignores international bodies at its peril. That is because the rest of the world respects them SO much. This neon sign is yet another good example (Singaporeans praying for the UN Security Council to find wisdom on Christmas would be another).
I don't recommend just subjecting ourselves to the whims of China and Russia, but the Iraq war did a lot of damage to the relationship between the UN and the US. I supported the war regardless of the UN's approval, but it's endorsement goes a long way to supporting any intervention's legitimacy, which is very helpful when fighting things like insurgencies (although not fundamental. We are still winning despite the bad start to the Iraq war. Victory creates its own sense of legitimacy).
What I would recommend, though, is to totally dominate the UN. President Obama has made the Ambassador to the UN a cabinet position. That's a good thing in my book only if he uses the UN as it was intended when we created: as a cudgel of righteousness with which to pummel dictators and mass murderers. So far the US has totally lost control of the UN, allowing greats like Cuba, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia to get onto the brand new Human Rights Council (the last one was dissolved because it had been dominated by pretty much the same group of human rights abusers, plus Libya). And the US is not actually on the Council. Although we did get Canada, Japan, Germany and Switzerland on there...they all have great records these days.
The point is, since I see international development and nation building expanding, not retracting, in the future, we had better start taking back control of the international system we created so that we can be more effective with our diplomacy and give our military the legitimacy cover they need if we need to take out another dictator. I think the total death toll from the cholera outbreak alone in Zimbabwae is 2,700 now http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/default.stm.
That doesn't include the number of people Mugabe and his thugs have simply murdered in order to stay in power.
BUT, that's just what I thought about after looking at this neon sign in Chennai.
After dropping off the two suitcases full of glasses I had brought for Unite For Sight, I slept for about 4 hours and then headed right back to the airport to catch a flight to Delhi.
At the airport I picked up a free copy of the Times of India. This picture is a little hard to read, but the main article is clear enough. If you look at that map they have of Pakistan and Afghanistan you will notice a patch of green inbetween. That is what the Times of India has named Talibanistan...
If I had to use one word to describe the state of India's news industry it would be "young." This newspaper was free, so that might be indicative of its quality, but when a major national newspaper succumbs to this kind of sensationalism, in alarms me a little bit. And this is not the only example.
I haven't done an exhaustive analysis of every newspaper in India, but my initial glance at the ones available at the airports have left me with a distinct impression of youth. Most of the articles have the tone of US high school or college level newspapers. I never really realized it because I was comparing British and American news, but news in the US is pretty good. Even FOX, the channel liberals love to hate, actually has some good content, John Stewart's sound bites aside (the Terrorist Fist Jab incident would be one example. The Left went on a crusade after that, forcing the anchor to apologize, but if you actually watched the segment the guest she has one explains the situation perfectly fine and one comes away with an image of Obama as someone who is young and is trying to appeal to a young crowd...which was true and worked).
But so far a lot of Indian newspapers have had this slightly radical tone to them, as if the writers wrote up the articles while having an argument with their friends in a bar. In my next post I'll explain these pictures in more detail, but essentially this paper got in the middle of a labor dispute between the government and gas workers who were striking. That's normal, but the paper has an obvious pro-government bias, to the point of posting advertisements from the government, arguing its case.
It's all democracy in action, I suppose, and it's ok when the stakes are low. But the Pakistani newspapers have the same kind of problem. From what I hear, Pakistani papers have been practically daring India to attack them. It's a miracle the two of them haven't gone to war over Mumbai.
Actually, the Indian press has called for more pressure on Pakistan from the US instead of war, so that is good. But I also found a magazine that had declared its own War on Terror and listed 12 ways the Indian government should combat terrorism (many gleaned from the US's 9-11 report).
This is slightly different in tone, but it is still interesting that the Indian newspapers are reporting on the difficulties of a Non-Resident Indian (people of Indian decent, no matter where they are) working for the US IRS...that was front page news...
ANYWAY, most of this actually happened before I even arrived in Delhi.
Delhi was cool though. I arranged a car and hotel at the airport (ripoff, don't ever do that). When I got to the hotel I immediately used their phone to call the Zambian embassy. I had prepared for this day by printing out everything I would need and emailing the embassy copies of it all in advance. I was ready to go.
The conversation went something like this:
"Hi, I am volunteering with Habitat for Humanity in Zambia in February and I wanted to apply for a visa."
"Please hold."
"OK."
....."Sir?"
"Yes, I'm here."
"You don't need to apply for a visa here. You can get it at the airport in Lusaka."
....."what?"
"You can get it in Lusaka?"
"But they said I had to do all this stuff and it would take weeks."
"Well, it would if you applied through us...but if you just go to Lusaka, you can buy it at the airport."
"Oh. Well, how long can I get a visa for at the airport?"
"Well, many Americans do business in Zambia so you can get a visa for 3 years."
"3 YEARS?? So I don't need to apply at all?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Are you REALLY sure because EVERYONE said I did and I don't want to show up and not get in."
"People call us for this all the time, sir. You can get it at the airport."
"Oh...ok...Well then...I guess I'll just enjoy my next 3 days in Delhi...Maybe I'll go see the Taj Mahal."
"Ok sir. Thank you."
"You're SURE about this right?"
"Yes sir."
"Alright...thanks."
Now, this has happened to me before, notably in Bahrain where I bought a $100 visa before going only to find I could have gotten it for $15 at the airport, so I should have known better. But when the Zambian consulate in Singapore told me I needed it I figured they could be trusted. Obviously I should have trusted the default position which is that the Blue Passport can get you in just about anywhere...except India oddly enough...I had to apply for that one from Singapore...Did I mention that when I did that there were hundreds of Indians in that consulate? There are so many Indias on Earth that they are tons of them EVERYWHERE I go."
With that cleared up I figured I might as well look around the city. I sent out some emails and chatted with my friend, Jason, online. Jason had been to India before and so he recommended an area of Delhi I could find a cheaper hotel.
This is the area he recommended.
This was one of the beds in one of the cheap hotels...wonder what people do around here....?
And people eat lots of meat in India. Many people are Vegetarians, but Non-Vegs are on the rise. A non-veg is what they call meat eaters around here. Apparently that is still considered abnormal so in needs to be classified.
Anyway, I eventually found a decent hotel for a tenth of the price I was paying and with internet, so I decided I'd head back to my hotel and pack up for my move the next day. But first, since I figured I'd be in Delhi for a while, I thought about getting a Lonely Planet guide. I asked around for a book store and was eventually pointed to Connaught Place.
Connaught place ended up being a massive circle with a park in the middle of it and smart-looking clothing stores ringing around it. It was the total opposite of the old city which was a mere 10 minutes away.
The circle was extremely cool. The shops were nice and cheap so I bought a sweater (it was damn cold). I tried to get into the park in the middle of the circle, but terrorists assholes have forced the Indian government to increase security so bags aren't allowed in the circle. I had a bag with stuff I had bought throughout the day in it. I hate terrorists. More on that latter.
Eventually I walked all the way around. I spotted a McDonalds and a KFC as well. The most interesting thing I saw was what books were on sale.
Steve Jobs is popular.
Hillary makes an appearance, along with Trump.
Friedman, Clinton, Mandela, the World is Flat and the story of Google.
The godfather, Harry Potter, Osama
Eventually I took a break on a curb to consult my Lonely Planet. While sitting there two youtes came up and sat next to me. They turned out to be students who spoke pretty good english. I told them what I was up to and they suggested that I use my time to take a small road trip through the "Golden Triangle." I had never heard of it but it is apparently the area between Delhi, the Taj Mahal and the Pink City, south of Delhi. The Youtes suggested I go to the government tourism center and rent a car. They showed me the way and dropped me off, saying goodbye. They didn't even work for the tourism guys. They were just being nice. I figured that was probably a good sign, so I ended up signing up for the tour. It was a little more expensive than just taking the bus, but it also gave me a guaranteed return time to Delhi, which I needed in order to catch my flight back to Chennai.
SO I packed up quick and left Delhi that night so I could see the Taj Mahal at sunrise. But that is the story for my next posting :)
The problem with this plan was that, according to HFH, I needed a visa to get into Zambia. I checked various Zambian government websites and even spoke with the Zambian High Commissioner's office in Singapore, where I spent Christmas, and they all confirmed this story.
So, naturally, I assumed I needed a visa. Unfortunately the Zambians in Singapore were unable to provide such a visa. The only Zambian embassy capable of such a feat in the nearby area was in Delhi, India...
Lucky for me I was going to India, then, I thought. I re-arranged all my flights so that I arrived in India on Jan 6th. My plan was to then fly from Chennai, where I was volunteering with Unite for Sight, to Delhi on Jan 7 and figure out my visa thing for the next 3 days.
The first part went according to plan. I arrived in Chennai on Jan 6th.
I was greeted by this lovely neon sign above the airport in Chennai. For the uninitiated, the ISO is the International Organization for Standardization (I have NO IDEA why they don't just call themselves the International Standards Organization...).
Normally this sign would have just been viewed as slightly odd, but some friends of mine in Iraq were quite obsessed with getting the Iraqis "ISO certified", so when I arrived in India I was actually aware of the organization's existence.
The fascinating thing about the ISO is that it appears to be quite popular in India. Besides the fact that Chennai's Airport advertised their certification in Neon, many other stores on the streets of Chennai and Delhi also advertised their ISO certification. I don't know to what degree US companies abide by this thing (I assume they all just do it), but it is apparently a HUGE deal everywhere else. Given that many developing countries lack robust regulatory regimes and legal systems, I imagine the ISO enables good companies in developing nations to gain an amount of legitimacy not possible with a simple certification from their home countries.
This makes perfect sense to me, but it actually speaks to something greater, although perhaps not obvious at first glance. I have long held the position that the United States ignores international bodies at its peril. That is because the rest of the world respects them SO much. This neon sign is yet another good example (Singaporeans praying for the UN Security Council to find wisdom on Christmas would be another).
I don't recommend just subjecting ourselves to the whims of China and Russia, but the Iraq war did a lot of damage to the relationship between the UN and the US. I supported the war regardless of the UN's approval, but it's endorsement goes a long way to supporting any intervention's legitimacy, which is very helpful when fighting things like insurgencies (although not fundamental. We are still winning despite the bad start to the Iraq war. Victory creates its own sense of legitimacy).
What I would recommend, though, is to totally dominate the UN. President Obama has made the Ambassador to the UN a cabinet position. That's a good thing in my book only if he uses the UN as it was intended when we created: as a cudgel of righteousness with which to pummel dictators and mass murderers. So far the US has totally lost control of the UN, allowing greats like Cuba, Russia, China and Saudi Arabia to get onto the brand new Human Rights Council (the last one was dissolved because it had been dominated by pretty much the same group of human rights abusers, plus Libya). And the US is not actually on the Council. Although we did get Canada, Japan, Germany and Switzerland on there...they all have great records these days.
The point is, since I see international development and nation building expanding, not retracting, in the future, we had better start taking back control of the international system we created so that we can be more effective with our diplomacy and give our military the legitimacy cover they need if we need to take out another dictator. I think the total death toll from the cholera outbreak alone in Zimbabwae is 2,700 now http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/default.stm.
That doesn't include the number of people Mugabe and his thugs have simply murdered in order to stay in power.
BUT, that's just what I thought about after looking at this neon sign in Chennai.
After dropping off the two suitcases full of glasses I had brought for Unite For Sight, I slept for about 4 hours and then headed right back to the airport to catch a flight to Delhi.
At the airport I picked up a free copy of the Times of India. This picture is a little hard to read, but the main article is clear enough. If you look at that map they have of Pakistan and Afghanistan you will notice a patch of green inbetween. That is what the Times of India has named Talibanistan...
If I had to use one word to describe the state of India's news industry it would be "young." This newspaper was free, so that might be indicative of its quality, but when a major national newspaper succumbs to this kind of sensationalism, in alarms me a little bit. And this is not the only example.
I haven't done an exhaustive analysis of every newspaper in India, but my initial glance at the ones available at the airports have left me with a distinct impression of youth. Most of the articles have the tone of US high school or college level newspapers. I never really realized it because I was comparing British and American news, but news in the US is pretty good. Even FOX, the channel liberals love to hate, actually has some good content, John Stewart's sound bites aside (the Terrorist Fist Jab incident would be one example. The Left went on a crusade after that, forcing the anchor to apologize, but if you actually watched the segment the guest she has one explains the situation perfectly fine and one comes away with an image of Obama as someone who is young and is trying to appeal to a young crowd...which was true and worked).
But so far a lot of Indian newspapers have had this slightly radical tone to them, as if the writers wrote up the articles while having an argument with their friends in a bar. In my next post I'll explain these pictures in more detail, but essentially this paper got in the middle of a labor dispute between the government and gas workers who were striking. That's normal, but the paper has an obvious pro-government bias, to the point of posting advertisements from the government, arguing its case.
It's all democracy in action, I suppose, and it's ok when the stakes are low. But the Pakistani newspapers have the same kind of problem. From what I hear, Pakistani papers have been practically daring India to attack them. It's a miracle the two of them haven't gone to war over Mumbai.
Actually, the Indian press has called for more pressure on Pakistan from the US instead of war, so that is good. But I also found a magazine that had declared its own War on Terror and listed 12 ways the Indian government should combat terrorism (many gleaned from the US's 9-11 report).
This is slightly different in tone, but it is still interesting that the Indian newspapers are reporting on the difficulties of a Non-Resident Indian (people of Indian decent, no matter where they are) working for the US IRS...that was front page news...ANYWAY, most of this actually happened before I even arrived in Delhi.
Delhi was cool though. I arranged a car and hotel at the airport (ripoff, don't ever do that). When I got to the hotel I immediately used their phone to call the Zambian embassy. I had prepared for this day by printing out everything I would need and emailing the embassy copies of it all in advance. I was ready to go.
The conversation went something like this:
"Hi, I am volunteering with Habitat for Humanity in Zambia in February and I wanted to apply for a visa."
"Please hold."
"OK."
....."Sir?"
"Yes, I'm here."
"You don't need to apply for a visa here. You can get it at the airport in Lusaka."
....."what?"
"You can get it in Lusaka?"
"But they said I had to do all this stuff and it would take weeks."
"Well, it would if you applied through us...but if you just go to Lusaka, you can buy it at the airport."
"Oh. Well, how long can I get a visa for at the airport?"
"Well, many Americans do business in Zambia so you can get a visa for 3 years."
"3 YEARS?? So I don't need to apply at all?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Are you REALLY sure because EVERYONE said I did and I don't want to show up and not get in."
"People call us for this all the time, sir. You can get it at the airport."
"Oh...ok...Well then...I guess I'll just enjoy my next 3 days in Delhi...Maybe I'll go see the Taj Mahal."
"Ok sir. Thank you."
"You're SURE about this right?"
"Yes sir."
"Alright...thanks."
Now, this has happened to me before, notably in Bahrain where I bought a $100 visa before going only to find I could have gotten it for $15 at the airport, so I should have known better. But when the Zambian consulate in Singapore told me I needed it I figured they could be trusted. Obviously I should have trusted the default position which is that the Blue Passport can get you in just about anywhere...except India oddly enough...I had to apply for that one from Singapore...Did I mention that when I did that there were hundreds of Indians in that consulate? There are so many Indias on Earth that they are tons of them EVERYWHERE I go."
With that cleared up I figured I might as well look around the city. I sent out some emails and chatted with my friend, Jason, online. Jason had been to India before and so he recommended an area of Delhi I could find a cheaper hotel.
This is the area he recommended.
This was one of the beds in one of the cheap hotels...wonder what people do around here....?
And people eat lots of meat in India. Many people are Vegetarians, but Non-Vegs are on the rise. A non-veg is what they call meat eaters around here. Apparently that is still considered abnormal so in needs to be classified.Anyway, I eventually found a decent hotel for a tenth of the price I was paying and with internet, so I decided I'd head back to my hotel and pack up for my move the next day. But first, since I figured I'd be in Delhi for a while, I thought about getting a Lonely Planet guide. I asked around for a book store and was eventually pointed to Connaught Place.
Connaught place ended up being a massive circle with a park in the middle of it and smart-looking clothing stores ringing around it. It was the total opposite of the old city which was a mere 10 minutes away.
The circle was extremely cool. The shops were nice and cheap so I bought a sweater (it was damn cold). I tried to get into the park in the middle of the circle, but terrorists assholes have forced the Indian government to increase security so bags aren't allowed in the circle. I had a bag with stuff I had bought throughout the day in it. I hate terrorists. More on that latter.
Eventually I walked all the way around. I spotted a McDonalds and a KFC as well. The most interesting thing I saw was what books were on sale.
Steve Jobs is popular.
Hillary makes an appearance, along with Trump.
Friedman, Clinton, Mandela, the World is Flat and the story of Google.
The godfather, Harry Potter, Osama
Eventually I took a break on a curb to consult my Lonely Planet. While sitting there two youtes came up and sat next to me. They turned out to be students who spoke pretty good english. I told them what I was up to and they suggested that I use my time to take a small road trip through the "Golden Triangle." I had never heard of it but it is apparently the area between Delhi, the Taj Mahal and the Pink City, south of Delhi. The Youtes suggested I go to the government tourism center and rent a car. They showed me the way and dropped me off, saying goodbye. They didn't even work for the tourism guys. They were just being nice. I figured that was probably a good sign, so I ended up signing up for the tour. It was a little more expensive than just taking the bus, but it also gave me a guaranteed return time to Delhi, which I needed in order to catch my flight back to Chennai.
SO I packed up quick and left Delhi that night so I could see the Taj Mahal at sunrise. But that is the story for my next posting :)
Happy Pongol (or Pongal)!...and the New Year too dammit!
This was originally posted on January 14 2009. I'm moving the posting date for this blog so that it is in chronological order with my life:)
So, while this isn't my first adventure in India, this is my first posting, but this particular cultural experience was worth it.
Here in Tamil Nadu the people are currently celebrating the Harvest Festival of Pongol. This is apparently a big deal because, as the doctors at the Uma Eye Clinic (Unite For Sight's partner down here in Chennai) told me, most of India's people still work in Agriculture or recently came to the cities from the farms. This means they still celebrate the old harvest festivals.
However, for some reason the government of Tamil Nadu, the southern India state of which Chennai is the capital, decided that the Pongol festival should be, as of this year, celebrated as the Tamil New Year as well.
Soooo, what this meant for the Unite For Sight volunteers was that we had nothing to do for the next two days because all the people we'd normally treat would be at home enjoying the festival and not showing up at the eye clinic.
To make sure we didn't waste our experience in India, our UFS administrator hooked us up with a tour agency and that's when the fun started.
First we got on an Auto-Rickshaw, which is a three-wheeled motorcycle with a bench in the back and a cloth cover. It is as terrifying as it sounds and the drivers are absolutely crazy. The only thing I can think to compare them to is Egyptian Cab drivers who are actually crazier, except they're in cars and these guys in India are in cardboard boxes.
Auto-Rickshaw
But the Indian AR drivers are just as much of a pain in negotiating prices as their Egyptian brethren. Although there is one important difference. Most of the time in Egypt you could name a price and if you walked away the driver would come down to your price. In India, the guys just drive away, even when they know they are still getting a deal. To this day I have not figured that out.
Of course in Egypt we didn't even agree on a price. We just paid whatever was fair at the end of the ride and walked away. So far in India I have had one success with that method but it has not been tested to the fullest, especially since I don't know the price/distance of most places I go.
Anyway, on this particular day the AR situation was pretty straightforward. There was the normal scam but eventually we got to the Tour Agency we were looking for.
When we got there we arranged for a tour around the city for the next day, but to compensate us for the fact that we couldn't go on the tour that day, the tour guys told us they would take us to the Pongol dance festival going on right then, and they'd do it for free!
Now, that was the first indication that something fishy was going on. NO ONE does anything for free in India (except the one dude who took my Monkey picture). But we went along for the ride because we wanted to see the traditional dancing, so we headed off in the car to the Pongol festival.
When we arrived people with walkie-talkies started directing us to go places. Normally I'd object to being hearded around when trying to attend a cultural event. However, for me the hearding was the cultural event. We started to notice that everywhere we went government-types were maneuvering us in front of cameras. Eventually we shuffled onto stange and presented like an exhibition ourselves. The pictures below describe it in less than 1000 words.
This is what my friends looked like on stage. The black girl right in the middle is whose camera I'm using and the blond girl to her right whose face is hidden is another volunteer.
The man in the middle is the government guy who was directing the "foreigners" into the right position for the photo-op.
This is the mass of photographers that we were looking at from the stage.
And here are the security forces.
This is the peacock who was dancing around us.
After the photo-op was taken to prove that the government sponsored cultural event had lots of international attention, a reporter from a Delhi Radio station interviewed my friends and I.
I tried to name drop Unite For Sight so that perhaps they could get some airtime too, but I'm not sure the woman interviewing us (far left) cared. She asked what we thought of the event and we were extremely kind to it, saying it was a great way to learn about the culture. After she stopped recording I tried to ask question in a way to imply that I thought the whole thing was a farcical publicity stunt, but she either already knew that or didn't care. I hope the quotes she edits out are good...apparently they're going to make the news somewhere.
After all that madness we were shuffled around a little more to take pics with peopel cooking traditional food and what not. There were also other exhibits showing how great the Tamil Nadu ruling party was.
This is an advertisement for the Moon Mission undertaken by the Indians last year. It was posted by the Department of Education. The ruling party in Tamil Nadu is the DMK. The opposition is called the Anna DMK or AIADMK and is an off-shoot of DMK. The moon mission was launched from a state near Chennai and the DMK is most likely trying to capitalize on it's success.
A quick wikipedia search puts this all in perspective:
The current DMK-led Government of Tamil Nadu abolished the traditional Tamil calendar in February 2008 citing a so-called but disputed proclamation in 1920s by a group of so-called Atheists under leadership of Periyar E. V. Ramasamy who assembled in Madurai and adopted first day of Thai Month as first day of the Tamil Calendar. The Tamil Nadu Government has ordered the Tiruvalluvar Era as official Tamil Calendar for the state and abolished the Tamil years used for several millennia. The new year has been changed to begin with Pongal day during month of Thai[1]. This controversial move however has no public support [2] and the traditional calendar that begins in April remains very much in use [3]. The opposition AIADMK has vowed to restore the traditional Tamil calendar when it assumes power. The present state government's move has also been challenged in court [4].
So the answer is, the government types are trying to sell their new calender to the people of Tamil Nadu. They don't really care if tourists learn anything about Tamil culture (some might, but certainly not all). What they want is to show that their new artificial culture has international appeal. So glad I could help.
I got Garland-ed...
But we did at least get to see a nice beach that was nearby. It actually had pretty nice waves and if I'd had a boogie board I might have been able to teach these Indians a thing or two...none of them ventured out past the shorebreak!
So, while this isn't my first adventure in India, this is my first posting, but this particular cultural experience was worth it.
Here in Tamil Nadu the people are currently celebrating the Harvest Festival of Pongol. This is apparently a big deal because, as the doctors at the Uma Eye Clinic (Unite For Sight's partner down here in Chennai) told me, most of India's people still work in Agriculture or recently came to the cities from the farms. This means they still celebrate the old harvest festivals.
However, for some reason the government of Tamil Nadu, the southern India state of which Chennai is the capital, decided that the Pongol festival should be, as of this year, celebrated as the Tamil New Year as well.
Soooo, what this meant for the Unite For Sight volunteers was that we had nothing to do for the next two days because all the people we'd normally treat would be at home enjoying the festival and not showing up at the eye clinic.
To make sure we didn't waste our experience in India, our UFS administrator hooked us up with a tour agency and that's when the fun started.
First we got on an Auto-Rickshaw, which is a three-wheeled motorcycle with a bench in the back and a cloth cover. It is as terrifying as it sounds and the drivers are absolutely crazy. The only thing I can think to compare them to is Egyptian Cab drivers who are actually crazier, except they're in cars and these guys in India are in cardboard boxes.
Auto-RickshawBut the Indian AR drivers are just as much of a pain in negotiating prices as their Egyptian brethren. Although there is one important difference. Most of the time in Egypt you could name a price and if you walked away the driver would come down to your price. In India, the guys just drive away, even when they know they are still getting a deal. To this day I have not figured that out.
Of course in Egypt we didn't even agree on a price. We just paid whatever was fair at the end of the ride and walked away. So far in India I have had one success with that method but it has not been tested to the fullest, especially since I don't know the price/distance of most places I go.
Anyway, on this particular day the AR situation was pretty straightforward. There was the normal scam but eventually we got to the Tour Agency we were looking for.
When we got there we arranged for a tour around the city for the next day, but to compensate us for the fact that we couldn't go on the tour that day, the tour guys told us they would take us to the Pongol dance festival going on right then, and they'd do it for free!
Now, that was the first indication that something fishy was going on. NO ONE does anything for free in India (except the one dude who took my Monkey picture). But we went along for the ride because we wanted to see the traditional dancing, so we headed off in the car to the Pongol festival.
When we arrived people with walkie-talkies started directing us to go places. Normally I'd object to being hearded around when trying to attend a cultural event. However, for me the hearding was the cultural event. We started to notice that everywhere we went government-types were maneuvering us in front of cameras. Eventually we shuffled onto stange and presented like an exhibition ourselves. The pictures below describe it in less than 1000 words.
This is what my friends looked like on stage. The black girl right in the middle is whose camera I'm using and the blond girl to her right whose face is hidden is another volunteer.
The man in the middle is the government guy who was directing the "foreigners" into the right position for the photo-op.
This is the mass of photographers that we were looking at from the stage.
And here are the security forces.
This is the peacock who was dancing around us.
After the photo-op was taken to prove that the government sponsored cultural event had lots of international attention, a reporter from a Delhi Radio station interviewed my friends and I.
I tried to name drop Unite For Sight so that perhaps they could get some airtime too, but I'm not sure the woman interviewing us (far left) cared. She asked what we thought of the event and we were extremely kind to it, saying it was a great way to learn about the culture. After she stopped recording I tried to ask question in a way to imply that I thought the whole thing was a farcical publicity stunt, but she either already knew that or didn't care. I hope the quotes she edits out are good...apparently they're going to make the news somewhere.
After all that madness we were shuffled around a little more to take pics with peopel cooking traditional food and what not. There were also other exhibits showing how great the Tamil Nadu ruling party was.
This is an advertisement for the Moon Mission undertaken by the Indians last year. It was posted by the Department of Education. The ruling party in Tamil Nadu is the DMK. The opposition is called the Anna DMK or AIADMK and is an off-shoot of DMK. The moon mission was launched from a state near Chennai and the DMK is most likely trying to capitalize on it's success.
A quick wikipedia search puts this all in perspective:
The current DMK-led Government of Tamil Nadu abolished the traditional Tamil calendar in February 2008 citing a so-called but disputed proclamation in 1920s by a group of so-called Atheists under leadership of Periyar E. V. Ramasamy who assembled in Madurai and adopted first day of Thai Month as first day of the Tamil Calendar. The Tamil Nadu Government has ordered the Tiruvalluvar Era as official Tamil Calendar for the state and abolished the Tamil years used for several millennia. The new year has been changed to begin with Pongal day during month of Thai[1]. This controversial move however has no public support [2] and the traditional calendar that begins in April remains very much in use [3]. The opposition AIADMK has vowed to restore the traditional Tamil calendar when it assumes power. The present state government's move has also been challenged in court [4].
So the answer is, the government types are trying to sell their new calender to the people of Tamil Nadu. They don't really care if tourists learn anything about Tamil culture (some might, but certainly not all). What they want is to show that their new artificial culture has international appeal. So glad I could help.
I got Garland-ed...
But we did at least get to see a nice beach that was nearby. It actually had pretty nice waves and if I'd had a boogie board I might have been able to teach these Indians a thing or two...none of them ventured out past the shorebreak!
Beijing on the eve of the Olympics...
The only thing I can say about my vacation is that it was probably two
of the best weeks of my entire life. They were certainly an
interesting two weeks and every day brought a new experience that I
never saw coming. Politicians can skip to the end for a summary on
China...but you'll miss the fun:)
And while I enjoyed Hong Kong and Singapore the most, Beijing was
certainly the most fascinating.
I started my trip to Beijing from the Manila airport. I was leaving
the Philippines after 5 days hanging out down in terrorist-infested
Mindanao(there is a story about that), and I was looking forward to my
trip out to Beijing. At the Manila airport I even got excited when I
saw a sign for Guangzhou (Under Siege 2: Dark Territory "The
fertilizer plant in Guangzhou is a Chemical weapons facility
masquerading as a fertilizer plant. We know this. The Chinese know
that we know. But we make believe that we don't know, so the Chinese
make believe that they believe that we don't know...but know that we
know...Everybody knows."...never mind.
Anyway when I finally got to the head of the line to check into my
flight I discovered that I needed a visa to get into Beijing. Now,
despite feeling stupid that I didn't check on the visa situation I
thought it was curious that for the Olympics the Chinese decided to
crack down as opposed to opening up. Then again, as with everything
in China, they're Communists, so it shouldn't have surprised me.
At this point I was in panic mode, but because I was on vacation it
really didnt matter! I left the airport and headed straight for the
Chinese Embassy in Manila. Unfortunately it was Saturday so it was
closed. So I did the next obvious thing: looked for a travel agent.
Since this was a Sam vacation I walked down the street and there was a
travel agent. See, I figured that if I had to get to China, I would
have to go to Hong Kong first to get a visa. I figured that Hong
Kong, since it enjoyed acting like its own country, would have a
different visa system. My hunch was confirmed by the travel agent who
said that I could get into Hong Kong for free. All I had to do was
buy a plane ticket to Hong Kong for the flight in 4 hours.
So after confirming my favorite theory (lots of money can get you just
about everything) I took the next 4 hours to look for a Philippine
Soccer Jersey. Unfortunately the Filipinos are totally unimpressed
with their national team so none of the 8 sports stores I went to had
a soccer jersey (however, one did have an ad for Rudy Giuliani giving
a speech about leadership in times of crisis).
At the Manila Airport, (the terminal Philippine Airlines flies out of
is very nice), I grabbed some magazines and waited for my flight. The
best article I read turned out to be about me. It was in the recent
Time Magazine and it spoke about the Beijing Olympics. Besides
mentioning that half the cars in Beijing are banned from the roads
(more on that), it also pointed out that lots of hapless tourists got
stuck outside China without visas they didn't know they needed (there
was a guy in front of me at the airport who found out the hard way,
just like I did).
See, the best thing about Communists is their penchant for shooting
themselves in the foot. Instead of actually opening up their country
to foreign journalists' and tourists' scrutiny, the Commies in China
have decided that it would be better to totally crackdown and ban tons
of tourists from entering Beijing. This means that instead of hotels
overflowing with tourists, the hotels are half empty in Beijing.
Chinese nationalists will scream that media coverage of their country
is unfair (which should make any American roll on the floor laughing).
But they should be totally ashamed that their country is so
embarrassing it can't handle intense, honest media scrutiny.
As much as Americans hate Guantanamo, there was at least the argument
made that the methods used there (waterboarding, a form of torture
outlawed by the Geneva Conventions) garnered information which
protected American lives. Now, Americans can agree or disagree on
that point (the two Presidential candidates have agreed it was
ineffective) but the Chinese can't even discuss the wicked acts their
government commits. Protecting international war criminals like Omar
Al-Bashir of Sudan, supporting the Genocide in Darfur by giving Sudan
political cover, furthering the suffering of the Zimbabweans by
selling guns and also giving political cover to Robert Mugabe are just
a couple of the crimes the Chinese People's government commits in
their name. The Communists also commit mass expulsion of their own
citizens out of areas of Beijing in order to build stadiums and make
the place "look nicer" (they are supposedly buying new houses for all
those people...because projects always work...more on that). They
also expelled thousands of people from the bank of the Yangtze river
to build a damn of dubious value.
Then there is the oppression of the Tibetans, the arrest and torture
of political dissidents, the massive corruption of local Communist
officials throughout the country side and the cover up of the
increasing unrest of the average Chinese farmer (who were responsible
for the original People's Revolution, in case the Communists in China
forgot that). Add all that up and China looks set to implode on the
foundation of lies the country has allowed itself to believe (like,
that they're still Communists. Really their just Capitalists living
under a terrible cabal of dictators).
Of course, there is always the argument that the China is too big and
unwieldy for political freedom and that the Communist party has lots
of dissenting voices within it that give it some ability to
self-critique. But the first point implies that China is held
together only by military might and that it is egging for a Civil war
and the second point is washed away by the fact that China can't
handle any criticism at all, lest the people catch on to the "1984"
lifestyle they're living.
But beating up on China is pointless. The Chinese people have no
control over their actions and the government is comfortable to fund
it's economic expansion on the back of Darfurian genocide. Heck, they
can always point out that we killed most of the Native
Americans...like boys who grow up to beat their wives just like their
dad did. Why learn from mistakes if we can remake them for twice the
cost!
Cutting to the chase, I eventually got on my plane to Hong Kong. Hong
Kong itself was awesome (I was there for three days). I met tons of
cool kids who I ended up hanging out with when I got back from
Beijing, but that's another story. In Hong Kong I applied for my visa
on Monday and got it Tuesday morning (again, with lots of money...I
also had to buy a plane ticket and reserve a hotel room and give a
phone number of a friend in China in order to get a visa).
Beijing: Day 1
Beijing was something else. The airport was massive. The air
conditioning at the airport was also broken...brilliant. Just in time
for the Olympics.
On a more Capitalist note, I met a very cute Chinese girl at the
airport who helped me by pointing me to the baggage claim, letting me
use her cell phone to call my friends and driving me into the city.
She owned a Porsche and she was very nervous about things like losing
her parking ticket. She gave her ex-boyfriend (broke up with him that
morning) 200,000 yuan to gamble in Macau, and she was scared she'd
have to pay a little extra for parking. Capitalism everywhere.
Anyway, she found the ticket and we met her friend outside the airport
and we drove on to Beijing. She explained also that she was nervous
about the cops.
See, the commies, in all their wisdom, decided that instead of solving
the pollution problem in Beijing, they would simply state that all
cars with license plates ending in Even numbers could drive on the
road on Even days of the month. On Odd days of the month, only cars
with Odd last numbers on their license plates. Not exactly a green
solution...but certainly a commie one:) Why let the market invent
cleaner cars when you have enough authority to demand that people
don't drive on certain days.
On the way into the city we saw a huge pillar of lights surrounded by
spot lights which shined brightly through the polluted foggy
night...my friend said it was a factory smoke stack...they lit it up
like a Christmas tree to beautify it...I must say it worked...I just
wondered how many green house gas emissions the lights generated...and
since most power in China is coal power, it probably generated tons of
pollution too, but perhaps outside the city.
The next phase of the trip out of the airport was meeting my friends
in Beijing. The girl I was driving with talked with my buddies on the
phone until we finally found the place (which involved the girl
backing up in the middle of a small four-way intersection to get down
the right street. FRIGGEN' AWESOME!)
The bar we ended up at was quite hilarious. The entire street was
actually bars and the cars were parked on the sidewalk. Americans
made up the majority of the patrons at all the bars. The one we went
to was on the roof and had two swings in it...So we had some drinks,
danced some salsa, swung on the swings, yelled about not wasting
money on Ex-es; ya know, capitalist stuff.
Eventually I caught a relatively cheap cab to my hotel (which was nice
and empty) and crashed out.
Great Wall: Day 2
The next morning I woke up to discover that I had ordered fried rice
and left the tub running. Luckily the tub had an overflow valve which
turned the water off and the room service staff was perfectly happy to
send me up new fried rice for breakfast without charging me double!
Great service for those wasteful capitalist pigs!!
So after a fried rice breakfast and a bath I decided to make a mad
dash for the Great Wall of China. This was of course a totally poorly
planned mistake, but being a Sam Vacation, it really didn't matter! I
can't really do anything wrong on my own vacation!
So I went to the telephone store and bought a sim card (in Hong Kong I
got one at a 7-11; in Syria I had to give a thumb print; in China and
Singapore I had to scan my passport...it is interesting the various
degrees of paranoia each country has...in the US we have to sign up
for entire plans, although you can buy pre-paid phones. Anyway, my
rant about how much American telecoms suck is for another time). Then
I caught the Subway to the main bus terminal. Subway was cool, but
very much in Chinese
At the bus terminal I ran around pointing at my Lonely Planet guide
until someone told me the right direction. Eventually I found a bus
bound for the right city. The bus itself was as efficient as any
Chinatown Bus in the US. It even had a list of all the stops posted
on the back of the bus.
When I woke up I was in Miyun. When I got off the bus I was
immediately surround by cab drivers. For the next 15 minutes I spent
my time writing numbers and places and times on a piece of paper
attempting to negotiate payment and hours with the cabbies. Thank god
they used arabic numerals. At one point a nice Chinese girl who spoke
some English showed up. She helped smooth out the communications.
When I finally settled on a place and time, I thanked her and she
responded, "Welcome to China!"
That, I think, speaks to something I did love about China. Despite
the government being an abhorrent dictatorship, the people were
extremely kind. And they very much wanted me to like them and their
country. The significance of that struck home for me.
See, governments, even dictatorships, are made of people gathered from
the societies they govern. Even countries under occupation, such as
Palestine (yes I understand it may or may not be a country) or Iraq
(occupation may be a little strong), still have administrators that
are from the population. Despite a few obscure exceptions,
governments are made up of the people they govern. The bureaucrats
still have to go home and get an earful from their mother. Their
friends are still the people they make traffic laws for.
Chinese bureaucrats go home to a people who understand that governing
them is hard, and they allow them a certain leeway. The problem with
China is not that it's a dictatorship. The problem is that the
Chinese people are ok with that for now. They have come to terms with
the fact that, in order for them to rise, they will have to suck
resources out of countries run by even more abhorrent dictators. They
are a people of history, and one of the oldest historic activities is
war. I have read in many places that Confucianism supports strong
government, or something like that. That may be one explanation for
China.
For me, I think the people have just accepted it. As long as they
don't see it (which the Chinese government takes care of by blocking
the Internet with the Great Firewall of China) they don't care (heck,
"All these years and the Chinese are still building walls," as my
brother says. Don't they remember how poorly the last one worked?).
They have economic prosperity for now, so they are comfortable. The
Olympics are coming, so they know they are going to be under
additional scrutiny. They just have to wait for it to blow over.
After my cultural experience, I continued to the Great Wall at
Simatai. The area leading up to the wall was all brand new. It had
brand new signs in English and maps and pretty tourist things.
And then there was the ski lift with no locks. Now, a normal ski lift
is pretty dangerous, but you are usually over snow. This lift, while
it did have a door, chairs and railings, was over sharp mountain edges
and hard rocks. If I had fallen out I would have died. And falling
out would have been easy. If a tourist dies in that lift during the
Olympics, it will make international news. The Chinese appear to be
betting it won't happen.
At the top of the lift I had to walk. "The Wall can be intense," my
friend had warned me, with a certain reverence reserved for one of the
biggest man-made structures on Earth, if not the biggest. He wasn't
kidding. With my plastic bag full of water bottles ripping and my
papers, Lonely Planet and Economist falling all over the place, I had
to do a drastic rearranging of my pockets. Along the way I got
laughed at by the tens of Chinese people working on the wall (there
are Chinese people everywhere in China). "Three bottles of water!
AHAHAHAH," was one of my favorites.
When I got to the top there were still hawkers selling plaques saying
"I climbed the Great Wall." There was even a guy selling ice cream,
but he didnt want his picture taken.
Eventually I got to the end of the accessible part of the wall. And
that's where the fun started. Sitting by the sign that said "500 Yuan
fine for crossing" was a Canadian backpacker with a big yellow pot
plant printed on a green shirt. He was arguing a bribe with the
Chinese guard that would allow him to hike to the top of the next
peek. I was obviously interested so I jumped right into the
bargaining (all the while the guard's kid was running around, hanging
out with Dad). The negotiations ended up failing as the sun started
to set, but it was good to meet a fellow backpacker at least. After
an email exchange I continued on my marry way. My Canadian friend
ended up trying to stay the night on the wall but told me later that
he got kicked off at 8pm.
So I ran back down the mountain minus two bottles of water and caught
the insane lift back down to the bottom of the mountain. I met up
with my cabbie, who was very pleased that I had kept my word and
returned on time, and I headed back to Miyun. From Miyun I caught a
bus to Beijing. Since I was totally exhausted from my Great Wall run,
I ended up meeting one of my friends (who happened to have founded the
first Apple store in China) and we sat down for some McDonald's and a
chat. After that I went home and totally collapsed.
Tiananmen Sq: Day 3
I have never felt more Communist in my life than in Tiananmen Sq. In
fact, I'm still diggin' the Proletariat. I really want to buy the
shirt my cousin has which shows all the Commie big wigs wearing funny
hats and holding red plastic cups under the caption: "The Communist
Party." Then I want to wear that shirt around Beijing...I'd probably
be arrested.
As it was, I did one better. I took the Beijing metro to the heart of
Communism on Earth and I took a picture in front of the Forbidden City
with a big poster of Mao behind me while wearing a bright red shirt.
The shirt had a beer cap on it which had "The Economist" printed on
it. Below the beer cap there was a caption: "Think Responsibly."
Even now this marvelous picture can be seen on my facebook profile.
After some priceless picture taking, I continued on a walking tour of
TS. The next best thing after the big picture of Mao is the endless
amount of young Chinese army recruits who march around TS continually.
I mean, they just make you feel so commie. Most of the soldiers are
young and probably don't even know why they are forced to march around
TS. In the tunnels under the roads connecting TS to the Forbidden
City, there were metal detectors as well. I'm not sure who the
Chinese are afraid of. The Tibetans are non-violent and the Taiwanese
have a country to retaliate against. Is Al-Qaeda gonna bomb China
during the Olympics?
Anyway, in TS I got my picture taken with some random Chinese people
who wanted to take a picture of me. I also got to wander around the
Forbidden City and get ripped off by all the merchants selling junk in
TS.
Commie Visit to Tiananmen Sq - Check
Hilariously ironic picture taken at the Forbidden City in front of Mao - Check
I moved on.
The next stop was to find lunch. Along the way I ran into the
"Beijing Book store." At least that is what the Lonely Planet called
it. What the Chinese called it was the "Book BUILDING!!!"
In Commiestan, everything must be massive and centralized! The Book
Building had about 5 floors. When I walked in the door someone
immediately greeted me in English and asked if I needed help. Instead
of going upstairs, I figured I'd check out the basement first. It was
down here that I found mostly American books on New Age philosophy and
Harry Potter, oddly enough.
I didn't check the upper floors cause I was hungry.
Lucky for me there was a massive underground mall across the street
from the book store. In there I found a soccer jersey. I had to have
my friend translate over the phone for me. It was at that moment that
I thought over-the-phone international translations would be pretty
clever. The business model is tough though, so more thought is
required.
I also discovered Beijing cuisine, which is apparently legendary. I
found it in a mass eatery where I had to take pictures of the food
that I wanted to try and explain it to the cashier. To the store's
credit they understood exactly what I was trying to do and one of the
guys walked me through the whole process. I ordered my food and
drinks, sat down and they brought me my food.
It was amazing. It was also fun because there were two Chinese kids
driving their parents nuts right next to me and one of the kids had
"2008" carved into his hair. I assume it was because of the Olympics,
but who knows? The point is that the Chinese have lots of children,
despite the one child policy, and their population is extremely young,
at least in Beijing.
It was just about this time that I started worrying about the US's
role in the face of a rising China. The reason I worried about it was
because I realized that China's population was not only HUGE, like
everything in the country, it was also young. That means that their
labor pool will remain massive and get larger for a long time to come.
After finishing my meal and leaving, followed by 100 staring eyes (I
also noticed that right after lunch time all the restaurant staff
grabbed naps at various tables or took breaks playing cards...very
odd), I started to ponder the advantages and disadvantages America and
Asia had on one another.
I created a list:
Asian Advantages:
Huge skilled and unskilled labor force
Massive education systems producing tons of engineers and scientists
(this includes Hong Kong, Singapore, India and China)
Great Airlines (at least Singapore and Hong Kong...the rest may be struggling)
Fantastic cellular networks. And this is true. American cell
networks are totally useless. We need to get into GSM or whatever
those little SIM cards are.
Momentum - No matter what, every city I visited (Beijing, Hong Kong,
Singapore, Kuala Lumpor) they all had an undeniable energy about
them. I'm worried they will simply over take us with their work
ethic. They also love to integrate technology into their personal
lives far quicker than we do, although they still struggle with
computers in businesses. The sports store in the huge underground
mall had 7 stores and only two cashiers with two computers for the
whole store. It worked, but seemed outdated.
American Advantages:
Excellent Infrastructure such as hardline phones, internet, well managed cities
My fear with this one is that our infrastructure is old, like the
bridge problem we now have to fix
Highly efficient financial systems
This advantage is suffering big time under the mortgage crisis,
so I'm worried about this guy
Skilled Labor
We have an excellent labor force, but our education system is
struggling to produce the best in the world. Many of our skilled
workers are immigrants and we are starting to make immigration laws to
keep them out, which is bad.
Political Freedom and stability - this we got in spades. Even with
The Patriot Act, we are centuries ahead of everyone else in the world
on political freedom, and I do mean centuries
Dynamic economy - no matter what, if we stick to the principles of the
Constitution and open our economy to new cultural influences (read
immigrants) and to Foreign Direct Investment, like people buying
Budweiser, we will be fine.
Growing population - unlike Eurpoe, Americans are breeding like crazy.
We just need to make sure we have an educated, outgoing population,
instead of an insulated terrified one that doesn't want to learn
Spanish. OH NO, OTHER LANGUAGES!!!! HOW DO THOSE CRAZIES EVEN KNOW
WHAT EACH OTHER ARE SAYING!!!
Free Media - I rage against what I see as a ridiculous liberal bias
in CNN and conservative bias of FOX as much as anyone, but in the end
our Media really does love digging up crap. And that crap-digging
forces everyone to be more honest. It forces people to actually live
up to their ideals because everyone is watching. Look at our
presidential race? Everyone in the world knows about it because we
dig up EVERYTHING!! They think we're crazy, but they don't think
we're crazy while their voting because most people live in
pathetically corrupt dictatorships or sham-democracies. Free Media is
good and fun. I love it.
OK, after the underground mall and the big bookstore, I went to look
for the fabled underground city.
This is where it got interesting.
I took the metro to some random stop that was near the underground
city. According to Lonely Planet (LP), the tunnels were built because
the Chinese were afraid of nuclear war with Russia...go Commie unity.
I came out of the stop and began following my LP map to the location.
I passed a great "Blind man massage" parlor, which I did not go for,
although I have heard they're good. In fact given my love of
massages, I probably should have tried it simply to be a
connoisseur...but I didn't.
Instead, I continued my search, which was beginning to take me away
from the main streets and into the back streets. Eventually I asked a
guard who asked an old lady (who tried to sell me a hat) and they
pointed me down the road I was walking.
It started to become very apparent to me that Beijing, outside the
fancy metro and the Olympic stadium, was terribly run down and poor.
I started noticing the spiderweb of wires endemic to developing
countries when people illegally tap the electricity lines. No one
seems to care...especially since the government pays for it all
anyway.
The buildings were also shanties, much the same as the run down cities
I had seen in the back deserts of Layounne in Western Sahara.
Eventually I found the underground city. It was closed. But luckily
the trip was not wasted. I ran into an Olympic volunteer who spoke
very good English. I asked him why it was closed and he said because
the construction in the area had made the tunnels unstable. The smirk
on his face gave me the impression he was feeding the company line.
It seemed more like the Commies didn't want to advertise their
paranoia and penchant for large hand-built wastes of time (don't think
about American nuclear drills, bomb shelters, similar tunnels under
Georgetown University and the Cuban Missile Crisis...of course, like I
said about the free media, we can still see our paranoia, and learn
from it).
Anyway, there was no construction going on. I pointed that out.
He said, "No the government is destroying this entire area. All the
people are being given new homes somewhere else."
.....
Everyone likes the Projects.
That rumor of Chinese mass internal population transfer being
confirmed, I switched to the topic of Olympic volunteers. I didn't
cover this totally before, but as you will all notice soon on the
news, Beijing is FULL of kids wearing Blue Shirts and standing around.
They are at every metro stop, the airport and at the major Olympic
venues. The guy I was talking to was not from Beijing. He came to
the city to volunteer. But the Commies didn't pay for him. All they
gave him was a t-shirt and lunch. He had to make ends meet by
translating part-time. I have no idea what the others did, especially
since most of them didn't speak English any better than I spoke
Chinese. Of course, at this point they still had a few weeks of
training before the Olympics, and they are gonna need it.
But it is amazing that the youth of China turned out for this. They
were certainly everywhere.
In the end, I asked to take a picture with my new friend.
He declined
...probably because he was afraid of getting killed by his government.
I got his email. Also dangerous, but perhaps he knew that the Great
Chinese Firewall had about as much of a chance of keeping him under
control as the Great Wall had of keeping out the Mongols.
For anyone going to Beijing: I challenge you to step out of the nice
Commie box they are putting the Olympics in and take a stroll through
the city. Start by making friends with the volunteers. They are
China's future.
After the failed attempt to find the Underground CommieVille, I went
to the cAppleIST store, I mean the Apple Store...only one in China.
Great place, excellent bandwidth. After hanging out for a bit at the
bar, I met up with my Chinese friend from the Airport who took me to
dinner. Like I said, very nice people. And the dinner was fantastic.
Lonely Planet is right. One of the best things about Beijing is the
food. It is awesome!
After dinner I met up with my American friends and hit the club scene.
The first club we tried had been torn down. Woops.
The second one was a Russian gangster place where we got searched and
metal detected before entering. The Russians are crazy. Americans
have reputations of being aloof and arrogant travelers. Russians have
a reputation of shooting people.
After much fun, I went home and ordered some fried rice...and then
promptly fell asleep.
Airport: Day 4
In the morning, I got my fried rice from the poor waiter who had
waited outside my door all night trying to wake me up. I tipped him.
I also felt bad.
Eventually I hit the cAppleIST, I mean APPLE, Store again and did some
email. I then went to lunch with my friend (started the Apple Store)
and his co-workers, one of whom went to the high school across the
street from mine in Hawaii. Yeah, not surprised anymore. Actually I
was, HOW COOL IS THAT!!?
The food rocked (again) but eventually I had to book it for the
airport. Luckily on my way there I passed a Hooters. Thank god they
made it to China.
Summary:
Beijing rocked and I need to go back to the Great Wall, because like
Nixon said, it's a great wall. However, the Chinese people are still
dancing on the edge of a knife. Their economic expansion is bringing
them untold riches, but those farmers who can't own their own land are
getting relatively poorer. They have abandoned Communism to pursue
"We understand governing is hard-ism" and that is going to last until
the boom stops. A war over Taiwan could galvanize the country, or it
could tear it apart, depending on how the Chinese manage the
propaganda over who started the war. But it this day and age, I think
the glorious transparency of the Internet is going to get those
Commies eventually.
But the Chinese people still kick ass! I will be back many times in my life.
Lots'a'love
of the best weeks of my entire life. They were certainly an
interesting two weeks and every day brought a new experience that I
never saw coming. Politicians can skip to the end for a summary on
China...but you'll miss the fun:)
And while I enjoyed Hong Kong and Singapore the most, Beijing was
certainly the most fascinating.
I started my trip to Beijing from the Manila airport. I was leaving
the Philippines after 5 days hanging out down in terrorist-infested
Mindanao(there is a story about that), and I was looking forward to my
trip out to Beijing. At the Manila airport I even got excited when I
saw a sign for Guangzhou (Under Siege 2: Dark Territory "The
fertilizer plant in Guangzhou is a Chemical weapons facility
masquerading as a fertilizer plant. We know this. The Chinese know
that we know. But we make believe that we don't know, so the Chinese
make believe that they believe that we don't know...but know that we
know...Everybody knows."...never mind.
Anyway when I finally got to the head of the line to check into my
flight I discovered that I needed a visa to get into Beijing. Now,
despite feeling stupid that I didn't check on the visa situation I
thought it was curious that for the Olympics the Chinese decided to
crack down as opposed to opening up. Then again, as with everything
in China, they're Communists, so it shouldn't have surprised me.
At this point I was in panic mode, but because I was on vacation it
really didnt matter! I left the airport and headed straight for the
Chinese Embassy in Manila. Unfortunately it was Saturday so it was
closed. So I did the next obvious thing: looked for a travel agent.
Since this was a Sam vacation I walked down the street and there was a
travel agent. See, I figured that if I had to get to China, I would
have to go to Hong Kong first to get a visa. I figured that Hong
Kong, since it enjoyed acting like its own country, would have a
different visa system. My hunch was confirmed by the travel agent who
said that I could get into Hong Kong for free. All I had to do was
buy a plane ticket to Hong Kong for the flight in 4 hours.
So after confirming my favorite theory (lots of money can get you just
about everything) I took the next 4 hours to look for a Philippine
Soccer Jersey. Unfortunately the Filipinos are totally unimpressed
with their national team so none of the 8 sports stores I went to had
a soccer jersey (however, one did have an ad for Rudy Giuliani giving
a speech about leadership in times of crisis).
At the Manila Airport, (the terminal Philippine Airlines flies out of
is very nice), I grabbed some magazines and waited for my flight. The
best article I read turned out to be about me. It was in the recent
Time Magazine and it spoke about the Beijing Olympics. Besides
mentioning that half the cars in Beijing are banned from the roads
(more on that), it also pointed out that lots of hapless tourists got
stuck outside China without visas they didn't know they needed (there
was a guy in front of me at the airport who found out the hard way,
just like I did).
See, the best thing about Communists is their penchant for shooting
themselves in the foot. Instead of actually opening up their country
to foreign journalists' and tourists' scrutiny, the Commies in China
have decided that it would be better to totally crackdown and ban tons
of tourists from entering Beijing. This means that instead of hotels
overflowing with tourists, the hotels are half empty in Beijing.
Chinese nationalists will scream that media coverage of their country
is unfair (which should make any American roll on the floor laughing).
But they should be totally ashamed that their country is so
embarrassing it can't handle intense, honest media scrutiny.
As much as Americans hate Guantanamo, there was at least the argument
made that the methods used there (waterboarding, a form of torture
outlawed by the Geneva Conventions) garnered information which
protected American lives. Now, Americans can agree or disagree on
that point (the two Presidential candidates have agreed it was
ineffective) but the Chinese can't even discuss the wicked acts their
government commits. Protecting international war criminals like Omar
Al-Bashir of Sudan, supporting the Genocide in Darfur by giving Sudan
political cover, furthering the suffering of the Zimbabweans by
selling guns and also giving political cover to Robert Mugabe are just
a couple of the crimes the Chinese People's government commits in
their name. The Communists also commit mass expulsion of their own
citizens out of areas of Beijing in order to build stadiums and make
the place "look nicer" (they are supposedly buying new houses for all
those people...because projects always work...more on that). They
also expelled thousands of people from the bank of the Yangtze river
to build a damn of dubious value.
Then there is the oppression of the Tibetans, the arrest and torture
of political dissidents, the massive corruption of local Communist
officials throughout the country side and the cover up of the
increasing unrest of the average Chinese farmer (who were responsible
for the original People's Revolution, in case the Communists in China
forgot that). Add all that up and China looks set to implode on the
foundation of lies the country has allowed itself to believe (like,
that they're still Communists. Really their just Capitalists living
under a terrible cabal of dictators).
Of course, there is always the argument that the China is too big and
unwieldy for political freedom and that the Communist party has lots
of dissenting voices within it that give it some ability to
self-critique. But the first point implies that China is held
together only by military might and that it is egging for a Civil war
and the second point is washed away by the fact that China can't
handle any criticism at all, lest the people catch on to the "1984"
lifestyle they're living.
But beating up on China is pointless. The Chinese people have no
control over their actions and the government is comfortable to fund
it's economic expansion on the back of Darfurian genocide. Heck, they
can always point out that we killed most of the Native
Americans...like boys who grow up to beat their wives just like their
dad did. Why learn from mistakes if we can remake them for twice the
cost!
Cutting to the chase, I eventually got on my plane to Hong Kong. Hong
Kong itself was awesome (I was there for three days). I met tons of
cool kids who I ended up hanging out with when I got back from
Beijing, but that's another story. In Hong Kong I applied for my visa
on Monday and got it Tuesday morning (again, with lots of money...I
also had to buy a plane ticket and reserve a hotel room and give a
phone number of a friend in China in order to get a visa).
Beijing: Day 1
Beijing was something else. The airport was massive. The air
conditioning at the airport was also broken...brilliant. Just in time
for the Olympics.
On a more Capitalist note, I met a very cute Chinese girl at the
airport who helped me by pointing me to the baggage claim, letting me
use her cell phone to call my friends and driving me into the city.
She owned a Porsche and she was very nervous about things like losing
her parking ticket. She gave her ex-boyfriend (broke up with him that
morning) 200,000 yuan to gamble in Macau, and she was scared she'd
have to pay a little extra for parking. Capitalism everywhere.
Anyway, she found the ticket and we met her friend outside the airport
and we drove on to Beijing. She explained also that she was nervous
about the cops.
See, the commies, in all their wisdom, decided that instead of solving
the pollution problem in Beijing, they would simply state that all
cars with license plates ending in Even numbers could drive on the
road on Even days of the month. On Odd days of the month, only cars
with Odd last numbers on their license plates. Not exactly a green
solution...but certainly a commie one:) Why let the market invent
cleaner cars when you have enough authority to demand that people
don't drive on certain days.
On the way into the city we saw a huge pillar of lights surrounded by
spot lights which shined brightly through the polluted foggy
night...my friend said it was a factory smoke stack...they lit it up
like a Christmas tree to beautify it...I must say it worked...I just
wondered how many green house gas emissions the lights generated...and
since most power in China is coal power, it probably generated tons of
pollution too, but perhaps outside the city.
The next phase of the trip out of the airport was meeting my friends
in Beijing. The girl I was driving with talked with my buddies on the
phone until we finally found the place (which involved the girl
backing up in the middle of a small four-way intersection to get down
the right street. FRIGGEN' AWESOME!)
The bar we ended up at was quite hilarious. The entire street was
actually bars and the cars were parked on the sidewalk. Americans
made up the majority of the patrons at all the bars. The one we went
to was on the roof and had two swings in it...So we had some drinks,
danced some salsa, swung on the swings, yelled about not wasting
money on Ex-es; ya know, capitalist stuff.
Eventually I caught a relatively cheap cab to my hotel (which was nice
and empty) and crashed out.
Great Wall: Day 2
The next morning I woke up to discover that I had ordered fried rice
and left the tub running. Luckily the tub had an overflow valve which
turned the water off and the room service staff was perfectly happy to
send me up new fried rice for breakfast without charging me double!
Great service for those wasteful capitalist pigs!!
So after a fried rice breakfast and a bath I decided to make a mad
dash for the Great Wall of China. This was of course a totally poorly
planned mistake, but being a Sam Vacation, it really didn't matter! I
can't really do anything wrong on my own vacation!
So I went to the telephone store and bought a sim card (in Hong Kong I
got one at a 7-11; in Syria I had to give a thumb print; in China and
Singapore I had to scan my passport...it is interesting the various
degrees of paranoia each country has...in the US we have to sign up
for entire plans, although you can buy pre-paid phones. Anyway, my
rant about how much American telecoms suck is for another time). Then
I caught the Subway to the main bus terminal. Subway was cool, but
very much in Chinese
At the bus terminal I ran around pointing at my Lonely Planet guide
until someone told me the right direction. Eventually I found a bus
bound for the right city. The bus itself was as efficient as any
Chinatown Bus in the US. It even had a list of all the stops posted
on the back of the bus.
When I woke up I was in Miyun. When I got off the bus I was
immediately surround by cab drivers. For the next 15 minutes I spent
my time writing numbers and places and times on a piece of paper
attempting to negotiate payment and hours with the cabbies. Thank god
they used arabic numerals. At one point a nice Chinese girl who spoke
some English showed up. She helped smooth out the communications.
When I finally settled on a place and time, I thanked her and she
responded, "Welcome to China!"
That, I think, speaks to something I did love about China. Despite
the government being an abhorrent dictatorship, the people were
extremely kind. And they very much wanted me to like them and their
country. The significance of that struck home for me.
See, governments, even dictatorships, are made of people gathered from
the societies they govern. Even countries under occupation, such as
Palestine (yes I understand it may or may not be a country) or Iraq
(occupation may be a little strong), still have administrators that
are from the population. Despite a few obscure exceptions,
governments are made up of the people they govern. The bureaucrats
still have to go home and get an earful from their mother. Their
friends are still the people they make traffic laws for.
Chinese bureaucrats go home to a people who understand that governing
them is hard, and they allow them a certain leeway. The problem with
China is not that it's a dictatorship. The problem is that the
Chinese people are ok with that for now. They have come to terms with
the fact that, in order for them to rise, they will have to suck
resources out of countries run by even more abhorrent dictators. They
are a people of history, and one of the oldest historic activities is
war. I have read in many places that Confucianism supports strong
government, or something like that. That may be one explanation for
China.
For me, I think the people have just accepted it. As long as they
don't see it (which the Chinese government takes care of by blocking
the Internet with the Great Firewall of China) they don't care (heck,
"All these years and the Chinese are still building walls," as my
brother says. Don't they remember how poorly the last one worked?).
They have economic prosperity for now, so they are comfortable. The
Olympics are coming, so they know they are going to be under
additional scrutiny. They just have to wait for it to blow over.
After my cultural experience, I continued to the Great Wall at
Simatai. The area leading up to the wall was all brand new. It had
brand new signs in English and maps and pretty tourist things.
And then there was the ski lift with no locks. Now, a normal ski lift
is pretty dangerous, but you are usually over snow. This lift, while
it did have a door, chairs and railings, was over sharp mountain edges
and hard rocks. If I had fallen out I would have died. And falling
out would have been easy. If a tourist dies in that lift during the
Olympics, it will make international news. The Chinese appear to be
betting it won't happen.
At the top of the lift I had to walk. "The Wall can be intense," my
friend had warned me, with a certain reverence reserved for one of the
biggest man-made structures on Earth, if not the biggest. He wasn't
kidding. With my plastic bag full of water bottles ripping and my
papers, Lonely Planet and Economist falling all over the place, I had
to do a drastic rearranging of my pockets. Along the way I got
laughed at by the tens of Chinese people working on the wall (there
are Chinese people everywhere in China). "Three bottles of water!
AHAHAHAH," was one of my favorites.
When I got to the top there were still hawkers selling plaques saying
"I climbed the Great Wall." There was even a guy selling ice cream,
but he didnt want his picture taken.
Eventually I got to the end of the accessible part of the wall. And
that's where the fun started. Sitting by the sign that said "500 Yuan
fine for crossing" was a Canadian backpacker with a big yellow pot
plant printed on a green shirt. He was arguing a bribe with the
Chinese guard that would allow him to hike to the top of the next
peek. I was obviously interested so I jumped right into the
bargaining (all the while the guard's kid was running around, hanging
out with Dad). The negotiations ended up failing as the sun started
to set, but it was good to meet a fellow backpacker at least. After
an email exchange I continued on my marry way. My Canadian friend
ended up trying to stay the night on the wall but told me later that
he got kicked off at 8pm.
So I ran back down the mountain minus two bottles of water and caught
the insane lift back down to the bottom of the mountain. I met up
with my cabbie, who was very pleased that I had kept my word and
returned on time, and I headed back to Miyun. From Miyun I caught a
bus to Beijing. Since I was totally exhausted from my Great Wall run,
I ended up meeting one of my friends (who happened to have founded the
first Apple store in China) and we sat down for some McDonald's and a
chat. After that I went home and totally collapsed.
Tiananmen Sq: Day 3
I have never felt more Communist in my life than in Tiananmen Sq. In
fact, I'm still diggin' the Proletariat. I really want to buy the
shirt my cousin has which shows all the Commie big wigs wearing funny
hats and holding red plastic cups under the caption: "The Communist
Party." Then I want to wear that shirt around Beijing...I'd probably
be arrested.
As it was, I did one better. I took the Beijing metro to the heart of
Communism on Earth and I took a picture in front of the Forbidden City
with a big poster of Mao behind me while wearing a bright red shirt.
The shirt had a beer cap on it which had "The Economist" printed on
it. Below the beer cap there was a caption: "Think Responsibly."
Even now this marvelous picture can be seen on my facebook profile.
After some priceless picture taking, I continued on a walking tour of
TS. The next best thing after the big picture of Mao is the endless
amount of young Chinese army recruits who march around TS continually.
I mean, they just make you feel so commie. Most of the soldiers are
young and probably don't even know why they are forced to march around
TS. In the tunnels under the roads connecting TS to the Forbidden
City, there were metal detectors as well. I'm not sure who the
Chinese are afraid of. The Tibetans are non-violent and the Taiwanese
have a country to retaliate against. Is Al-Qaeda gonna bomb China
during the Olympics?
Anyway, in TS I got my picture taken with some random Chinese people
who wanted to take a picture of me. I also got to wander around the
Forbidden City and get ripped off by all the merchants selling junk in
TS.
Commie Visit to Tiananmen Sq - Check
Hilariously ironic picture taken at the Forbidden City in front of Mao - Check
I moved on.
The next stop was to find lunch. Along the way I ran into the
"Beijing Book store." At least that is what the Lonely Planet called
it. What the Chinese called it was the "Book BUILDING!!!"
In Commiestan, everything must be massive and centralized! The Book
Building had about 5 floors. When I walked in the door someone
immediately greeted me in English and asked if I needed help. Instead
of going upstairs, I figured I'd check out the basement first. It was
down here that I found mostly American books on New Age philosophy and
Harry Potter, oddly enough.
I didn't check the upper floors cause I was hungry.
Lucky for me there was a massive underground mall across the street
from the book store. In there I found a soccer jersey. I had to have
my friend translate over the phone for me. It was at that moment that
I thought over-the-phone international translations would be pretty
clever. The business model is tough though, so more thought is
required.
I also discovered Beijing cuisine, which is apparently legendary. I
found it in a mass eatery where I had to take pictures of the food
that I wanted to try and explain it to the cashier. To the store's
credit they understood exactly what I was trying to do and one of the
guys walked me through the whole process. I ordered my food and
drinks, sat down and they brought me my food.
It was amazing. It was also fun because there were two Chinese kids
driving their parents nuts right next to me and one of the kids had
"2008" carved into his hair. I assume it was because of the Olympics,
but who knows? The point is that the Chinese have lots of children,
despite the one child policy, and their population is extremely young,
at least in Beijing.
It was just about this time that I started worrying about the US's
role in the face of a rising China. The reason I worried about it was
because I realized that China's population was not only HUGE, like
everything in the country, it was also young. That means that their
labor pool will remain massive and get larger for a long time to come.
After finishing my meal and leaving, followed by 100 staring eyes (I
also noticed that right after lunch time all the restaurant staff
grabbed naps at various tables or took breaks playing cards...very
odd), I started to ponder the advantages and disadvantages America and
Asia had on one another.
I created a list:
Asian Advantages:
Huge skilled and unskilled labor force
Massive education systems producing tons of engineers and scientists
(this includes Hong Kong, Singapore, India and China)
Great Airlines (at least Singapore and Hong Kong...the rest may be struggling)
Fantastic cellular networks. And this is true. American cell
networks are totally useless. We need to get into GSM or whatever
those little SIM cards are.
Momentum - No matter what, every city I visited (Beijing, Hong Kong,
Singapore, Kuala Lumpor) they all had an undeniable energy about
them. I'm worried they will simply over take us with their work
ethic. They also love to integrate technology into their personal
lives far quicker than we do, although they still struggle with
computers in businesses. The sports store in the huge underground
mall had 7 stores and only two cashiers with two computers for the
whole store. It worked, but seemed outdated.
American Advantages:
Excellent Infrastructure such as hardline phones, internet, well managed cities
My fear with this one is that our infrastructure is old, like the
bridge problem we now have to fix
Highly efficient financial systems
This advantage is suffering big time under the mortgage crisis,
so I'm worried about this guy
Skilled Labor
We have an excellent labor force, but our education system is
struggling to produce the best in the world. Many of our skilled
workers are immigrants and we are starting to make immigration laws to
keep them out, which is bad.
Political Freedom and stability - this we got in spades. Even with
The Patriot Act, we are centuries ahead of everyone else in the world
on political freedom, and I do mean centuries
Dynamic economy - no matter what, if we stick to the principles of the
Constitution and open our economy to new cultural influences (read
immigrants) and to Foreign Direct Investment, like people buying
Budweiser, we will be fine.
Growing population - unlike Eurpoe, Americans are breeding like crazy.
We just need to make sure we have an educated, outgoing population,
instead of an insulated terrified one that doesn't want to learn
Spanish. OH NO, OTHER LANGUAGES!!!! HOW DO THOSE CRAZIES EVEN KNOW
WHAT EACH OTHER ARE SAYING!!!
Free Media - I rage against what I see as a ridiculous liberal bias
in CNN and conservative bias of FOX as much as anyone, but in the end
our Media really does love digging up crap. And that crap-digging
forces everyone to be more honest. It forces people to actually live
up to their ideals because everyone is watching. Look at our
presidential race? Everyone in the world knows about it because we
dig up EVERYTHING!! They think we're crazy, but they don't think
we're crazy while their voting because most people live in
pathetically corrupt dictatorships or sham-democracies. Free Media is
good and fun. I love it.
OK, after the underground mall and the big bookstore, I went to look
for the fabled underground city.
This is where it got interesting.
I took the metro to some random stop that was near the underground
city. According to Lonely Planet (LP), the tunnels were built because
the Chinese were afraid of nuclear war with Russia...go Commie unity.
I came out of the stop and began following my LP map to the location.
I passed a great "Blind man massage" parlor, which I did not go for,
although I have heard they're good. In fact given my love of
massages, I probably should have tried it simply to be a
connoisseur...but I didn't.
Instead, I continued my search, which was beginning to take me away
from the main streets and into the back streets. Eventually I asked a
guard who asked an old lady (who tried to sell me a hat) and they
pointed me down the road I was walking.
It started to become very apparent to me that Beijing, outside the
fancy metro and the Olympic stadium, was terribly run down and poor.
I started noticing the spiderweb of wires endemic to developing
countries when people illegally tap the electricity lines. No one
seems to care...especially since the government pays for it all
anyway.
The buildings were also shanties, much the same as the run down cities
I had seen in the back deserts of Layounne in Western Sahara.
Eventually I found the underground city. It was closed. But luckily
the trip was not wasted. I ran into an Olympic volunteer who spoke
very good English. I asked him why it was closed and he said because
the construction in the area had made the tunnels unstable. The smirk
on his face gave me the impression he was feeding the company line.
It seemed more like the Commies didn't want to advertise their
paranoia and penchant for large hand-built wastes of time (don't think
about American nuclear drills, bomb shelters, similar tunnels under
Georgetown University and the Cuban Missile Crisis...of course, like I
said about the free media, we can still see our paranoia, and learn
from it).
Anyway, there was no construction going on. I pointed that out.
He said, "No the government is destroying this entire area. All the
people are being given new homes somewhere else."
.....
Everyone likes the Projects.
That rumor of Chinese mass internal population transfer being
confirmed, I switched to the topic of Olympic volunteers. I didn't
cover this totally before, but as you will all notice soon on the
news, Beijing is FULL of kids wearing Blue Shirts and standing around.
They are at every metro stop, the airport and at the major Olympic
venues. The guy I was talking to was not from Beijing. He came to
the city to volunteer. But the Commies didn't pay for him. All they
gave him was a t-shirt and lunch. He had to make ends meet by
translating part-time. I have no idea what the others did, especially
since most of them didn't speak English any better than I spoke
Chinese. Of course, at this point they still had a few weeks of
training before the Olympics, and they are gonna need it.
But it is amazing that the youth of China turned out for this. They
were certainly everywhere.
In the end, I asked to take a picture with my new friend.
He declined
...probably because he was afraid of getting killed by his government.
I got his email. Also dangerous, but perhaps he knew that the Great
Chinese Firewall had about as much of a chance of keeping him under
control as the Great Wall had of keeping out the Mongols.
For anyone going to Beijing: I challenge you to step out of the nice
Commie box they are putting the Olympics in and take a stroll through
the city. Start by making friends with the volunteers. They are
China's future.
After the failed attempt to find the Underground CommieVille, I went
to the cAppleIST store, I mean the Apple Store...only one in China.
Great place, excellent bandwidth. After hanging out for a bit at the
bar, I met up with my Chinese friend from the Airport who took me to
dinner. Like I said, very nice people. And the dinner was fantastic.
Lonely Planet is right. One of the best things about Beijing is the
food. It is awesome!
After dinner I met up with my American friends and hit the club scene.
The first club we tried had been torn down. Woops.
The second one was a Russian gangster place where we got searched and
metal detected before entering. The Russians are crazy. Americans
have reputations of being aloof and arrogant travelers. Russians have
a reputation of shooting people.
After much fun, I went home and ordered some fried rice...and then
promptly fell asleep.
Airport: Day 4
In the morning, I got my fried rice from the poor waiter who had
waited outside my door all night trying to wake me up. I tipped him.
I also felt bad.
Eventually I hit the cAppleIST, I mean APPLE, Store again and did some
email. I then went to lunch with my friend (started the Apple Store)
and his co-workers, one of whom went to the high school across the
street from mine in Hawaii. Yeah, not surprised anymore. Actually I
was, HOW COOL IS THAT!!?
The food rocked (again) but eventually I had to book it for the
airport. Luckily on my way there I passed a Hooters. Thank god they
made it to China.
Summary:
Beijing rocked and I need to go back to the Great Wall, because like
Nixon said, it's a great wall. However, the Chinese people are still
dancing on the edge of a knife. Their economic expansion is bringing
them untold riches, but those farmers who can't own their own land are
getting relatively poorer. They have abandoned Communism to pursue
"We understand governing is hard-ism" and that is going to last until
the boom stops. A war over Taiwan could galvanize the country, or it
could tear it apart, depending on how the Chinese manage the
propaganda over who started the war. But it this day and age, I think
the glorious transparency of the Internet is going to get those
Commies eventually.
But the Chinese people still kick ass! I will be back many times in my life.
Lots'a'love
Monday, August 24, 2009
Syria Redeux and Cyprus: May 2008 and the end of Iraq
I wrote this email at the end of my time in Iraq. It includes some closing Iraq thoughts and the story of my second trip to Syria and first trip to Cyprus in May 2008.
Dear Friends and Family,
I landed in Iraq in March looking to help out in any way I could. I felt like a lot of mistakes had been made in a war that I had supported, so I wanted to find out why and see what I could do.
And I think I helped, in my own small way. I assisted USAID in coordinating GIS operations among Iraqi and American mapping specialists and I helped finalize the transfer of 5 years of great mapping data from the US military to the Iraqis. And I topped it all off by laying the ground work for a Symposium where all of Iraq's major GIS stakeholders finally got to meet in a single room and REALIZE they had a lot of information, but also a lot of coordination to do. The post-Symposium noise I'm hearing is that it actually worked, and the Iraqis are saying things like "That was the first time we saw how many people were involved in GIS and how much work we'd already done, and how much more we had to do."
I think they do indeed have a chance. But it is up to the Iraqis at this point. They have told us when they need us out, and that is how it's gonna be. I hope that they find a way to achieve Reconciliation, because there are many lies that live on and many pains that need to be expressed, but it doesn't seem to be where they are headed just yet.
But my time here is done, for now. However, the wonderfully complicated American tax system states that if I come home before I have been out of the country for 330 days out of 365, I will have to pay a whole lot of taxes.
So I've decided that a great way to finish off this year of rampant internationalism is with a little volunteer time.
I'm not in the habit of asking people for money, except my parents, and even that I try to avoid these days. But this happens to be for a good cause. For the entire months of January and February, I will be doing three separate volunteer events:
January 10-31: Unite For Sight in Chennai, India
https://maestropay.com/go/uniteforsight/volunteers?ref=645b8413a9fe4c1f8f50ef42609274db
February 3-16: Habitat for Humanity build in Zambia
https://www.habitat.org/cd/gv/participant/participant.aspx?pid=93132015
February 21-March 7: Habitat for Humanity build in Thailand
Apparently, the way volunteer organizations operate is that they offer the volunteers the opportunity to work for free and in return, the volunteers do fundraising for them. So I went in search of good volunteer organizations I thought you'd guys would donate to and I found Habitat for Humanity and Unite for Sight.
I think most people know about the great work Habitat for Humanity does around the world, supplying the impoverished of the world with a decent roof. What you may not know is that HFH does not just give the houses away, which would damage the local housing industry by flooding the market with cheap housing.
What they do is offer the housing recipients long-term, no interest loans to buy the house, and on top of that the recipients have to do 300 hours of Sweet Equity. Sweet Equity means that the people who get houses from HFH have to work for HFH doing builds for 300 hours before they can move into their houses. The end result of this is that HFH builds communities of houses built by volunteers who then move into the homes after they build them with their own hands. It creates a wonderful sense of community and I am excited that I'm going to get a chance to be part of that family!
Unite For Sight is another awesome organization. They have a ton of information on their website, and I add some more on mine. Suffice to say, UFS cures people of blindness. It is an almost magical concept, and the fact that they actually do it amazes me. On top of that, they too have learned from the many pitfalls of International Development and they work through local eye clinics to provide all their care so they don't force local business out. And the net benefit of their eye care is tremendous, as previously blind people and their caretakers are freed up to join the work force and earn a living for their families or go to school if they are kids.
But I can do one better than simply asking people to donate to a good cause!
I know that many of you enjoy my stories about my trips around the world. If I can't convince you that you should donate to these causes out of their own merit, then at least take the time to ask yourself how much fun you got out of reading my stories. I'm sure they will keep coming, especially if I have my friends and family financing my volunteerism all over the world!!
And btw the donations are tax-deductable:) Plus they make you feel good!
(Some of the more nerdy among you may have noticed I only provided one website for the HFH trips. That is because I only get one HFH website at a time unfortunately, so I need to fundraise for the Zambia trip first, and then the Thailand trip second)
The deadline for fundraising for the Zambia trip is Dec 15 and I need to raise $1,880. For UFS, the deadline is the end of December and I need to raise $1500. And for the Thailand trip I need to raise $1,680 and the deadline is Jan 7. You can donate through the websites listed above. Please pass this one to your friends and family, too, if you think they'd like to donate!
And if you're worried I don't take this seriously, I have already locked down a $1500 refundable deposit with UFS and $700 worth of deposits with HFH (non-refundale) Plus, I'm going to have to buy my plane tickets all over the place
And in case you were waiting for it, I have also attached my story about my trip through Syria last May (the attachment are notes taken during the trip...the story explains).
It's one heck of a long story though, so grab some hot chocolate.
If you need a summary: I left Baghdad on a "legal" plane ticket, bribed some Syrian border guards, met a Hizbullah gurrilla and got attacked by a Syrian...all on the first day...well, part of the second...Then I communed with St. Paul, convinced some Syrians that their government was worse than they thought, almost got arrested attempting to smuggle myself to Cyprus and got rescued by some Poles while storming a castle. Eventually I ended up on some Island with an Australian guy, caught boat ride to see a city of Ghosts and some naked Russians and topped it all off watching someone pay to watch someone else pour a bottle of Black Label into a fire...And then I went back to Baghdad.
If you got this far, I'm impressed. Thanks to all of you and hope you all have a Merry Christmas too!!!
The Syria Trip...aka Syriana
here are some notes I took about Syria after a conversation with a friend studying there. They might help inform your reading.
Day 1: Friday, May 9th, 2008
My trip to Syria started, as all trips start, at the planning phase. For anyone planning to travel I highly recommend using the "plot a path" function of Google Earth. It is really cool, security guys in Iraq use it to plot their routes, and you can get an idea of your place in the world. My trip plan was to go from Baghdad to Amman to Damascus to Lattakia (Northern Syria) to Cyprus (by boat) and then back from Cyprus (by plane) to Damascus to Amman to Baghdad.
It didn't exactly work like that.
My convoy ride to the airport was uneventful (thank god or Alhamdulilah). I traveled with my buddy and roommate David Kraus, who I entered the country with (every new group of arrivals seems to form a kind of bond. It is a lot like freshmen year of college, actually…in fact the IZ in general is disturbingly like college because apparently nothing really changes as we get older. Everyone just gets smarter and more experienced, but there are just as many cat-fights). Most of the time we were just looking out the window wondering when an IED was going to blow us away (the security guys warn us not to lean on the doors…). However, I felt pretty comfortable because a month early a rocket had actually landed about 10 meters away from me inside our compound and the armored cars that were two feet away from the blast protected the passenger compartment completely.
A big cement T-Wall saved my life in that particular rocket strike. My colleague Anwar Khudair, the deputy director of training, took multiple shrapnel hits. He got rushed to the American military hospital in the IZ and then transferred to the American Military Trauma hospital, which is the best on Earth simply because the staff has the most experience with shrapnel trauma out of anyone. Once Anwar was stabilized, he got transferred out of the US military hospital to the Iraqi Medical City. He was pronounced dead later that evening. It appears that he was either murdered in the hospital through neglect or was simply neglected out of incompetence. In either case, it was an extremely sad event.
A Chinese copy of a Russian-designed rocket bought by Iranians sold to Iraqis and fired by Sadrist in Baghdad at an American military zone landed in a USAID program's HQ and killed an Iraqi citizen. Globalization is here.
These thoughts and others raced through my mind as our convoy raced to the BIAP.
Much like everything in Iraq, entering BIAP is quite interesting. As we approached the first checkpoint, I noticed heaps of Iraqis sitting in cars in a dirt parking lot right outside the BIAP. I have no idea what those people do, but it is rumored they are there to pick up Iraqis coming out of the airport. The one time I took a civilian taxi out of BIAP he picked me up right outside the terminal, but inside the airport, so I didn't have to hitchhike.
After the first checkpoint where our Personal Security Detail sweet talked the cute American soldier guarding the checkpoint, we drove on. The next checkpoint we hit was guarded by a private security company called Global (every time I see them I am reminded of Globo-Gym from the movie Dodgeball). It would normally seem strange for a security company to be guarding an airport as opposed to the airport doing its own security, but in Iraq in is very much the norm. Even the outer perimeter of the US embassy in Baghdad is guarded by a private company called Triple Canopy.
Essentially the US military has outsourced the basic security functions to people who could do it just as well as our soldiers for less money. It basically shows that the US military has more money than people. However, the security guards are good at their jobs. The companies are security companies and their future profits are based on their ability to protect people, so they do it. Their allegiance is to money, not necessarily the Americans. But they can't allow their guards to get bribed because it would be bad for business. And at the rate things are going in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if private security companies start working for the UN. You can call them mercenaries if ya want (cause they basically are) but they provide a service that everyone needs.
After passing the Globo-Gym checkpoint test, the armored car finally pulled up to the curb and we got out. The next level of security involved a group of about 50 people lining up all their bags in a bunker and allowing Global guards to search through them all and sniff them with dogs; then came metal detectors and x-rays, of course. Besides being surrounded by two US Military Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), BIAP is one secure airport.
Inside the Airport, the fun really starts. First off, my friends and I tried to find the infamous "bar on the third floor." Unfortunately it turned out to be closed (for my more avid readers, you might remember I went to Erbil in June, after this trip. On that trip up to Erbil I did find the "Bar on the third floor" and one of my buddies and I graced it with a drink at 9am...oh and btw, all the PSD convoys always drop people off at BIAP in the early morning, but all the flights leave in the afternoon or evening, so the many hours spent with it have made BIAP a dear, dear friend of mine).
After failing to find the bar, we went downstairs to a small restaurant. Eventually my friends got called for their flight to Dubai so we headed down to the Departure Terminal. UNFORTUNATELY, the line to get through security there was REALLY long. One of my friends happened to be one of our chief finance people back at HQ and he wasn't down with standing in line. So he got on the phone with our fixer.
See, the way BIAP works is that every major company has a fixer. They call up this person when their employees are traveling and the fixer finds a way to get the employees past all the other people (mostly Iraqis) so that they don't miss their flights. Our particular fixer is friends with the Iraqi Colonel who runs BIAP, so when we have problems we call the fixer and they disappear. Our Chief of Party never misses flights, and our Big Dog employees don't stand in lines unless they want to.
However, unless it is an emergency, the fixer is usually not needed at all. By the time the fixer got anyone to help my buddies they were already at the front of the line (I was not allowed through because I was going to Amman, Jordan and not to Dubai).
So I sat around on my ass waiting for my flight. When it did get called, I went to the front of the line and the guard at the front said "No, you have to go and get a boarding pass from the Royal Jordanian office over there." That wasn't too hard, but it did put me all the way to the back of the loooooong security line. So naturally, I called our fixer. His response was essentially to "suck it up." Oh the life of a peon:).
Eventually I got through security (again) just fine, and then I checked in...and then I got another boarding pass...and then I got my passport checked...and then I got my bag scanned AGAIN. However, while I was standing in all these lines, I did get the opportunity to make some phone calls. With the magic of modern telephone infrastructure, I actually got to call my American friends in Syria with my Iraqi cell phone issued by USAID from BIAP. I told them I would be coming from Amman to Damascus that day and that the party should be waiting for me.
It was at this point that my friends in Damascus decided to tell me that it could take up to 17 hours to get across the border from Jordan to Syria. Now, I had crossed into Syria from Lebanon and crossed into Jordan from Syria. But I had Syrian Christians with me the first time I crossed the Syrian border and I was leaving the country the second time. I had never actually gone from Jordan to Syria. It was at that point that I decided that if I was going to roll into Damascus in style, I would have to get across the border quickly. More on that later.
For now, I was stuck in the extremely comfy waiting lounge that awaits passengers after they finish check-in. Say what you want about the Middle East, they know how to lounge around in big cushions. And while it was kinda nasty that all the seats were absorbent foam, they were very comfortable, comfortable enough to sleep on which many people do when flights get canceled at the BIAP.
At this point my friends still had not gotten off the ground for Dubai, so we all sat around and chit chatted. One of my buddies was a Filipino electrical engineer. He worked in Falluja, actually, and when our HQ was having Electricity problems, we brought him in to fix them, and amazingly, he actually helped! A man qualified to be an electrical engineer...actually being an electrical adviser...SHOCKING!!! The only problem was that he was so good the PRT he was working at threw a hissy-fit and DEMANDED that he be returned to work. Yes, people still through hissy-fits in Iraq. But it was nice to know he was appreciated.
SO this particular guy, on top of being awesome, is something of a god to his fellow Filipinos in Iraq. He had a whole crew of them around him (and he also knows all the rest in the IZ)! I guess because the Philippine Government made it illegal for its citizens to work in Iraq they kinda stick together.
At about 12pm my friends got called onto their flight. This was very lucky for them because the whole time we were waiting at BIAP we noticed that a dust storm was kicking up outside and it was only getting worse. Unfortunately for me my flight still had to come in from Amman and didn't land until 2pm. That turned out to be very unlucky.
Just after my friends left, I heard over the loud speaker something that sounded very much like "The RJ flight to Amman has been delayed." Naturally I was worried so I went up to the extremely cute Iraqi girl behind the information desk and impressed her with my fancy-pants Arabic to find out what was going on. The only thing I got out of it was a smile and a "yes, your flight is delayed."
At this point it was a waiting game. I tried to talk to some people to get them to switch me to an Iraqi Airways flight, but I decided to wait to see what RJ said. I even tried to call our Fixer again, but he said there was nothing I could do and the Iraqi Airways flight was full anyway. So I waited.
But not uneventfully. I did get to see a train of KBR employees go past on their way to Al-Asad airbase. Now, I think KBR does some damn impressive work. But when their employees file past in BIAP (they travel in packs because they charter their own planes) it looks like a prison break. The guys are the most stereotypical Red Necks, hommies and honkies you could POSSIBLY imagine. Only half of them shave and they all wear denim. Anyone in a suit is upper management. The rest are true salt of the Earth.
And, despite their appearance, I gotta say they work just as hard as the soldiers they serve.
A KBR women tried to recruit me while standing in line at the PX in the IZ a few weeks before my vacation and she broke it down for me. KBR employees work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. They get about 2, maybe 3, vacations. And after the KBR recruiter walked away, the two KBR truckers behind me in line informed me that KBR also didn't pay all that well. So, however they choose to dress, KBR employees are some of the HARDEST working people on the planet. Not to mention the fact that the truckers take the same risks as the soldiers every day. The cabs of all KBR trucks are up-armored and they travel with guns and military convoys. They are hard core.
Eventually I heard that the RJ flight to Amman was canceled.
My vacation was ruined.
But wait...this is Iraq:)
First I had to go to RJ and pretend like they were gonna gimme a ticket for the next day. While waiting I ran into another friend of mine from a different company (expats in the IZ all get to know each other). I also found out that the Iraqi Airways flight to Amman was not yet canceled. I immediately got on the phone with the Fixer and asked him to get me on the flight. He made some calls and informed me it was full. That didn't help.
So I ended up in the check-in area again trying to figure out what the hell to do. I called the HQ PSDs and alerted them that they might have to pick me up at BIAP, which sucked.
It was at this point that I ran into a kindly British chap about my age by the name of Mark. I told him my predicament and he just smiled.
"Don't worry, I've done this before. RJ always cancels, but Iraqi Airways will fly in anything, dust or no dust. All we have to do is get a ticket at the counter."
"But the flight is full," I protested.
"It's never full. They just wait for RJ to cancel and pick up the scraps."
So we went to the counter. The guys at the counter told us to go talk to "that guy" and get a ticket.
"That guy" turned out to be some sort of drama queen. We tried to get a word in past all the Iraqis talking to him for 10 minutes, during which time "That guy" kept walking, stopping, sitting, picking up the phone, hanging up, flailing his arms, yelling, walking, phone, stop, go, sit, stop stop stop GOGOGOG, YEEEELLLLL PHOOOOONEEEE stop. Chat chat.
Eventually I started getting bored. At one point some guy offered to get us tickets if we paid him $400 bucks. We asked him how and made the mistake of saying he'd talk to "That guy."
"Can't we just do that ourselves?"
"....uh...."
"How much are the tickets?"
"$300"
"So you're charging us $100 to go talk to some guy? Thanks, we can handle it."
Having determined how much the ticket cost, I put an end to the dramatics. I pulled out $300 cash and told Mark to do the same.
INSTANTLY "That guy" stopped paying attention to anyone else and walked right over to us. It was so cliche I just couldn't help but laugh. Money talks and bullshit walks.
"Do you need tickets?"
"Yes." Cash.
"No no no, don't pay me here."
At this point he wrote us a little note and pointed us toward the back office of Iraqi Airways.
So we went back through a sneaky side security door and walked into the Iraqi Airways office. Iraqi Airways is not quite up to computers yet. While that makes them inefficient, it also makes them extremely flexible because they had no databases to keep them accountable. So, for a cool $300 Mark and I got tickets on the full Iraqi Airways flight bound for Amman written up for us in 10 minutes flat. God I love the Middle East!
After acquiring our tickets we went back through the sneaky side door. We paid the airport exit tax (a brilliant system where if you don't pay you end like that guy in the song about the MTA who never returned). When we got to the customs agent we flashed our government badges and gave the agent our passports.
The US government worked some sort of deal with the Iraqis that allowed anyone with a certain type of government badge to get into and out of the country without a visa. This made these badges a hot commodity and led to a kind of black market where people would try to take their badges after their jobs ended so that they could still get in and out of the country easily. It often worked.
The badges in general had great use. They could get you onto military bases, into the PX store and into the DFAC (DFAC's are the soldier's cafeterias. Each meal served there costs about $50 and the food is served by Gulf Catering Co. It is quite good, and the contractors regularly snuck in there for food). The ironic thing about it was that the people at my Pentagon job had the same badges. What they didn't realize was that the things were insanely valuable. At the Pentagon we thought they were kinda annoying because you needed them to unlock your computer. If anyone from that jobsite went to Iraq, though, they'd be able to survive off that badge until it expired without anyone knowing the difference.
Once we crossed back into the waiting area, we waited. It was exceedingly boring; most of the time I just sat around. Every once in a while I'd flirt with the cute girl behind the information desk in Arabic to get an update on our flight.
At one point I ended up in a conversation with a security guy named who was escorting an Iraqi banker from HSBC. That was surprising in and of its self because my friends and I didn't even realize there were banks in Iraq. RTI actually paid all its employees in cash, which was a huge logistical issue, but they couldn't deposit money in Iraqi banks so that's what they had to do.
After we swapped stories and information the guy told me about a great Russian hooker he knew in Amman who might be able to help me out. Apparently she was not just for sex. She also was fun to hang out with, incredibly well connected and very knowledgeable about Amman. I thought that was probably the most interesting tidbit of info I'd heard in a while so I took down her number, just in case. Hookers are apparently very well connected people and it was possible she could get me cheap transport to the border.
Eventually my plane to Amman arrived. I ended up sitting next to Mark for the trip and he offered to give me a lift to the Intercontinental in the taxi his company was providing. I did not get a taxi from the airport because I was taking an RRB instead of an R&R so my company paid for nothing. Allow me to explain.
Many contractors in Iraq got deals which granted them two kinds of vacation. One is a Regional Rest Break, where you get 5 work days off, plus the weekends, plus one travel day on EITHER END of the trip for getting in and out of Baghdad. That means you leave work Friday and come back Monday. A 10 day vacation for 5 days off. Sweet. Unfortunately on RRBs the company (and by the company I mean USAID, which means the American taxpayer) only pays for the plane tickets in and out of Baghdad. Once you're out, you are responsible for all hotels and flights, unless your flight gets delayed coming back into Baghdad and you are forced to stay outside Iraq.
ON R&Rs, however, the US taxpayer is more generous. In this situation the contractor gets the flight out paid for, a one night stay in Amman or Dubai for any connecting flight delays, and a first-class ticket back to their home of reference. Or they can get airfare paid up to the cost of a round trip coach-class ticket to London. These vacations are 10 days. With weekends and the travel days added on, they become 17 day holidays. Very sweet.
All told I was entitled to 2 R&Rs and 3 RRBs, plus 3 floating holidays (which became 5 due to the fact that holidays like Labor Day fell on Mondays but we worked on Sundays in Iraq, so the company just made us work those days and gave us floating holidays) which we could tack onto the end of any holiday.
As of the writing of this story these holidays have been trimmed down to just three R&Rs for most people. At the time I wasn't complaining because I was living the high life, but the holidays caused a lot of disruptions in our work in Iraq. Because they were use-em-or-lose-em every 365 days, we had to take holidays every month and half in order to fit them all in. This meant that people starting planning work around holidays, rather than the other way around.
Of course, this all becomes a little more reasonable when you take into consideration that for the first two and a half months I was in Iraq I was under constant rocket barrage. Now that conditions have gotten better, it is a bit much.
But while I do have great respect for all the civilians risking their lives in Iraq, the best people in the country were the soldiers. Those guys worked 7 days a week and they didn't get 3 RRBs. Maybe 1, if they were lucky.
If there is one way we could make development work more effective, it'd be to cut back on the holidays. But then again, there has got to be some incentive for smart motivated people to want to risk their lives in a war zone voluntarily. Patriotism doesn't cut it (in fact, a lot of contractors in Iraq were Brits, Ausies, Kiwis and various other Europeans).
Eventually the plane landed in Amman. Mark and I got through customs, found his driver and headed for the Intercontinental. When we arrived I thanked him and we parted ways.
In Amman the Intercontinental is a good place to start because they have a taxi service right in the hotel (many of the big hotels do). I went into the taxi place and asked how much it would be to get to Damascus. They said $100. I called up the Russian hooker and asked her. She confirmed that it'd be about $100. I figured this was a pretty good price, since it was about 10pm and I was in a rush, so I agreed. I waited about 45 minutes for a driver to arrive and then we took off.
On the way up the driver and I chatted. I told him that if he could get me across the border quick I'd tip him. Besides not wanting to hang out on the Syria border with a US government badge hidden in my shoe (I was paranoid the whole time that the Syrians would find that badge. Probably would have been bad), I also wanted to prove to my buddies in Damascus that I could indeed get across the border in an hour.
And when we got to the border, my taxi friend went to work. At the first counter I told the customs agent that I had just graduated and was thinking about going to school at the University of Damascus, where my friends were at. I gave him their contact info. My driver then led me to the next window in a different building. There we gave my information again. Then we went around to the back of the border compound to some hut that you'd never find if you didn't know it was there and talked to some bureaucrats there.
Once we had done all that my driver said we just had to wait. It could take an hour, it could take 5.
While we waited I repacked my bag to better hide my badge (I took it out of my shoe) just in case the Syrians searched me. Then we went into the huge Duty Free shop on the border. I bought an excellent bottle of liquor for cheap as a gift for my friends in Damascus and chatted with some of the people in the store. The place was amazing. Besides having tons of cheap liquor, it also had Jetskis and Legos! Heaven.
After about an hour, my driver got a call. My visa had been approved. Mission accomplished J.
We headed back to the first window and the customs agent, who now looked a little edgy, gave me my passport with the visa in it.
We left the window and went back outside. Once outside, my driver stopped me and asked for $30 to bribe the agent. He said that the agent didn't want to get paid while I was standing there because it would look suspicious. I gave him the money, he wrapped it in a note and took it inside. He came out a minute later all smiles and said, "Let's go!"
I couldn't have agreed more. We drove across the border with no incident. All the guards did was open the trunk.
After about 30 minutes my driver stopped in a town. He said his brother would drive me the rest of the way into town. I gave him a tip for his help and we parted ways.
On my way into Damascus, I called my friends to get precise directions to their house. They were stunned that I'd made it through that fast. I modestly told them that I was a badass and that's how I rolled.
Eventually my new driver dropped me off at a taxi stand in the middle of the city. I gave him a little more money for him and his brother, and then found a new taxi driver. I used his cell phone to call my buddies again who gave the driver the specific directions.
At this point my cabbie decided he'd tell me his life story. He showed me scars on his arm and informed me that he had fought with Hizballah against the Israelis in the 2007 war against Israel in Lebanon. He told me he killed three Israelis. Normally I throw out "Mabruks" (Arabic for congratulations) like candy, but in this particular situation I didn't. I didn't really know what to say, though, because if I'd started tearing into the guy for being a terrorist, I'm not sure that would have been a very safe idea. So I said that was interesting.
When he dropped me off I got out quick. I wasn't near anything I recognized from my last trip to Damascus, but luckily my friend Roheet found me. We got away from the cabbie as quick as possible.
Roheet and I went back to his house. It was in the middle of Damascus' old city. While the door was actually small and cramped, it opened into a huge three story villa with a fountain in the middle of it. The place was beautiful. I saw my friend Geoff there too and met some new people as well.
The weirdest thing was how refreshing it was to be back among people my own age. I'd spent the last three months hanging out with people way older and far more experienced than me and it had been an intense and stressful time. Being back with my friends relaxing in Damascus (only I could relax in Syria while working in Iraq) gave me a fresh appreciation of how important those RRBs were to keeping the civilians working in Iraq sane. Even then it didn't always work.
Day 2: Saturday, May 10, 2008
Of course that was not the end of the night. Being me, midnight never stopped anything. I managed to convince my friends that it was an excellent time to go out partying.
The first location on the list was a nightclub called Seri. Incredibly, Syria does have quite a few nightclubs. In fact one theme of this trip in general would be the cosmopolitan nature of Syria. It is quite an up and coming country, which may actually contribute to the nationalist tensions between Syria and the US. Personally I think Syria is yearning for acceptance into the global system, but we keep stomping on them because they support terrorists…which of course is perfectly reasonable of us. But with a little creative diplomacy we could probably drag the Syrians to our side.
Which brings me to the nightclub. The only difference between the Syrian nightclub and any place I'd been in the states was that the music in the Syrian place was loud to the point of being painful. I didn't real do too much more observing because we left after a few minutes.
My friend Geoff and I took a break outside the club before going back to the house. While standing there we were attacked by a small Syrian nationalist. When we had gone into the club, Geoff had left a drink right outside on a ledge. The kid had poured it out while we'd been inside. He wanted money, and when we didn't give it to him he kicked us in the shins. He didn't seem to have too many fans among the Syrians hanging around outside either, so maybe he's parents just didn't love him enough.
Either way he seemed to think kicking whitey was ok, so we figured it'd be better to leave than make an international incident out of smacking a small, fat little Syrian kid.
The road we took back to the house was actually an old Roman road and straight as an arrow. All the shops around it were being renovated too, which was surprising. I'm not sure if the Syrian economy is still doing so well, but it was interesting to see the Syrians improving the infrastructure of their tourist center, the Old Town.
On the way back we also stopped off at a Syrian Internet Café called "Google." It was one of the best because it allowed people to access Facebook, which is apparently blocked by the Syrian government (I found out from a Syrian friend later that this is apparently only done at public internet cafes, but that private internet users did not get their Facebook blocked).
After letting my family know that I actually made it in to Syria, we headed back to the apartment. We discovered upon our arrival that Jared, one of Geoff's roommates, was still up so the three of us figured this would be a great time to spend 5 hours on the roof drinking beer and arguing politics.
Jared was an interesting character. He spent many of his weekends traveling to and from Lebanon and earned money gambling in Beirut, taking money from rich people who couldn't gamble. He also studied Lebanon quite a bit. The combination of his time spent in the country and his studies made his analysis of the region excellent and his information current, which was useful because at the time there was a crisis in Lebanon.
If memory serves, the crisis this time around was that Hizbullah had attacked Sunni government strongholds in Beirut and the Druze in the Shuf mountains. Many people in Lebanon were terrified that Hizbullah was trying to restart the civil war. As Jared pointed out, this was actually bad for Hizbullah. In a rare mistake for Hizbullah, they had actually overplayed their hand, especially by attacking the Druze, who weren't bothering any one. While Hizbullah won tactically on the ground, they hurt their strategic image as a peaceful political party in Lebanon. They eventually backed down, but they lost a lot of political clout which they had gained from beating Israel a few years before.
We also discussed Iraq. While the arguments were not entirely original, I noticed that I had become more confident in my arguments (perhaps even cocky…"no, never! Sam? Cocky?"). My experience on the ground in Iraq and the success of the surge had convinced me that while much work had to be done (remember this is May, which was the end of the three month rocket barrage I had lived under since March) Iraq was finally on the right track. There was a consensus that while many mistakes were made, the US did not have any option but to encourage the Iraqi democracy and to do as much good as possible before we pulled out, which wouldn't be until a democrat was elected any way (McCain still had a chance back then…sigh).
Eventually we noticed that the sun had risen and figured we might as well get some sleep.
The next day (err, by that I mean the next chunk of time between sleeping) Geoff and I headed back to Google. The walk to Google was actually quite nice. My friends' apartment was in the heart of the old city, right around the corner from a beautiful Souq (market). Not only was it perfect for tourists, it was also chock full of hot women. I had been in Baghdad (70% men, if not more) for the last 2 and half months, which felt like a lifetime, so this was just fantastic to me. I can't imagine how it must be for kids growing up with all women around them covered in burkas. MTV must be shocking. Actually, I can imagine how that is, in fact I've seen some of the results. Cairo was an excellent example. While there were plenty of fine, upstanding respectful men in the streets, the ones you noticed were the assholes cat-calling the girls and grabbing them as they walked by.
After checking email, we headed off to the fruit market to do some shopping. Apparently there was a party that night at my friends' apartment (Always good to arrive in time for a party) so Geoff had to buy some goods. I had no objections to any of this as I was still dumbfounded by all the gorgeous women in the street. I started to notice that this wasn't just me having been in Baghdad for a while. I realized that Damascus was simply living up to its cosmopolitan reputation. I'd say Damascus at least rivaled Lebanon for beautiful women. Iraq actually had very good looking women, but only inside the IZ. Once the women left, they were totally covered and veiled, unfortunately. Cairo had a mix of the two, but the more conservative women in Cairo actually campaigned to get girls back under the hijab. Of course, no one compares to Yemen. In Yemen I didn't see a single woman wearing anything but a total black burka, except one western researcher who was still veiled. But women in Yemen, as I mentioned in that story, didn't seem to notice that they were veiled. I don't know what women in Yemen look like, but I know they have BEAUTIFUL eyes!
Aaaaaanyway, when I finally got used to the hotness, I started to notice something rather ugly. As Geoff and I wandered through the market I started seeing the same cragly beggar following us around. Even when we made a U-turn and crossed to the other side he seemed to find his way behind us again. Eventually we went into a cramped "supermarket" (I mean cramped too. It was only more amazing that they had tiny shopping carts) and the guy stopped outside. When I checked up on him, I noticed him talking to a group of soldiers. Besides the contrast of the women of Syria, it was depressing to see that these poor people had to live with the dark side of the regime's oppression.
Once we left the store the beggar stopped following us. The soldiers may have concluded that we were unimportant. Or, possibly more likely, the beggar was just bored and wanted attention so he tried to drum up a story to get some from the soldiers. They didn't even look at us. The oppression is still there, but under the new, younger Asad, it is slightly more confident that it does not need to follow every foreigner around. The chances of rebellion are low as long as the regime can distract the people with Israel.
Eventually we ended up walking across town to IFPO, the Institut francais du Proche-Orient (said with snobby voice and a little squiggly line under the 'c' in 'francais'), where my friends were studying Arabic.
IFPO is an interesting institute. It serves as a sort of ad hoc institute for criticism of the Syrian regime. The regime allows it to operate probably because it is a kind of pressure valve for Syrian society. It is also the devil the regime knows. Whatever the reason, IFPO continues to exist and educate students in the truth, rather than regime propaganda. One of the more interesting things Geoff and I discussed while chillin' at IFPO was the breakdown of Syria's political forces. I have attached my notes below.
Basically, Bashar's regime is a little different than his father's, and the tension shows. The Intel, Security and Military guys are more diehard that Bashar is. Bashar is much younger and more interested in moving Syria back into the International System. Victories for Bashar within Syria look kinda like the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, the secret Syrian negotiations with Israel and, to the extent it happens, the Syrian dampening of insurgents flowing into Iraq (that is also good for the security guys, though, cause no one likes crazy terrorists...I don't call them Jihadists because that's actually a compliment).
Victories for the old Hafiz security guys look like the bombings that continue in Lebanon targeting pro-western government officials and Syria's continued support of Hizbullah and Hamas. Bashar dances a delicate line between reforming Syria and keeping control of the country. If he is too hard, he gets sanctioned by the US and the international community. If he is too soft, there may be a coup in Syria.
The one thing many of the students I spoke with seemed to agree on is that the US should be engaging with Syria more in order to strengthen Bashar. There is a legitimate opportunity to pull Syria out of the orbit of terrorists and Iran and bring them onto the US's side. They are a very modern people and pretty well educated. And if the Israelis are still talking to them, after bombing their nuclear facility (possibly something allowed by Bashar to weaken his enemies in the Old Guard…that's wild speculation though), then there must be room for an accord between the US and Syria.
After touring IFPO we headed back to the house. When we got there preparations were underway for the big dinner party. Being a pyromaniac myself, I went about lighting candles and putting them all over the place. When we turned the lights off the candles actually gave off a pretty cool effect, and didn't burn the house down (always a plus).
The guests themselves were worth noting. One girl was veiled and only had her face showing. There was some discussion as to whether or not drinking would be allowed at the party because she was coming. It was concluded that she probably knew anyway and had still decided to come, so it'd be ok, especially if we toned it down while she was there. In the event she did not seem to have an objection. She just didn't drink herself.
We ended up playing scrabble in Arabic. I was totally terrible since my Arabic had sadly deteriorated without the intense study of my student years. I can still talk and get around, but academic stuff like scrabble wasn't going to work out. Scrabble is hard in English.
In Arabic, though, there is one thing that makes Scrabble a little bit easier. See, in Arabic all words are derived from roots of three letters, with occasional two or four letter roots. That essentially means that if one knows the root and pattern structure, one can take any combination of three letters, add some letters to make a standard pattern, and then have a word despite never having seen it before and having no idea what it means. Hans Wehr, the Arabic-English equivalent of the Oxford English dictionary, is the book we use for looking up words.
I think, despite many people making up words, only a single challenge was successful.
Eventually the night wound down with talk about a text message one of the girls got from some guy which led to a conversation about relationships and money…I don't really recall how that played out…
Day 3: Sunday, May 11, 2008
On Sunday I decided to hit the streets early so I woke up at the crack of 11am….
I got out of bed at 3:30 pm ready to start the day.
Everyone had actually gone somewhere that day. I was quite content to sleep, especially since it was my vacation. But eventually Geoff and I managed to get out of the house. I hadn't toured the Old City since the last time I had been in Damascus on my Whirlwind Tour of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, so we went for a stroll.
We ended up hitting Souq Hamadia, which is a big Souq that leads down hill to the Grand Mosque. The first time I came to Damascus I didn't actually spend a lot of time there, so the only part of the Souq I remembered was the lower part near the mosque. It was there that I borrowed the cell phone of a random shop keeper to call my American friend who had been living in Damascus at the time so I could meet up with him for dinner.
This time, the Souq had much less of a feel of urgency so I enjoyed myself much more. Geoff, now playing tour guide, pointed out holes in the ceiling. The holes were actually quite beautiful because Souq Hamadia is covered. The holes in the ceiling looked like daytime stars from inside the Souq. Apparently the holes were put there by the French who strafed the Souq while they were withdrawing for Syria.
Great democracy builders, those French.
But the holes looked cool.
We ended up eating dinner/breakfast at a place called Lela's. I ordered some sort of minty smoothie, which was actually ok, and we watched the news on the Lebanon crisis. Hizbullah was still going crazy and we were actually surprised to see that Hizbullah was still losing public support as they fought what appeared to everyone else as an unnecessary war within Lebanon against Lebanese.
After dinner, we headed back to the house. There appeared to be some sort of discussion going on as we passed through the curtain which separated the doorway from the house. Some housemates were trying to convince the others to go to a free Jazz cultural event sponsored by the US Embassy. The moment I heard about it I was on board, cause that sounded like a guaranteed adventure. Some people opted out and some opted in. When it was decided, the in group caught a cab to one of the major theatres in Damascus.
The entrance to the venue was actually below the street, so we had to walk down a set of steps to get to the door (there was an opposite set of stairs across the way, creating windflow). But by the time we arrived, the area outside the door was packed with people. We wiggled through the crowd to get closer to the door, all the while remarking at how amazing it was that this many people had shown up for a US Embassy sponsored Jazz concert in Damascus (we do have an Embassy in Syria, just no Ambassador).
And looking around at the crowd of well-dress Damascenes (half of whom were women, which TOTALLY blew me away for the Middle East) I realized that I had stumbled into US Foreign policy in action, quite literally. This was a US Embassy sponsored event, bringing US musicians to a country my country considered a state-sponsor of terrorism. Syria was indeed one of the US's major adversaries in the Middle East, smuggling suicide bombing terrorists into Iraq and supplying Hizbullah and Hamas with weapons to fight our strongest ally in the region, Israel. And still yet, the venue was overflowing with Syrians who wanted to hear Jazz.
But no matter how cool the cross-cultural exchange was, that wasn't going to prevent the time-honored Middle Eastern tradition of RUSHING FOR THE DOOR!!!!!!!
The moment the door opened it was a crush of people. DAMN YOU CHILD!! OUT OF THE WAY OLD WOMAN!!!
It wasn't actually all that bad. I was of course laughing the whole time cause what else can you do? But people, while they were rushing the door, were generally pretty polite and let the ladies go first when they could. But it was also a free for all, so those ladies were throwing some elbows too.
Eventually we got inside and it was all style and grace once again. When everyone was seated the place was packed wall-to-wall with standing room only, and people were standing. One highlight was that I spotted a Syrian openly wearing a US Embassy badge around his neck, which I only recognized because I constantly needed someone wearing one of those to escort me into the US Embassy in Baghdad.
Once the lights dimmed the crowed quieted down and a Caucasian, Blond America strode onto the stage. She then proceeded to introduce herself and the event in beautiful, perfect Arabic. Apparently the best use we could find for her was organizing cultural events in Damascus. Then again, it wasn't all that bad an idea. In fact, judging from the crowd, that Jazz event might have been one of the most effective foreign policy tools America had.
The event itself was mildly entertaining. One of my friend's friends ended up being a cute, chatty Indian Canadian who worked at the Canadian Embassy, so I at least had someone fun and ethnically interesting to talk to.
But this being the Middle East, irony was ever present. In-between sets of Jazz songs (on guitar was a music geek white guy and singing was a big voiced big…everything…black woman) my friends and I would talk about the songs or whatever. The one thing we all agreed on was that the event should have been happening at a bar, not in a theatre. At that point, a Syrian guy in front of us turned around and said, "I am really quite sick of your talking. Please stop. This is not the place for talking," or something to that effect.
In case the irony isn't obvious: A bunch of Americans and an Indian Canadian were at a Jazz concert sponsored by the US Embassy in Damascus which was meant to share American culture with Syrians. Part of that culture is to talk while listening to the music (at least in my generation) and the Syrian in front of us, who I assume had come to share in American culture, told us to shut up. CLASSIC.
*Ironic side note in the Syrian's defense: My next trip in July 2008 took me to Kuala Lumpur (very cool) where I visited a famous jazz club and met some fellow travelers. While hanging out there we were drinking and chatting away. It was my birthday as well, and the band was kind enough to sing Happy Birthday Samantha for me. Thoughtful. Anyway, 2/3 of the way through the evening that band also told the relatively small crowd that talking while they were playing was also not appreciated and that anyone wanting to talk should go outside…When did Jazz get so snobby?...IS that an outside the US thing?
At one point all this Jazz elitism was too much for me so I went out to the lobby where I thought there would be drinks. There was one scruffy looking dude behind a bar passing out tap water. I declined.
Back in the theatre, I noticed another tidbit of US foreign policy. There was a cameraman in the event. Unfortunately, because he had to sell a good story for someone, he was always turning to film the crowd. That wouldn't have been a problem, except he kept the massive spotlight attached to his camera on so he ended up just blinding everyone and generally annoying us.
But the songs each got raucous applause, and in the end the crowd seemed really quite happy with the whole performance. In fact, the only disappointed people in the whole place were the Americans. I didn't really care about the music one way or the other, but my friends were not impressed.
We all concluded that they really should have done it at a bar instead, but then one of my buddies pointed out that the Embassy actually does do that. So I guess the US Embassy in Damascus is at least trying.
After failing to get a post jazz-concert date with the cute Indian Canadian gal, I went with my friends back to their pad.
On the way back to the house was the first time I realized how much the rockets in Iraq had affected me. As we casually walked the streets of the Old City a truck backfired. It was something straight out of a movie. I damn near jumped out of my skin and I'm still amazed I didn't dive to the floor. My friends all stared at me and I was just pissed as hell that I'd let the rockets get to me. But I realized that post-traumatic stress is pretty standard for war zones, so I laughed it off and we continued. Those are the kind of situations where I take solace from Russell Crowe: Death smiles at us all…all a man can do is smile back J.
Back at the house the wine had been broken out. The best wine easily available in Syria is Lebanese. It was ok stuff, but it was also extremely cheap, which is great for students like my friends, so they usually had a supply.
And, because this was a house full of students, the conversation quickly lapsed into discussions of flirting, Islamic Jurisprudence and the ongoing conflict in Lebanon. Ya know, everyday stuff…
Then again, that is actually everyday stuff in the Middle East. One of the reasons I study the region is because it is so interesting. But to most Americans, all this stuff is just noise on the opposite side of the planet. This is the reason many people in the Middle East think Americans are ignorant and uninformed. For the most part we are. I mean, Middle Easterners have a hard time keeping up with who is pissed off at who any given day. A nurse in Ohio does not give a damn about what Hizbullah is up to today. But when you live in Syria and Hizbullah is right next door, it is a little harder to avoid.
Normally this isn't a problem. But our country is SO powerful, that we touch everything and everyone, even when they don't or can't touch us. It is something we need to be careful with. Of course, that is why we created a State Department.
Eventually someone said something and a water fight broke out. Lucky for me I was way too new to the situation to be in the middle of it…which was actually quite new for me and incredibly refreshing J. I went to sleep.
Day 4: Monday, May 12, 2008
Day 4 was pretty low-key. All my friends had school or work so I was on my own. I took a stroll around the old city. I ended up at a garden donated to Syria by the Swiss. It had Arabic verses about the Golan Heights inscribed on a metal plaque at the entrance. The irony of that will, again, be explained later. There was a café beside the garden, so I figured I'd sit there, have breakfast and read a little. I got an interesting banana milk-shake thingy and a fruit salad…only veggie food at the garden.
Eventually I got bored of sitting at the café reading, so I figured I'd go to the American Embassy, just to prove it was there. I put on my cool-looking Oakley's (first ones I ever bought, purchased at the Baghdad Px…like a market for military peeps…I never bought Oakley's before cause…well I never had any money before and thought it'd be a big dumb waste. However, once wearing my Oakley's, I realized how much cooler they make you feel. Since I was making big bucks, I felt EEEEEVEN cooler) and then headed off to the embassy.
I caught a cab and told him where I was going. He dropped me off across the street and uphill from the Embassy. I checked it out, walked around it, but I didn't really have any reason to go inside, so I figured the hell with it. I also wasn't all that sure it'd be a great idea to advertise to the US gov't that I was rolling through Syria with a government badge while working on a USAID contract…then again they may have been happier just to know…either way, I didn't tell em.
Instead I just started walking down the street (singing do a diddy…ok done). I ran across a KFC at one point. I wasn't all that hungry but I did stop to take some pictures. Apparently KFCs in Syria are not actually owned by KFC, which I don't think can operate in Syria because of the sanctions. Instead, a former KFC employee decided to start a copy-cat chain in Syria. Since Syria is a bit of an international pariah, no one really bothered to stop him…and according to my buddies it is actually better than the real KFC. Too bad for that guy if and when Syria stops supporting terrorism and the US lifts the sanctions.
I ended up walking all the way to the IFPO, totally inadvertently. Geoff was surprised as hell to see me stroll in, but, again, that's how I roll. He was busy, but it worked out fine because as Geoff was finishing up I checked email (the keyboards were those annoying French ones which the French insisted on because they're special…they may actually be easier to type with in French too…).
At one point I actually ran into an old teacher from Middlebury who worked for IFPO and the US Embassy. The Arabic community in the US is pretty small, so every single person is about two degrees of separation apart.
Eventually we drifted outside to a café across the street and had some tea. We hung out with another girl from IFPO, also cool. The weird thing was that we sat there for an hour and some weird guy wearing not-as-cool-as-my-Oakley's-sunglasses was just standing there the whole time. When we got up to leave the guy was still there, although some "friend" of his appeared and the hugged, as if the guy had been waiting there for an hour for him.
But he didn't follow us so we didn't care. We meet up with Roheet and went to get some food. We ate at some place that was supposed to be really good. It was a skinny little restaurant and it served humus, chicken and rice…just like everyone else.
After buying a neato poster of a tree with all the monotheistic prophets on it and some Quranic recital tapes, we headed back to the house to regroup.
I was feeling up for a massage at that point, because I knew Syria had some kickass Hammams. I had gone to a good one in the northern city of Aleppo and wanted to see what Damascus had to offer. Roheet knew a good spot, so we headed off.
The place we ended up in was pretty sweet. Hammams in general are pretty fun, although they can easily be seen as quite gay since it is usually a bunch of men soaping up and steaming. Europe has definitely hit the mark with the mixed-gender bathhouses and female masseuses.
Syria had not gotten there, and probably was not going to. The massage portion wasn't really a massage anyway, more like skin-peeling exfoliation torture. I am usually pretty white, but I came out of that thing pink…but clean.
Back outside the steam room was actually quite nice too. The place had some cushioned benches and they served kickass tea. It felt so sophisticated Roheet and I actually talked business, which I found hilarious, but the place simply invited it. Eventually I decided to get a haircut and a shave. Neither was worth the money. All-in-all it was an ok Hammam, but I have seen better.
For the evening I bought the round of wine and we did our usual sit around and chat on the cushioned bench in the apartment. Have I mentioned how much that apartment kicked ass? I mean it had an open air atrium in the middle of it which rooms circled around. Above it was a series of metal arches with a plastic sheet over them which kept out the rain and in the middle of the atrium was a nice little fountain with pots and plants around it. Sitting in the place was like sitting out side, but dryer and warmer. Great chi, I guess.
But the chi did not soothe our savage souls. Apparently, one of the guys living in the house was not paying rent. Everybody liked him, so they just let him hang out, but he had gotten in a fight with Roheet the day before and Roheet had banished him to a tent on the roof. Roheet figured his punishment was not enough so we locked the guy out of his tent.
I was trying to remain neutral and enjoy the chaos instead of causing it, so I read some depressing crap by Gram Greene (yes, I'm sure he's a genius, but he's depressing) and then I hit the sack…
Day 5: Tuesday, May 13, 2008…a day that will live in infamy.
I awoke the next day just like every other day. I opened the door to the room I was in and walked outside…I stretched, brushed my teeth, got dressed, stretched…and as I was looking up I noticed the strangest thing.
Geoff's backpack was hanging by rope, twenty feet off the ground in the middle of the air. The rope was wrapped around the metal arches that formed the plastic roof over the atrium. As I looked more I noticed that there were shoes hanging from the arches and there were also slippers sitting on the plastic tarp. I looked around at the ground outside the doors to the rooms and saw that all the footwear which was usually there was now gone. Apparently the guy who had gotten locked out of his tent decided to have his revenge with one of the most ingenious pranks ever: he put everyone's shoes on a roof no one could get to.
As the rest of the apartment's denizens awoke, we all stared in amazement at the footwear and the bag hanging from the roof. Some people were kind of angry, but every one was basically just impressed by the ingenuity and industry of the pranker, a guy who lived in the apartment for free! He had mad good people skills.
But Roheet didn't let it stop at that (I didn't even care cause all my stuff had been locked in the room I'd been sleeping in). With me filming, Roheet snuck upstairs and began pouring pitcher after pitcher of water through the tent onto the sleeping pranker, who begged for mercy he did not receive. After about 7 minutes of deluge, the pranker managed to unlock himself from the tent (he had locked himself in to protect himself while he slept). He was then ordered to get all of the things off the roof.
While he was doing that, everyone else was asking him how the hell he did it. Apparently he had actually insanely crawled across the metal arches to tie some of the shoes. If the arches broke he would have fallen 30 feet to his death. The slippers were easy because he just threw them.
The bag was creative, though. He had done that by tying the rope up above first and lowering it down to the ground. Then he tied it to the bag and hoisted the bag into the air. At first he had apparently tried a suitcase, but that had fallen into the fountain and broken a pot. The suitcase was Geoff's, who, if he hadn't been so impressed by the prank, might have actually been upset that his clothes were soaked.
But the best was yet to come. The landlord showed up. The landlord didn't really show up all that often, apparently, but that day he decided to check in. What he found was a bunch of shoes hanging from the roof and holes in his plastic tarp. Plus one of his nice pots from around the fountain was broken. The fountain water was also dirty from the suitcase, which was bad for the fish in it. Apparently his comment was, "this is very strange behavior."
Not really…just American culture J. I think even an American landlord would have agreed with the Syrian, though. In the end the prankster climbed out on the metal arches, retrieved the shoes and took down the bag. He also bought a new pot for the landlord. Don't worry, even if we Americans break your shit, we will buy you something new and prettier!
I'm not sure that was all a positive look at America, but in the end the landlord took it in stride. In fact, I think he even cracked a smile. I guess American culture really was getting to him.
But, besides making grandiose observations about international relations based on small anecdotes, I had other things to do.
On that day I decided it was time to go check out the Cypriot Embassy and see about getting a visa before my boat ride. I caught a cab and gave the cabbie the directions I had. Apparently it was a pretty far drive, but I told him it'd be no problem as long as he used the meter. Actually, Syrian taxes were pretty good with meters. The cops apparently punished cabbies that tried to rip off tourists and you could pretty much count on a cabbie not using a meter to be ripping you off. There were some exceptions, but not many. To me, the use of meters in taxis is a serious mark of civilization. New York has fricken GPS installed in their taxis. THAT is awesome.
The area that my friends lived in was cheap because it was the Old Town, and it was called that for a reason: it was small, cramped and not all that clean. The area around IFPO and the US Embassy was a little bit better, but the part of town I drove through to get to the Cypriot Embassy was really nice. It had high rise office buildings and banks and landscaping. Now, your average hippie would much rather have been in the Old Town, but for me, I liked the city.
To me cities are way more impressive than Old Towns. Everybody likes the neat-o architecture of the Old Towns of the world, but they really do miss the bigger picture. The simplest way I can put it is that there is a reason we built big, fancy cities.
The more complicated reason is that, especially after my work in Iraq where I helped and got to watch very smart people try and rebuild a whole country, I realized what went into making cities work. Some people are unimpressed by cities because they think they are too clean and proper and that they sap the energy out of our personalities. But the truth of the matter is that it takes serious amounts of effort to keep city streets clean. Sewer systems alone should be marked down as wonders of the world. Have you ever stopped to think about the fact that there are literally thousands of miles of pipes under your feet that carry your shit to a processing plant? I mean, that is hardcore.
And, just for a mental exercise, think about how you would dispose of thousands of tons of trash each year. How would you inform 10,000,000 people how to do the same thing on certain days of the week? How would you design the trucks that picked up the trash? Where do those trucks go? How far do they travel? Where do they put the trash? How is the landfill, if they use one, constructed? Does it have a big plastic tarp underneath it to prevent the waste from seeping into the ground and destroying the aquifer under the city?
Cities are cool; great measure of civilization. Not the only one, not by far, but a pretty good one.
And if you have ever worked for a city or on a development project, you are fully aware of how much personality is involved in running a city.
The best way to put might actually be found in a one-minute commercial which I saw played over and over on CNN in Iraq. It was for some energy company. It showed the process of energy being sent to a city, from the mining of raw materials, to the design of the power plant, the delivery to the power plant of the raw materials, the connection between the plant and the city and finally the connection of the lines to a nightclub so that some guy could dance with a girl with dazzling lights all around.
Of course you could dance under the stars too, but then you'd be camping and you'd have to crap in a hole every night…instead of the filthy bathrooms you usually find at nightclubs…ok there are some clean ones… anyway, you get the point. I think cities are cool. Moving on.
I arrived at the Embassy and put on my cool Oakley's. As I walked up the gate I saw two men standing off to one side talking to a guard. I approached the guard and asked how I could get a visa to Syria. He asked what country I was from. I said America and showed him my passport. All three of the men were stunned beyond belief and wanted to know what I was doing there. I told 'em I was on vacation.
As it turned out the two guys were actually from Iraq. At one point on guy mentioned Saddam Hussein and the other guy said "allah irhamahu" which is a blessing in Arabic on the dead.
I did not tell them I worked in Baghdad and that I supported the destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime. I did enjoy stumping them just a little bit, like when one of the guys said he lived south of Baghdad and I said, "In Mahmoudiya?" He was surprised and said yes. I didn't explain how I knew of it.
I knew about Mahmoudiya because there was a real cool agricultural specialist down there who had single-handedly created the Mahmoudiya Poultry Growers Association. He was so damn good with chickens, that he could bring together the entire chicken growing community of Mahmoudiya and convince them they needed an Association.
The first time I met the guy was in my second or third week at RTI when a group of consultants came in from another consulting company (also paid by USAID) to ascertain from RTI's specialists if USAID should fund a program to train Iraq's Director Generals. The DGs were actually the city managers. At the time I thought they were an anachronistic hold-over from the Saddam dictatorship, and I said so (two to three weeks in mind you). The consultants patted me on the back and told me to keep up my youthful idealism. I figured they were just being nice and thought I was a moron, which I later learned I was, but I didn't really care at the time because my greater objective was to get the attention of my superiors in the hope that they'd notice I was actually trying. Still don't know if that worked (as it turns out, the DGs are the only guys who know how to run Iraq. The central gov't doesn't wan to stop paying them because they keep power in Baghdad. The DGs should be trained, but they should also be folded into the local government structure. At the time I had suggested they be eliminated entirely because I didn't understand their true function as city managers).
Anyway, the Poultry guy fits in here because I sat in on his briefing to this team. He managed to convince them that chicken growing was an essential service. We are talking: Water, Sewer, Electricity, Chicken Growing. The guy was good.
BUT THE BEST PART, was when one of the consultants, a British woman (which only made it seem more like a sitcom) actually complained about how the chickens were being treated. She did not like that they were kept in a chicken coup and wondered if they could all be raised free range. The Chicken guy was not impressed. He first informed her that he had actually dedicated his life to studying chickens.
He then informed her that when you open the door to a chicken coup, the chickens actually just sit there, contrary to popular cartoon movies. And when chickens are actually free range, they usually end up eating small insects which then tear up the chickens' stomachs and intestines, resulting in excruciating pain and death.
He then rubbed it in by asking if she was more interested in free range chickens or feeding people.
He then rubbed it in more by saying that the Brits also had to get on board with genetically engineered food so we didn't all starve to death. It was probably one of the funniest things I had ever seen.
And as it turned out, I didn't need a visa to get into Cyprus, because I was an American. Usually the case. Love the Blue Passport.
I walked off, leaving my Baathist friends behind, and took a stroll through the neighborhood. It was really quite nice. School was just getting out so there were kids running all over the place, and they looked like standard kids. Soccer, gossip, boys hitting on girls, the usual. It was peaceful. Luckily they weren't at war with their neighbor Israel at the time.
As I walked on I eventually came across a Syrian fire station. I had been an EMT in southern Maryland for a little more than a year while working in DC so I had an interest in fire stations. Fire stations are also cool because they fit with my whole loving cities theme because emergency services are one of the key parts of making a city work.
I approached the station and began looking for people. I spotted an open window and walked up to it. It was a room with a table, chairs, a bed and a single, small, wall-mounted TV. Inside were all the firemen on duty sitting around making jokes and watching TV…just like fire stations in Maryland.
When I said hi they were all pretty shocked, as usual, but when I explained that I had worked as an EMT in the US they were very friendly and showed me around. Totally not to my surprise, the place was pretty much exactly the same as the rescue squad station I had volunteered at in Maryland. It had a kitchen, a bunkroom, locker room, lounge, bay for the vehicles, even a bell for waking people up. The only thing I don't remember, which is telling, was a radio room. They got calls somehow, but they didn't have the computer systems to organize it all.
EMTs in the states HATE doing paper work, which today means data entry in a database, but they at least realize the importance of it. It allows bean-counters to count all the beans and then tell the EMTs how many more beans survive if you call 911 before starting CPR or after 2 cycles of CPR. The Syrian guys may very well have had some of that data coordination, but it certainly was not on display. The radio room in the States had two computers where every single call was logged, with location and time. I didn't see a computer in the whole Syrian station.
Their trucks were very neat-o though. The best part about them was that they were donated by the Japanese…the US isn't the only country with a foreign policy. Their trucks had very modern equipment, too, including vehicle extraction rescue equipment like the Omni Tool, also known as spreaders or the Jaws of Life. Apparently true EMT/Rescue nerds look down on the term "Jaws of Life," though, so don't tell them I said that. Actually, the Omni Tool can both cut and spread, hence the Omni part. Whatever it's called it is cool.
Besides the lack of a solid radio room and GPS tracking of all their units, the Syrian fire station was also relatively run down. Of course, I never really saw any fires in Damascus, either, so maybe they weren't all that busy.
After the grand tour I took some photos and said goodbye. Whatever the place looked like, it had the feel of a fire station and the people were friendly enough.
Eventually I got bored with walking and caught a cab back to Souq Hamadia, which was near my buddies' house. When the taxi driver got to our destination neither of us had change so we had to drive around for about 15 minutes to find an ATM, asking people on the street all the while if they had change. Yet another fantastic taxi ride.
In Souq Hamadia I decided to take a different route. I veered off into some side ally and discovered that the Souq had WAY more to offer than I thought. It turned out that there were actually sections of the Souq that sold similar things, one of which was wedding dresses. I have seen Souqs similarly designed, but I have never wandered dusty sidewalk corridors filled with wedding dresses behind cheap display glass before. It was quite surreal. It felt a lot like Blade Runner…
I also came across a construction site in the Souq. They were expanding the place. But construction or not, people still used the place as a walkway (including me) wandering through without hard hats and generally just getting in the way. Construction in the Old City is more of an ad hoc business I guess.
Eventually my wanderings took me out of the Souq. I looked in my Lonely Planet and saw that I was near the Tomb of Baybers and decided I HAD to see that place. Baybers is the big hero of the Crusades as far as Syria is concerned. Saladin was cool and all, and while he managed to hold off Richard the Lion Heart, he did not end the Crusades. He was a great man and reasonable, often letting captured Crusaders go free, but he could not defeat them all.
Baybers was not down with that. Baybers was a Mamluk Turk and he was bred and raised to kill everyone, which is what he did. When he took a Crusader stronghold, everyone died. He burned the Crusaders right out of the Middle East in the most gruesome and violent ways he could imagine.
And right as he finished, the Mongols rolled in. The Mongols, which had just conquered all the lands between Mongolia and Iraq met their match with Baybers. He stopped them from going into North Africa and their defeat at the hands of Baybers was a major blow.
So, I found his tomb. Ironically, it was closed for construction, but the workers let me in anyway. I went inside and they showed me his tomb and they gave me tea. Since it wasn't a museum yet, no one minded sitting on the tomb (they were drying laundry in there too) so I got to sit and drink tea on the Tomb of Baybers. I hope it wasn't cursed.
As it turns out the workers were also Kurds, the people of Saladin, another irony I relished. The Kurds of Syria are apparently the construction guys. They all live in the North East by Iraq and come into Damascus for work. According to them the guy in charge of the restoration was Canadian. I didn't really see any irony there, but it was still funny: a Canadian engineer managing Kurdish workers to restore the tomb of a Turkish general who saved the Arabs from the Europeans and the Mongols. Did I mention that I love the Middle East.
After Bayber's Tomb I went back to the house to relax for a bit. The rest of the roommates were hanging out on the roof sunbathing, a truly Western pastime. I got bored with that pretty quick (I don't really tan as much as get skin cancer) so I figured I'd top off the tourist stuff in Damascus with a run to the Christian Quarter.
The walk to the Christian Quarter took me right through another construction area. The government was repaving and renovating the whole place, apparently. I spent most of my time dodging mini-bulldozers, walking planks and jumping holes. Pretty much everyone else did the same…just another day at work for the Syrians.
In fact, because this king of disorganization is so common in the Middle East, most average folk had pretty thick skin, possibly one of the reasons most people are friendly and polite. Everything is so chaotic and dirty all the time, that little things don't get to you as much eventually. The only thing that always annoyed people were taxis.
Eventually I got lost (best way to travel) and got directions from some guy in a KFC uniform who said I had walked too far. He turned me around and pointed me in the right direction. I was looking for two things: the House of St. Ananias and St. Paul's Church.
As it turned out the street being renovated was the Street called Straight (Acts 9:10-18). Another fun thing about the Middle East: it features prominently in some major religions you may have heard of. Every day you walk the same paths of the people in the Torah, Bible and Quran.
St. Ananias was the man God called upon to cure Paul's vision. His house was quite nice and it emphasized St. Paul's importance to Ananias. There were a series of pictures on the walls that portrayed the journey of St. Paul around the Mediterranean. The best part of all was when I discovered that St. Paul had ALSO gone to Cyprus by boat! I figured it couldn't hurt to have a Saint watching out for me (irony comes later).
I took the time to soak in Ananias's place. I don't go to church very often, but spiritual places have a different feel about them. It might be holiness, or just the importance people attach to them. Either way it is a feeling that I enjoy and indeed one that I feel I need to have every once in a while just to keep my sanity. It is just relaxing, and after two and a half months of rocket fire, relaxation went a long way.
Once I was done getting my spirituality on, I went upstairs to the well-placed gift shop to do some good ole fashion American consuming. I bought an excellent book which contained all the pictures and translations of the journey of St. Paul and some other nick-nacks.
I got directions to St. Paul's church and headed off. It was squirreled away a little bit, but the street leading to it was wide and nicely paved. The church itself was beautiful. I went to the gate and asked if I had to pay and the guy said "Of course not, it is free for all." Christians are great. They are also GORGEOUS. The place was almost deserted, and still I saw three or four hot women walking around. Church is the place to be, man.
But ladies aside, the place itself was fantastically spiritual as well. I'm not sure if it was always like that, but it had an incredibly sense of peace to it. Despite the fact that no one there had any idea who I was, no one bothered me. I took some photos and wandered around a bit and then left feeling like I'd accomplished something.
On my way back to the house I passed through the Souq again and bought some stuff for Mom and then headed home. We were about to start the evening poker game, but still had some time, so I figured I'd go see Sayyed al-Rouqia, the big Shiite Mosque right by the house, while I had time.
The mosque was very cool and the people were just as polite as the Christians. They knew I was a visitor and were happy to let me meander about. This place had a ton of people in it, however, as it was prayer time. People were in various states of prayer or lounging about. I took my shoes off at the entrance and turned them in at a station inside for a token. I looked around and took some pictures, but I didn't really capture the spirit of the place.
It felt homey, and it seemed like a very social place. I don't know if it is because I'm Christian or because I just like relaxing in silence, but it didn't strike me the same as St. Paul's places. But that certainly didn't matter to anyone else and they all seemed to be enjoying it just fine. I grabbed my shoes and headed back to the house.
As it turned out, the game was still some time a way. People were hanging out at some bunker bar for dinner. I headed over and saw Roheet and Ania, one of my friends from Cairo. The bunker bar was an old British hangout and the walls were covered with movie posters. The food was ok, but the company was great, so it was good dinner.
Eventually we headed back to the house and I finished off my touristic spiritual journey with a great game of poker.
Day 6: Wednesday, May 14, 2008
I ended up doubling my money. This was great news, because I had decided to go North that day and try to get to Cyprus, so I'd need all the money I could get.
When the game was done I got directions to the bus station and I headed off to find a taxi. It was about 3:30 in the morning, unfortunately, so there were no cabs. I ended up having to hike it to the main road to hail a cab. It took three tries to find one who would take me for a decent price but the competitive free market won out eventually and I got the price I wanted.
At the bus station I hurried to find a bus to Lattakia, the major port city of Syria, in the North. After some running around I found one that was leaving quick. After a brief argument about not wanting to put my backpack under the bus, I figured it didn't matter and I was too tired anyway. I got on the bus and took a nap.
I woke up in Lattakia.
My first order of business was to find a good hotel that could give me some information. I had checked up on the place in Roheet's Lonely Planet while I had been in Damascus and the best hotel was called Hotel Dura. I found it in a back alley (like ya do) and headed upstairs. It turned out to be quite nice, actually. The owner was very cool and very used to backpackers. He had a world map on his desk, which made it much easier to explain that I wanted to take a boat to Cyprus. He thought I was nuts and said there were no boats, but I told him I had to try anyway. After all, St. Paul had my back!
After getting settled and having a shower I hit the streets. The one thing I had heard about Lattakia before coming was that the women were good looking and dressed very liberally. It was true. Great city.
My first stops were the local travel agencies. I tried one and asked about boats. The guy there said there were no boats, but he pointed me toward the dock and said I could ask there.
I headed down to the dock and asked there. At first they didn't even let me in. Eventually I got to talk to some sort of underling, and he told me there were no boats. I kept at it until a higher up guy came. He told me there were no boats. I kept at it until they started to ignore me because they knew I would not believe them. Unfortunately they won that round. There were no passenger boats going to Cyprus.
I headed back to the travel agencies. The second one I found said there were boats but they were all canceled until June, which was no good for me. They said there were boats from Turkey as well, but at the time I didn't think I had time to go all the way to Turkey to catch a boat to Cyprus. Plus, I didn't want to cross the border again.
While I was at the second travel agency another guy came in who was also trying to get to Cyprus. I figured we should combine efforts.
We went to eat lunch and formed a plan. We decided we'd rest for an hour and then we'd go to every shipping agency in the area and ask if we could hitch a ride to Cyprus.
While we were chatting I discovered that my new friend was Iranian. He had a connection in Cyprus who he was trying to get in touch with so that he could continue on to Europe to find a job. He had apparently gotten kicked out of Iran for owning Salmon Rushdee's "Satanic Verses."
See, Iran being the paragon of the Islamic Revolution and scourge of the evil Americans that it was, could not allow people to have certain books cause all those words might confuse the poor people. I chewed on that one along with my chicken and rice lunch and then we broke for an hour.
I reorganized back at my hotel and then went for a mini-stroll. Highlights: A REALLY REALLY red guy and some old dudes playing Macala at a café. I had only seen Macala at my cousin's house in Hawaii where it was widely acknowledge as a foreign game. These guys seemed like they played it every day.
After an hour I called my Iranian exile buddy and we hit the shipping agencies. We must have walked a good 5 miles in all and visited at least 10 different agencies. We eventually hit one staffed totally by cute girls who pointed us to the one agency that could actually help us: Al-Jazeeri (Al-Jazeera means 'island' in Arabic and the company shipped to Cyprus).
At Al-Jazeeri we were introduced to Muhammed, the head of operations. We did everything we could to get on that container ship, but in the end the owner of the boat was totally unwilling to take on the risk of two passengers on his boat, which was very illegal. On top of being unregistered, there was also the Syrian exit stamp that I would have been missing. It didn't sound like Lattakia was gonna get me to Cyprus.
I was on day 6 of my 10 day trip, so I didn't have time to sit in Lattakia and keep trying. So I said buy to my Iranian buddy, packed my bags, paid for the half-day in the hotel and said goodbye to Lattakia.
My last chance to get to Cyprus by boat was another port south of Lattakia: Tartus.
I caught a bus and got off in Tartus. I had not been planning to go to Tartus so I had not looked for any hotels or anything before arriving. For the first time, in a long time, I had no guide to go on, no guide book to help. It was the first time I realized the amazing value of a Lonely Planet guide.
I was scared.
So, the first thing that I did was start looking for the Internet. No matter what my problem, I knew Google could help. I started asking around and eventually the people in the area herded me onto a mini-bus and sent me off to an Internet café.
The place I ended up was not what I expect, but turned out to be awesome. It was the Syrian Computer Association.
When I showed up at the door speaking Arabic asking for the internet the people were a little shocked, but they eventually showed me a room with a bunch of computers. I didn't ask how much at the time because it did not matter to me; I needed internet.
As an aside, I saw a great Law & Order episode where a kid was kidnapped by a netstalker or something and the psychiatrist guy said that the kid had been addicted to the Internet, which was why he spent so much time online. Jack McCoy scoffed and said "Oh yeah, everything's an addiction now." The psychiatrist responded, "Well, he spends most of his time on the internet, he doesn't sleep, he doesn't eat, he has withdrawn from his friends and family…what would you call it?" Normally I would have been inclined to agree with McCoy, but that psychiatrist made one heck of an empirical argument.
Anyway, I don't think I'm addicted to the Internet, but it did give me a tremendous amount of comfort to be back on. I think that is quite natural since it is a source of tremendous amounts of information and I had exactly none (I also got to chat with my friends in the States while I was on the other side of the planet in a country with which my country had…frosty…relations).
But in the end, the Internet didn't really help except to allow me to update my friends. The employees of the SCA were the ones who helped me. They took me to a good, moderately priced hotel and helped me find an ATM. I told them my plan about Cyprus and they went around to their friends and called the owner of the docks and asked him about it. No one came back with anything, but they certainly put in a lot of effort to help a complete stranger.
They even took me to get a cell phone. The kid that drove me was absolutely crazy (and that's saying something if you've seen the way I drive) but we did get there.
That actually turned out to be quite unfortunate though. As I was purchasing the phone, the cute lady behind the desk asked to take my fingerprint and the kid I was with had to give them his phone number. I really should have refused at that point and gotten the hell out, but I was sort of committed and needed a cell phone. The weirdest part to me was that the Syrians I was with thought this was a normal thing. They said it was for security reasons. I just about flipped out thinking about all the ways it could suck to have the Syrians and whoever they gave it to access to my thumb print.
Then again, I've been to countries where they take your fingerprint at the airport, like Turkey and Jordan. Even though they are nominally on our side, my fingerprints are pretty much all over the place already. It was much more frightening that the Syrian government had so brainwashed their people that they would allow themselves to be fingerprinted to buy a phone.
After I got my phone I returned to the café to finish up my emails and chatting with my friends. I found out the people of the SCA were also Christians. They didn't even let me pay for my Internet time. Now, I know there are some Christians in the world who are fanatical, and I know that Christian history isn't spotless; even in the modern Middle East Christians have been violent.
But on the whole, Christians were the most awesome people I ever met in the Middle East. There may have been a lot of factors contributing to that, but whatever they were, they made Christians the coolest people to meet. They always helped and were always kind. They were so kind they even got mentioned in the Quran for being kind 5:82:
";and thou wilt fin the nearest in friendship to the believers to be those who say, we are Christians. That is because there are priests and monks among them and because they are not proud."
And 57:27
"…and We made Jesus son of Mary to follow, and We gave him the Gospel. And We put compassion and mercy in the hearts of those who followed him."
It is worth noting here that the beginning of 5:82 says: "Thou wilt certainly find the most violent of people in enmity against the believers to be the Jews and the idolaters…" and that the end of 57:27 says: "…So We gave those of them who believed their reward, but most of them are transgressors."
So Christians are well known for being kind people, even though most of them are transgressors. And the whole Jewish-Muslim thing goes back a while. I'm no Quran specialist though, so I'd suggest reading it yourself.
I don't know if this bunch were transgressors in their off time, but they were extremely friendly with me! We settled on having dinner after I got settled into my hotel.
After I cleaned up one of the guys from the SCA picked me up at the hotel. We were going to meet one of his friends and another guy from the SCA. We met up at a nice little restaurant and had dinner by the sea. I think I had fish. I mean, it was a port town. Gotta have fish.
For a while the conversation centered on my Arabic. We all agreed that Arabic grammar was hard. We also discussed how Syrian schools, while free, didn't teach any English. That sucked for Syrians, but didn't really surprise me since they were still trying to shrug off France's Imperial imposition of French on them.
But eventually, as all conversations I have had in the Middle East do, it descended into the Arab-Israeli conflict.
My friends back in Damascus were all smart people. They had all lived in the Middle East for some time and in Syria in particular. They all told me that they avoided politics at all costs. My friend Geoff got asked a political question during a job interview and said he'd rather not answer it. The interviewer agreed.
But I was just way to sick of listening to people bitching about the Arab-Israeli Conflict to let it go. I have seen how Arab governments, and Persian ones, abuse the plight of the Palestinians to impose the most draconian laws on their people. It is the saddest and most pathetic burden the Arabs have forced upon themselves. And all sides are to blame. So here's what I said.
1. The conversation started with talk about what Hizbullah was doing in Lebanon. This was more than a year after Hizbullah's war with Israel in southern Lebanon, but my Syrian friends still thought that Hizbullah was fighting Israel. Armed with all the great information I had gotten from Jared, my friends' friend down in Damascus, I informed the group that Hizbullah was in no way fighting Israel. What they were doing was fighting a vicious turf battle with fellow Muslims, Arabs and Lebanese and killing many of them unjustly.
2. As we went back and forth about how America helps Israel and doesn't help the Palestinians, I explained that I was pissed off at both sides. The Israelis were a pain in America's ass most of the time. They have at least once destroyed an American warship. They are a constant public relations disaster and their settlers are amongst the vilest people on Earth. They may not all be, but their movement is a negative force on the planet.
But in the end the Israelis are the only Democracy in the whole region and they are our best ally. They provide us with fantastic intelligence and they are a staunch ally against terrorism. The Palestinians could not even hold an election without splitting in two. Hamas had thrown fellow Palestinians off roof tops with their hands tied behind their back when they took over Gaza.
All in all, I said, Israel and Palestine eat up way more global resources than either of them are worth. The problem is solvable and it should be solved quickly. The Palestinians and the Israelis are the biggest problem. They appear totally bent on killing each other, and even those who want peace have to tiptoe around murders like Hamas and the Israeli settlers.
3. Leaving the Israelis and the Palestinians aside, Syria was wasting its time bitching about Golan. What the hell good was Golan going to do the Syrians? I asked. I have seen it. It's a small mound where you might be able to grow some crops. It is certainly the high ground above Damascus, but the Israelis most likely have nukes, so what difference does the high ground make. Syria could easily settle for UN mediators on the mound and give it up for the sake of peace.
Actually, I think the Syrians and Israelis today are working on that and might just settle the whole issue.
4. At one point they asked me, "Why do you support Bush, he kills babies." I didn't even bother to explain that I didn't support baby-killing.
What I did explain was that you have to support someone, and baby-killing isn't really a criteria since everyone kills babies, ESPECIALLY in the Middle East. The Israeli airstrikes kill babies. Hamas' rockets kill babies. Hafez Al-Asad leveled the entire city of Hama, killing lots of babies. Syrian suicide bombers in Iraq kill babies. Iraqi suicide bombers kill babies.
That's all a bit morbid, but the point is that Syrians pretending to be superior based on baby killings is ridiculous. I supported Bush because he supported Freedom for my fellow human beings in Iraq (believe him or not, he gave them the opportunity). He was not rolling in simply to kill Iraqi babies, unlike Syrian terrorist Fedayeen who used them as human shields. When Hafez Al-Asad (father of the current Syrian president) leveled Hama, he wanted to extinguish the Muslim Brotherhood, which I assume meant their babies.
Babies, or civilians, die, and it suck. Using non-violence to solve problems is awesome, but it usually takes a very long time and while the Syrians were sitting around waiting for Saddam to die (if they actually were), how many babies did Saddam kill? People try to act like Iraq was better under Saddam, and I still find this ridiculous. It is sad that people think that way. As bad as it has gotten in Iraq, as of March 07 a majority still prefer life without Saddam: http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=67
It seems odd that Syrians are condemning Bush for punishing the Iraqis when the Iraqis are happier without Saddam. Lots of mistakes were made; things could have been done way better. But Saddam was an evil without comparison on this Earth and America whooped his ass.
5. Oh yeah, my Syrian buddies also tried to deny that Syrians are attacking Iraqis. That's awesome. At the time I knew that was wrong, but in the past few weeks I have read two books confirming it ("Cobra II," by Bernard Trainer and Michael Gordon…Check the acknowledgements in the back of the book for my name; and "One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer."). In fact, it is well known that among the Fedayeen forces that the US faced on the way to Baghdad, many of them were Syrian with Syrian passports.
Their "Reason for Entering" Iraq was "Jihad" according to the Iraqi border guard who stamped their passports.
6. I then had to point out that while they were saying America was evil, I was looking at videos of Al Qaeda cutting off the heads of captives and posting them on the internet. The Americans had committed gross violations at Abu Gharab, but those people lived. Al Qaeda was systematically assassinating the tribal sheiks of Anbar and their suicide bombers were TARGETING markets and highly populated areas of Baghdad. Not populated by Americans, mind you, but Iraqis.
America can and will always strive to do better. But in a contest between America and Al Qaeda, who would you want running the world? It is really that simple, and it still saddens me that people can see Al Qaeda through a lens of resisting the Evil Superpower. Al Qaeda is in no way resisting anything. All they are doing is destroying their own homelands and killing their brothers and sisters. When America does better, it means people love us more because we spread the values of Freedom and Justice around the world. When Al Qaeda does better it means it killed a bunch of people.
7. Eventually I got sick of the high-faluten philosophical thought. I didn't feel like any of us were really saying what we meant and it was getting totally confusing with all the generalizations.
So, I cut it down to finances. I began to ask my friends what they paid in taxes. What they told me was that taxes in Syria were pretty low and they were progressive, meaning richer people got taxed more. My friends thought this was great and fair.
But then I asked them about tariffs. They said that Tariffs were actually really high. That, I said, was where the Syrian government snuck the costs of their endless dictatorship past the people. The Syrians had free health care, schools and cheap gas. But they were paying for all of it through increased prices for bread and clothes and everything and anything imported into the country. All their food was more expensive. And their schools and health care weren't even that good.
As the conversation went on I could see I was getting through to them. When I told them the Golan was worthless they argued at first. But eventually they started to agree and argued amongst themselves. When I described how the Syrian government made them pay for all the things they thought were free, they seem surprised and shocked.
I explained that in countries where you have Freedom, you don't have to give a fingerprint for "security reasons" when you buy a phone. They said that they were in a State of Emergency. I laughed and said "Your State of Emergency has lasted 50 years." That got my friends from the SCA arguing with their friend big time, saying that I was right and that it was ridiculous for it to have gone on so long.
I even conceded that Syria could go on fighting forever if it wanted to. The Syrians could continue funding Hamas and Hizbullah to fight some war against Israel for some reason. But then I asked, what did Hamas or Hizbullah ever give to the Syrian people? I mean, the Syrians needed new schools and new sewers. Hamas and Hizbullah were buying rockets and firing them at Israel. They were not importing any engineers to Syria. What did Syria gain from having those allies? They had no answer to that.
And finally I described why they would always lose in a war with Israel. As long as the Syrians were a dictatorship and lived in a country with no Freedom and no creativity, their economy would never match the Israelis. They would never be able to beat them, no matter what they tried. And America would never back a terrorist-sponsoring petty dictatorship over a thriving democracy, even if that democracy had a lot to learn about how to treat its neighbors. Syrians were no more moral than Israelis, and Israel was doing a hell of a lot better with their moral conversations than the Syrians were.
That kinda stopped the conversation. They knew that was true. And we all knew that once Syria was actually a democracy, they wouldn't really want war with Israel, just as most Palestinians actually want peace. They voted for Hamas because they thought they'd be less corrupt than Fatah, not because they actually thought Hamas' endless war was a good idea.
But we did manage to settle on a few points we agreed on: Kids drive too fast, taxes suck, and Syrians really are the nicest people in the Middle East, especially Christians! I assume that's still true, since they didn't turn me in and I lived to get out of the country…of course they probably would have gotten in more trouble for talking to me, but no matter what our disagreements were politically, the Syrians were extremely kind and polite the whole time.
And that is actually one of my favorite traits about people in the Middle East. I have gotten into the nastiest conversations where I was on the polar opposite side from the person I was talking to, but we always managed to part friends.
I went back to my hotel, watched "Ronin" on the most awesome movie channel in the Middle East, Channel 2 (Arabic subtitles), and crashed.
Day 7: Thursday, May 15, 2008
I woke up with a plan. It started with the internet.
When I got to the SCA I learned that there were no boats going to Cyprus from Tartus. One of the ladies there also gave me a present. I think she may have been hitting on me, although I wouldn't have known unless she actually hit me.
After checking email I went with her to a shop around the corner and bought a cheap 4 gig memory stick, simply because I could. It cost about $20. I found out that there are 8 gig memory sticks out there later on, and eventually just bought a 500 gig harddrive, so it was all kinda moot anyway, but it was cool to see that technology was advancing so fast and could be so cheap, even in the developing world. I remember that the first memory stick I bought cost $100 and could store a whopping 1 gig.
I also bought a phone charger cause mine kept breaking.
After that I told my friends the next phase. If I couldn't find a commercial boat, I'd have to find a civilian. There was one place in Tartus I thought shady enough for that and it was the island of Arwad.
Arwad is a small fishing village on an island about 15 minutes from Tartus by boat. I asked my friends how to get to the dock and they put me in a cab.
When I got to the dock I discovered that it was right across the street from my hotel. Unfortunately I had checked out, expecting to leave that night. Anyway, when I got down there I found the boat to Arwad. My suspicion that Arwad was shady was confirmed when I found that Syrian security officials were taking down names and passports of every passenger getting on the boats. It cost a couple bucks, but it was no problem.
The boat ride was pretty cool. I got to sit on the roof wearing my cool-looking Oakley's and chat with the locals. It was a bit bouncy, but nothing terrible. Eventually we pulled into Arwad.
When I got off I surveyed the situation. Most of the other tourists were actually Russians. Syria was a good vacation spot back from the Soviet times. I saw the same thing when I visited Poland in 2005. There were advertisements for great, cheap plane tickets from Poland to Cuba. The travel deals stemmed from when they were all Communist and they had a hard time going any where else because the Soviets wouldn't let them out.
I spotted a café to the right as I exited the port and figured that'd be a good place to start. I walked over with my backpack. As I approached a man came out and asked if I would like some tea. I thought for a second and then agreed. I asked if there was a boat to Cyprus as well. He looked at me for a second and then, in true conspiratorial fashion, said that I should sit and have tea and afterwards come upstairs to talk with him.
I finished my tea and then he beckoned me to follow him upstairs. I went up and met a boat captain named Haj Muhammad. The manager of the restaurant, also Muhammad, but not a Haj (didn't go on pilgrimage to Mecca) said that this was the man who would take me to Cyprus. While we spoke Muhamad had some fish brought up for me. It wasn't that good.
The price started at $6000. I had about $3000 in the bank at the time so I told them that would not be possible. In about an hour I negotiated the price from $6000 to $2000.
Plus Muhamad wanted my Oakley's.
That was my first inkling that something was weird. It all seemed very cool and conspiratorial, but it was also way too easy. It was fun to prove that money could make the impossible possible, but I wasn't sure that needed to be proven. Plus, if the trip cost thousands of dollars for them to make, I doubt very much they would have lopped $4000 off in one hour. And the demand for my Oakley's made it seem very much like an old-fashion scam.
However, the Oakley's were expendable and I could buy more when I got back to Baghdad. I would not get another chance to smuggle myself to Cyprus. So I agreed, knowing full well I'd never see the shades again, even though I threatened to come back if the trip to Cyprus didn't go down. I did demand that I get a pair of shades to replace them though, even though they were cheap, crappy shades.
With that I headed back to the dock and returned to Tartus. I returned to the SCA and spoke with the manager. I told him what was up and he seemed a bit worried, but he did not try to deter me. There was an ATM right outside so I went there and withdrew 20,000 lira, which was about $500 at the time.
I was very worried about all the money I was spending for this little trip, so I figured I might just be able to knock off another $1000. I called Muhamad and he seemed to confirm that the price was only $1000. But then he said something odd. He said that Haj was sleeping and that he was thinking about not going. I was a bit pissed, but I told him "No problem I'm coming back for my Oakley's."
So I returned to Arwad. When I got there Muhamad was no where to be found. His friends asked me how expensive those shades were and I told them $100. They seemed impressed. Muhamad was most likely bragging about ripping off the American. The friends told me Haj Muhamad was waiting upstairs to talk to me though, so it was possible he was still going and I didn't need to take my shades.
When I went to see Haj he was clean and had on new clothes. When I first met him he looked like a dirty sailor. He agreed to my new price, and to me paying half in Tartus and half when I reached Cyprus. I told him visas were no problem because I didn't need one to get into Cyprus. He told me we were good to go and that I could meet him at the docks at 1am.
We shook on it and I went downstairs. I saw Muhamad then, but the shades were not on him. I said goodbye and walked off to the dock. Haj Muhamad came with me and said that we would not have problems because he had a friend who was a cop. I thanked him, paid the ferryman and got on the boat back to Tartus.
While I was sitting waiting to leave, I saw Haj talking to a cop, so I figured he was telling the truth. Eventually some Russians got on board. Something got confused and we had to switch boats but the Russian ladies didn't want to. There was lots of arguing, but I got bored, so I got off the boat and decided to walk around the island.
As I was walking various people came up to say hi. I wasn't feeling very talkative so I told them my name was Bill and that I was Russian, since they thought I was Russian anyway. First time in my life I had been mistaken for Russian instead of British or American. They get a lot more Russians in Syria than anyone else.
The island was nice enough, if a bit run down. It had apparently been an old Phoenician fort and some of the defenses were still standing. While I walked I came up with a plan to prepare for my trip. It required the Internet, though, so I went back to the ferry. I got on the boat and headed back. While we sailed for 15 minutes, the sea felt much choppier. It was a little bit rougher than earlier that morning.
Back in Tartus I did two things. First I wrote an email to my brother and friends telling them of my plans (I did not alert the parents since they probably would have freaked). I included names, times and phone numbers. The boat ride was supposed to take about 12 hours. If I didn't check in after 16 hours I said there was probably a problem and those numbers should be called. They included the number of the SCA and the boat guys who were supposed to take me.
After my rescue plan was in place I called Haj. I said I would be ready to go sooner than 1am and asked if we could move it to 10pm. He agreed.
I left my bag at the SCA and went to the market. I figured that if I was going to take a boat to Cyprus I better have some plastic on hand to keep all my stuff dry. It might also be useful to have some things that could hold a lot of air in case the boat sank and I need floatation devices. There were no ziplock bags anywhere in Tartus, unfortunately, so I had to make do with regular plastic bags. I managed to find some big trash bags as well, and I bought some Tupperware which I figured would be great for holding my camera. Then I bought a whole bunch of snacks and big plastic bottles of water. If I was going on this trip, I wasn't dying of dehydration.
After I had all my supplies I grabbed my stuff from the SCA and said goodbye to my friends there. I headed off to the dock. I picked a spot right across the street from the dock to have dinner. I ate as big a meal as I could and tried to hide my supplies. Some officers came in to have dinner as well, but they didn't pay me any mind. When I finished I grabbed my supplies, which were all in big black plastic bags and walked out.
I crossed the street to the dock. The dock was L shaped. The long part of the L led from the road to the water, and then the short part made a right turn to where the boats were docked. There was a small building there and some boats tied up. Now, I assumed that Haj would be waiting on the boat so I wouldn't have to sit around on the dock raising suspicion, so I walked all the way down the dock to the very end of the L, past the Syrian police with all my supplies. Eventually a man came up to me and said Haj was waiting for me in a tent which sat on the corner of the L. Sooo, I walked back to the tent, past the Syrian police again and into a dark tent which was about the shadiest place I could imagine to have a meeting like this.
Haj was sitting there along with two other men. I sat down and asked what was going on. They said, "This is very illegal. You could go to jail." I asked why and they said it was because I did not have an exit stamp in my visa, so if we got caught I'd be arrested. At this point a cop walked up to the tent and asked what we were doing. The guys said nothing, just talking. Then they went back to scaring the shit out of me.
"You could go to jail. We could all go to jail. We could all get beat up. The police man that runs this place is crazy. He will arrest you, but he might kill us," they said. "Are you ready for that?!"
"No," I responded.
"Do you really have to go??" I thought about that for a second. I guess they were assuming I was someone besides a guy on a trip who wanted to go by boat for some reason. They may have thought I was doing something illegal, when in fact I just wanted to take a boat to Cyprus. They started to outline their plan and at one point I thought they said they would have to hit the cops to get to their boat.
"You have to hit the cops??" I asked.
But I asked a little too loud and just as I did the crazy cop approached and demanded to know what was going on. Haj, who had his hand on the back of the couch, was pinching my arm, silently telling me to shut the hell up. We told him nothing and he looked at me. I told him we were just friends and we were talking. I told him they had been nice to me and I had bought them some gifts, indicating all the Tupperware I had bought and the left over chicken from my dinner (he didn't know it was leftovers). He looked suspicious but he walked away.
At that point I decided this was a lost cause. These guys were way too scared (maybe for good reason) and the cops were now suspicious as hell. They suggested I could just take a plane and this time I agreed. I took two of the big bottles of water I had bought and left the rest of the $15 worth of supplies with them. I walked off the dock and never looked back.
I walked around a little bit until I found a fancy hotel where the concierge pointed me to a 24 hour internet joint. I went there (it was packed with teenagers wasting their life away like I did playing video games as a kid…they're fun, but I got the feeling these guys didn't unplug a lot) and got online. I emailed my friends and brother that there was nothing to worry about and that the show was off. I checked out my stocks, which were doing ok, and then, out of curiosity, I checked the weather.
It turns out that on the night I was planning on going to Cyprus there were 20 knot winds and 4 foot waves in ocean. It was windy and rough and the boat we would have gone on was about the same size as the ferry I took to Arwad for 15 minutes. 12 hours would have been intense, and it probably would have been more like 20 hours in rough seas, if we made it at all.
I checked back into my old hotel contemplating my failure. As I dozed off to sleep I thought about St. Paul and his rough boat ride to Cyprus. I was kinda upset that I didn't pull it off, but considering that weather report, I concluded that St. Paul may have had my back after all.
Day 8: Friday, May 16, 2008
I woke up on Friday and took stock of my defeat. I had lost my $100 shades (I was not going back past the police to Arwad again for those…they weren't even polarized), I had $500 in Syrian pounds that I would never use, I gave away $15 of supplies and I had lost a $350 dollar return ticket from Cyprus to Damascus to Amman. I guess it was a heck of a lot less damage than the $1000 I could have lost going to Cyprus by boat, possibly dying or getting robbed by the crew.
I tried to call Muhamad about my shades, but he simply did not answer. Eventually I headed to the bus station. I was resigned to defeat at that point so I figured I may as well check out some more stuff in Syria. I caught a mini-bus to the Krak De Chevaliers, aka Qalat Al-Husan.
Unfortunately the mini-bus took me only half way. He dropped me off on the side of the road on an overpass and said I need to walk "that way."
I took some stairs down to the lower road and started walking. I walked for quite a while. I did see some signs for the castle, but I didn't see the castle itself, which concerned me because the thing was supposed to be huge.
But as luck would have it a mini-bus full of Polish archeologists just happened to be coming down the road (there are lots of Polish archeologists in the Middle East for some reason, and the old Communist ties probably didn't hurt with Syria either). They invited me in and took me up to the castle.
As it turned out it was a 15 minute drive. It would have been a 2 hour walk uphill if I'd tried it. Thank god for Poles!!
The castle did not disappoint. It was huge and cool, like the other castles I had seen, and it was still there 1000 years later. The Poles said I was part of their team so I could get a discount on the ticket. On the roof of the castle there was a restaurant and the Poles and I sat down for lunch. The chicken was surprisingly good and they even had beer. The castle even had a Red Crescent office inside of it, which I thought was weird.
After checking out the castle we moved on. The Poles said they were heading to Homs and then to Hama. I had to go that way anyway, so I went with them. In Homs there was actually a ticket system for the mini-buses, which impressed me. We caught a bus to Hama and then in Hama caught a bus to the center of town.
Hama was quite a city. Besides having been totally rebuilt after Hafez leveled it, it also had ancient wooden water wheels in it that were a tourist attraction. I checked out the sites, saw all the rebuilt walls and then wished my Polish friends goodbye!
I went back to the bus station by taxi. I didn't have change for the taxi, again, and he didn't have any either, so he waited outside while I broke a larger bill by buying some Pringles. I then went and found a bus company and bought a ticket for Damascus.
When I showed the guys my passport they seemed confused. They passed me off to a younger guy who spoke English. I paid him and he said he'd bring the ticket out to me. I waited outside and eventually he brought me the ticket. When he did he stopped for a second to ask,
"Why do you hate Syria?" I assume he asked because I was American. At this point I was way too tired to try and explain life to this kid so I just told him,
"Not everyone's the same." He seemed ok with that and I took down his email and wished him luck. I didn't really know where the bus was going to stop. The announcements where in Arabic but the speakers were hard to make out. At one point a bus pulled up and the kid announced that it was the Damascus bus. I went up to it to board and then I heard the announcement again, but in English. There were no other tourists at that terminal, just Syrians. The kid had made a special announcement for me to make sure I got on the bus. Nice of him.
I slept the whole way back to Damascus. I called my cabbie friend who had driven me up from Amman and told him to stand by to drive me back south.
Back in Damascus I found the house. When I got there everyone was very excited. Apparently a group of people had gone to see Richard III and had actually sat right next to Bashar Al Asad in the front row. They were all meeting up at a place called the Journalist's Bar. I grabbed some dinner and then headed off to meet them.
When I got to the Journalist's Bar it was laughs all around. Everyone had stories to share, them about Asad and me about Tartus. It was pretty amazing to hear that Asad had gone to a play about a dictator's rise to power. That says something about his style right there.
But that did not turn out to be the most interesting part of the night. I ended up seated across from two actual Syrian girls who did not share the American's enthusiasm for seeing Asad and, in fact, openly expressed their hatred of him. I looked around the Bar at the waiters. I thought someone would arrest them on the spot. But apparently the Journalist's Bar is kind of protected from that.
The conversation was damn interesting. We talked about Iraq and what I was doing there. I usually get in heated debates with Americans about it, but the Syrian girls and I actually ended up agreeing a lot. We both saw that Saddam was wicked, and that a lot had gotten screwed up, but, in the end, the Iraqis should at least try for Democracy.
The thing that amazed me the most was how calm I managed to stay. I think in the past I substituted noise for reasoned debate, and my time in Iraq made me quite comfortable that we were doing the right thing over there and had to see it through.
As it turned out, 4 months later, after I left RTI and was in Amman sitting in a coffeshop waiting for my new job to start, one of those girls spotted me and said hi. We ended up being roommates for 10 days, which was great because she cut my housing costs from 10 dinars a day to 3.33. She saved me quite a bit of money when I was on a tight budgetJ.
Back to the Journalist's Bar. As I was sitting and chatting, Ania, my friend from AUC came up. She was apparently at the place too, for totally different reasons. She was also hanging out with a bunch of OTHER AUC people. I went over to say hi and we all took some pictures. They were all amazed at my exploits over the past few years since we had studied abroad. Ania admitted that the last one with the boat had her a little concerned. It was apparently the one time she thought, "Wow, Sam is taking this seriously. This might be serious." I took it as a compliment…
But eventually I had to go. Back at the house I was bored and sad that I wasn't going to Cyprus.
But, as it turned out, there was still a chance. I had met a guy way back at the beginning of the trip who I thought was named Kerby. He was going to Cyprus by plane and he was on the way to the airport. When he got there he called me and said there was room on the plane and if I hurried I could get on.
So in 2 minutes I packed, said bye to everyone who was awake…which was no one, and ran off to the airport.
Day 9: Saturday, May 17, 2008
I found a taxi quick this time by paying a little extra. I told him to hurry, but for some reason he had to stop to grab some tea. He gave me some, though, so it was cool.
He did make it to the airport in record time. When I got to the airport I found my buddy Kerby and we headed to the ticket counter. At the ticket counter they told me I needed some sort of receipt to prove I had spent money in the country or something. They wanted me to spend US dollars to buy my ticket and they didn't take credit cards.
See, the Syrians don't have a very strong currency, so one way they increase their foreign currency reserves is by hijacking people at the airport and forcing them to pay taxes in US dollars or Euros. Despite the security officials supporting terrorists against the US, they still wanted our dollars.
But they were out of luck with me, and I had a ton of Syrian currency which I had taken out of the ATM for the boat ride. I went to the booth where I was supposed to get the receipt and I stood there long enough bothering the guy that he eventually just gave me the proper documentation. I went back to the lady at the ticket counter, bought my ticket and headed to the check-in.
The one thing I was worried about was that they would find my government ID on me. However, my friends had told me that the Syrians were paranoid, but they never body searched foreigners. So I just put it in my wallet. I put my wallet in the tray as I passed through the metal detectors and they were never the wiser.
The check-in was a bit chaotic, but it was efficient enough once they opened it. While we were waiting around for check-in I discovered that Kerby's name was actually Toby and I had heard it wrong over the phone!
After we checked in I headed to customs. The customs official searched through my passport. At one point I swore he stared right at my Iraqi exit stamp. He grilled me about what I was doing there but I looked like a grungy student, so telling him I was a student worked just fine. The plane was boarding, so he let me go.
As it turned out the plane was nearly empty. I fell asleep quick, but the flight was only 45 minutes, so when I woke up in Larnaca I was still tired.
However, I had finally gotten to Cyprus! Albeit the easy way, but still there. Lucky for me Toby had a hotel. We caught a cab from the airport to the hotel. We had agreed on a price with the cabbie, but as usual when we got out he tried to rip us off. He grabbed Toby's hand and when Toby told him to piss off the cabbie threw his hand. Not a great introduction to Cyprus.
However, the owner of the hotel made up for it. We told him what happened and he rushed outside to yell at the cabbie, but he'd already left. He apologized profusely on the cabbie's behalf, saying that it was really rude and that Cypriots were really much nicer than that.
Cyprus is an interesting island. It has Greeks in the South and Turks in the North, but it has a truly British culture. It is one of the most, if not the most, conquered islands on Earth. So far I was liking the Brits better than the Greeks. But, in the end they all turned out ok.
Toby was nice enough to let me crash on one of the two beds in his room. I took a nap and a shower and then we headed off to check out the city a little. There was a farmer's market going on in the parking lot and the beach was actually right past it. The beach was nice too. Apparently all the spies in Syria left through Cyprus, which was one reason I got such a grilling at customs. But looking at that beach I could see that was not only a good escape route, but a nice place to relax.
Eventually Toby and I parted ways. I grabbed some lunch and then I headed back to the airport. My plan was to get to Ayia Napa which was apparently THE party town of Cyprus, so it had to be checked out. Ayia Napa was also near one of the most fascinating negative side effects of international Peacekeeping in the world: the abandoned city of Famagusta.
When the Turks invaded Cyprus in 1974 they captured Famagusta. The Greek Cypriots of the town had evacuated before the troops arrived and under the bombing of the Turks. When the Turks arrived, they sealed off the thriving tourist town and major port of Varosha, which was in southern Famagusta. To this day the city is a ghost town, totally frozen in time while the Cyprus dispute between the Turks and Greeks continues. There are still clothes in the department stores and restaurants with tables set.
No one is allowed into the zone by the Turks, who control the northern half of Cyprus. Naturally I was thinking of sneaking in. However, I didn't have enough time at that point. But I heard that there were boat rides from Ayia Napa that you could take to the border and look at Famagusta, so I settled for that.
When I got back to the airport in Larnca I went to rent a car. I checked all the agencies for the best price and then realized I had left my wallet with my driver's license in Iraq. I used a badge holder (like a pouch you wear around your neck) popular with contractors in Iraq to hold all my credit cards and cash, so I didn't carry my wallet anymore. That meant no rental car.
That sucked. My flight was the next day and I wanted the car for the flexibility and because it would have been cheaper and more fun than a taxi. But it was not to be. I went outside and caught a 45 Euro cab ride to Ayia Napa.
Oh yeah, they use the Euro in Cyprus. Double sucks.
The most obvious mark of British influence is that Cypriots drive on the left side of the road and their steering wheels on the right side of the cars. It is very strange for Americans, but I got used to it.
The landscape of Cyprus was pretty nice. There was a lot of ocean, which I always love, but it was distinctly different from Hawaii.
Hawaii is pretty much totally urbanized. There really are not any farms and everything depends on tourism and the military. The infrastructure is pretty good and there are tall buildings and mountains everywhere.
Cyprus still had villages. Hawaii has suburbs. There were small towns in-between the big cities. It actually seemed like a pretty nice place, although it was quite flat.
But Ayia Napa did not disappoint. It was chalk-full of girls in bikinis and dune-buggies. I found a hotel in the middle of town which was a set of apartments that just got turned into a hotel, really. That basically meant I had to buy my own soap and shampoo. Luckily I had brought a towel (always bring a towel).
For the afternoon, I checked out the beach and did another one of those spiritual sit-around and think about life things. I went swimming in the Mediterranean as well. In fact, that may have been the first time I ever did that. I gotta admit. Hawaii has some nice ocean. But the blue waters of the Mediterranean around Cyprus were gorgeous, and fresh. It was probably one of the most refreshing swims of my whole life.
I went back to the hotel for a nap and then went out in the evening. I checked out a British bar called Tommy's for dinner. It was apparently Karaoke night. I enjoyed that before checking out what nightlife Ayia Napa had to offer.
It was actually quite cool. There was essentially one major area where all the clubs were and you could hear it from about half a mile away. The best part was that all the clubs were thematic, and were built like their name suggested. There was a pirate bar shaped like a ship; a castle bar shaped like a castle; a Flintstones bar with the characters scattered around with a Stone Age design; a Communist bar which was all red, etc. It was really impressive. Unfortunately hitting up the nightlife while traveling alone gets boring pretty quickly, at least it did for me, and so I headed back early. It was probably the healthy thing to do anyway.
I could hear the party thumping away as I drifted to sleep.
Day 10: Sunday, May 18, 2008
I still had a little bit of time to explore before my flight out of Cyprus that evening, so I headed back to the beach. I found a Bangladeshi kid renting out Jet Skis. I tried to negotiate the price down because I was running out of Euro, but the kid couldn't budge without the owner there.
I said I'd come back and I headed to the dock. As I was walking a guy on the dock handed me an advertisement. I usually would have ignored it, but when I read it I saw that it was for a boat ride out to see Famagusta! I turned around (shocked by the irony that the handing-out-little-flyers-to-random-people trick had worked on me) and asked the guy when the ship was leaving. He said 15 minutes. Just enough time!
I took off at a sprint back to my hotel. I packed quick and checked out. I ran back to the dock…but stopped at McDonalds for breakfast take way. I continued running looking like a true tourist: Hiking backpack on, a Mcdonald's bag in one hand and a medium coke in the other. I made it to the dock just in time to get on the boat.
The ride itself was pretty low key. The owner of the boat was apparently from Famagusta and he told us that he hoped to go back there one day. On the way to the ghost city, we stopped so people could jump off the boat into the water.
The city itself was unfortunately not all that impressive. First off, it was cloudy so we couldn't see it. Second, it was too far away. The boat had to turn around at the invisible Green Line in the water which split poor Cyprus in half.
We headed back to the dock, stopping once more for swimming. As we pulled into the dock, I saw the Captain rush to the stereo equipment. He quickly switched the music and began blaring "Let's Talk About Sex," as we pulled into the harbor. I laughed my ass off.
After I got off I went back to check out the Jet Ski guy. The owner, a big fat greek guy, had showed up. He agreed to let me ride the Jet Ski for half time at half price, saying I could pay "his" Bangladeshi boy when I was done. I love Jet Skis so I had a good time. I came back in and paid the kid. I asked the kid his name, trying to be nice, and he told me he didn't know…I stared at him unsure what to say. But he just smiled and shrugged. I shook his hand and headed off looking for a last meal before heading back to Larnaca. As I was leaving the beach I saw some naked Russians sunbathing…
You don't see that in Hawaii very much at all…
Eventually I found a place to eat. It was nice enough and it was attached to a hotel too. After I ate they let me use their showers. I changed and headed off to find a cab.
I found a guy pretty quick, but I realized I had one last thing to do. He let me keep my bags in his trunk (he didn't have very many customers and wanted to make sure I stuck around) and I went off to find a soccer jersey. The first store I checked didn't have anything, but the store right next to it was the jackpot. I bought my Cypriot Soccer jersey and even got a flag to top it off.
With that done, I jumped in the cab and headed for the airport.
UNFORTUNATELY, my plane was late. When I finally caught it, I had to do a layover in Damascus. That sucked because I was back in Syria, one, and two, I missed my connecting flight to Amman and there was not another flight for 8 hours. That meant I was most likely going to miss my flight to Baghdad and that meant I was going to have to use one day of PTO and pay for my hotel stay in Amman because RTI would not cover me for an RRB.
I found a first class lounge in the Damascus airport. I had to pay something like 1000 lira to stay there for 4 hours. But I was making plenty of money in Iraq, with no expenses, and I had tons of Syrian pounds left from my massive ATM withdrawal. The girls at the counter seemed surprised that a scruffy-looking ruffian like me could afford their Prestigious First Class Lounge and I enjoyed their surprise with a smile. I also made up for it by eating the free food and drinking the free water. They didn't have any Internet, though. I passed out on a couch. They woke me up after 4 hours to ask for another 1000 lira, which I gave them.
Finally my flight to Amman showed up. I went to the gate and gave the guard my passport. He told his supervisor that I did not have a Syrian entry stamp and I cut in, in Arabic, explaining that I was transiting through to Amman from Cyprus. After a little shock, they let me through.
As I suspected I got stuck in Amman for a day. Luckily RTI got me the corporate rate at the Intercontinental, so it was a little cheaper.
At that point I thought the adventure was over and I headed down to the bar/restaurant for some food. I ended up sitting next to some Scottish Oil pipeline engineer who had an armed Syrian driver paid for by his company and they were going out on the town. I agreed to go with them and they drove us for about 30 minutes out to some bar. It seemed like a nice part of town, although I had no idea where it was.
The bar itself was crazy! It was loud as hell and just as blue. There were scantily clad women inside dancing around for rich Jordanians and Lebanese princes who were escaping from the fighting in Lebanon. We sat down and a girl came up to our table.
Apparently the way the place worked was that the girls would flirt and dance with you and ask you to buy them ridiculously expensive cocktails. They would not drink them at all, but if you kept buying them they'd flirt with you more. I don't even think they went home with any of the guys. The proceeds went to the bar and the girls got a slice.
Since I totally missed the point of all that, I didn't buy the girl at our table any drinks and neither did my buddies. She became progressively less friendly and went to serve other tables.
But the most RIDICULOUS spectacle was the weird ass custom of toasting the girls. The crazy Lebanese princes would apparently toast to the girls by paying one of the guys from the bar to pour an entire bottle of Black Label, about $70 worth, into a fire…literally, I watched them pour $70 into a flame to toast some girls who worked at a bar. I mean, it might be fun to burn money if I was stupid rich, but why would I pay SOMEONE ELSE to burn my money? At least pour the Black Label in yourself…wacko.
To top that off, they did another toast where they put 10 bottles of Champagne on the ground in a circle, stuck sparklers in the top of them, and lit the sparkers. Then they danced in the middle of the circle. Then they poured out the Champagne. That one cost around $200 bucks. My new buddies took great amusement in the perplexed look on my face.
At the end of the night the driver drove me and the Oil engineer back to the hotel. I headed upstairs and crashed. The logic of the Jordanian nightlife still escapes me to this day…
But it was a great way to end one hell of a trip.
Dear Friends and Family,
I landed in Iraq in March looking to help out in any way I could. I felt like a lot of mistakes had been made in a war that I had supported, so I wanted to find out why and see what I could do.
And I think I helped, in my own small way. I assisted USAID in coordinating GIS operations among Iraqi and American mapping specialists and I helped finalize the transfer of 5 years of great mapping data from the US military to the Iraqis. And I topped it all off by laying the ground work for a Symposium where all of Iraq's major GIS stakeholders finally got to meet in a single room and REALIZE they had a lot of information, but also a lot of coordination to do. The post-Symposium noise I'm hearing is that it actually worked, and the Iraqis are saying things like "That was the first time we saw how many people were involved in GIS and how much work we'd already done, and how much more we had to do."
I think they do indeed have a chance. But it is up to the Iraqis at this point. They have told us when they need us out, and that is how it's gonna be. I hope that they find a way to achieve Reconciliation, because there are many lies that live on and many pains that need to be expressed, but it doesn't seem to be where they are headed just yet.
But my time here is done, for now. However, the wonderfully complicated American tax system states that if I come home before I have been out of the country for 330 days out of 365, I will have to pay a whole lot of taxes.
So I've decided that a great way to finish off this year of rampant internationalism is with a little volunteer time.
I'm not in the habit of asking people for money, except my parents, and even that I try to avoid these days. But this happens to be for a good cause. For the entire months of January and February, I will be doing three separate volunteer events:
January 10-31: Unite For Sight in Chennai, India
https://maestropay.com/go/uniteforsight/volunteers?ref=645b8413a9fe4c1f8f50ef42609274db
February 3-16: Habitat for Humanity build in Zambia
https://www.habitat.org/cd/gv/participant/participant.aspx?pid=93132015
February 21-March 7: Habitat for Humanity build in Thailand
Apparently, the way volunteer organizations operate is that they offer the volunteers the opportunity to work for free and in return, the volunteers do fundraising for them. So I went in search of good volunteer organizations I thought you'd guys would donate to and I found Habitat for Humanity and Unite for Sight.
I think most people know about the great work Habitat for Humanity does around the world, supplying the impoverished of the world with a decent roof. What you may not know is that HFH does not just give the houses away, which would damage the local housing industry by flooding the market with cheap housing.
What they do is offer the housing recipients long-term, no interest loans to buy the house, and on top of that the recipients have to do 300 hours of Sweet Equity. Sweet Equity means that the people who get houses from HFH have to work for HFH doing builds for 300 hours before they can move into their houses. The end result of this is that HFH builds communities of houses built by volunteers who then move into the homes after they build them with their own hands. It creates a wonderful sense of community and I am excited that I'm going to get a chance to be part of that family!
Unite For Sight is another awesome organization. They have a ton of information on their website, and I add some more on mine. Suffice to say, UFS cures people of blindness. It is an almost magical concept, and the fact that they actually do it amazes me. On top of that, they too have learned from the many pitfalls of International Development and they work through local eye clinics to provide all their care so they don't force local business out. And the net benefit of their eye care is tremendous, as previously blind people and their caretakers are freed up to join the work force and earn a living for their families or go to school if they are kids.
But I can do one better than simply asking people to donate to a good cause!
I know that many of you enjoy my stories about my trips around the world. If I can't convince you that you should donate to these causes out of their own merit, then at least take the time to ask yourself how much fun you got out of reading my stories. I'm sure they will keep coming, especially if I have my friends and family financing my volunteerism all over the world!!
And btw the donations are tax-deductable:) Plus they make you feel good!
(Some of the more nerdy among you may have noticed I only provided one website for the HFH trips. That is because I only get one HFH website at a time unfortunately, so I need to fundraise for the Zambia trip first, and then the Thailand trip second)
The deadline for fundraising for the Zambia trip is Dec 15 and I need to raise $1,880. For UFS, the deadline is the end of December and I need to raise $1500. And for the Thailand trip I need to raise $1,680 and the deadline is Jan 7. You can donate through the websites listed above. Please pass this one to your friends and family, too, if you think they'd like to donate!
And if you're worried I don't take this seriously, I have already locked down a $1500 refundable deposit with UFS and $700 worth of deposits with HFH (non-refundale) Plus, I'm going to have to buy my plane tickets all over the place
And in case you were waiting for it, I have also attached my story about my trip through Syria last May (the attachment are notes taken during the trip...the story explains).
It's one heck of a long story though, so grab some hot chocolate.
If you need a summary: I left Baghdad on a "legal" plane ticket, bribed some Syrian border guards, met a Hizbullah gurrilla and got attacked by a Syrian...all on the first day...well, part of the second...Then I communed with St. Paul, convinced some Syrians that their government was worse than they thought, almost got arrested attempting to smuggle myself to Cyprus and got rescued by some Poles while storming a castle. Eventually I ended up on some Island with an Australian guy, caught boat ride to see a city of Ghosts and some naked Russians and topped it all off watching someone pay to watch someone else pour a bottle of Black Label into a fire...And then I went back to Baghdad.
If you got this far, I'm impressed. Thanks to all of you and hope you all have a Merry Christmas too!!!
The Syria Trip...aka Syriana
here are some notes I took about Syria after a conversation with a friend studying there. They might help inform your reading.
Day 1: Friday, May 9th, 2008
My trip to Syria started, as all trips start, at the planning phase. For anyone planning to travel I highly recommend using the "plot a path" function of Google Earth. It is really cool, security guys in Iraq use it to plot their routes, and you can get an idea of your place in the world. My trip plan was to go from Baghdad to Amman to Damascus to Lattakia (Northern Syria) to Cyprus (by boat) and then back from Cyprus (by plane) to Damascus to Amman to Baghdad.
It didn't exactly work like that.
My convoy ride to the airport was uneventful (thank god or Alhamdulilah). I traveled with my buddy and roommate David Kraus, who I entered the country with (every new group of arrivals seems to form a kind of bond. It is a lot like freshmen year of college, actually…in fact the IZ in general is disturbingly like college because apparently nothing really changes as we get older. Everyone just gets smarter and more experienced, but there are just as many cat-fights). Most of the time we were just looking out the window wondering when an IED was going to blow us away (the security guys warn us not to lean on the doors…). However, I felt pretty comfortable because a month early a rocket had actually landed about 10 meters away from me inside our compound and the armored cars that were two feet away from the blast protected the passenger compartment completely.
A big cement T-Wall saved my life in that particular rocket strike. My colleague Anwar Khudair, the deputy director of training, took multiple shrapnel hits. He got rushed to the American military hospital in the IZ and then transferred to the American Military Trauma hospital, which is the best on Earth simply because the staff has the most experience with shrapnel trauma out of anyone. Once Anwar was stabilized, he got transferred out of the US military hospital to the Iraqi Medical City. He was pronounced dead later that evening. It appears that he was either murdered in the hospital through neglect or was simply neglected out of incompetence. In either case, it was an extremely sad event.
A Chinese copy of a Russian-designed rocket bought by Iranians sold to Iraqis and fired by Sadrist in Baghdad at an American military zone landed in a USAID program's HQ and killed an Iraqi citizen. Globalization is here.
These thoughts and others raced through my mind as our convoy raced to the BIAP.
Much like everything in Iraq, entering BIAP is quite interesting. As we approached the first checkpoint, I noticed heaps of Iraqis sitting in cars in a dirt parking lot right outside the BIAP. I have no idea what those people do, but it is rumored they are there to pick up Iraqis coming out of the airport. The one time I took a civilian taxi out of BIAP he picked me up right outside the terminal, but inside the airport, so I didn't have to hitchhike.
After the first checkpoint where our Personal Security Detail sweet talked the cute American soldier guarding the checkpoint, we drove on. The next checkpoint we hit was guarded by a private security company called Global (every time I see them I am reminded of Globo-Gym from the movie Dodgeball). It would normally seem strange for a security company to be guarding an airport as opposed to the airport doing its own security, but in Iraq in is very much the norm. Even the outer perimeter of the US embassy in Baghdad is guarded by a private company called Triple Canopy.
Essentially the US military has outsourced the basic security functions to people who could do it just as well as our soldiers for less money. It basically shows that the US military has more money than people. However, the security guards are good at their jobs. The companies are security companies and their future profits are based on their ability to protect people, so they do it. Their allegiance is to money, not necessarily the Americans. But they can't allow their guards to get bribed because it would be bad for business. And at the rate things are going in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if private security companies start working for the UN. You can call them mercenaries if ya want (cause they basically are) but they provide a service that everyone needs.
After passing the Globo-Gym checkpoint test, the armored car finally pulled up to the curb and we got out. The next level of security involved a group of about 50 people lining up all their bags in a bunker and allowing Global guards to search through them all and sniff them with dogs; then came metal detectors and x-rays, of course. Besides being surrounded by two US Military Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), BIAP is one secure airport.
Inside the Airport, the fun really starts. First off, my friends and I tried to find the infamous "bar on the third floor." Unfortunately it turned out to be closed (for my more avid readers, you might remember I went to Erbil in June, after this trip. On that trip up to Erbil I did find the "Bar on the third floor" and one of my buddies and I graced it with a drink at 9am...oh and btw, all the PSD convoys always drop people off at BIAP in the early morning, but all the flights leave in the afternoon or evening, so the many hours spent with it have made BIAP a dear, dear friend of mine).
After failing to find the bar, we went downstairs to a small restaurant. Eventually my friends got called for their flight to Dubai so we headed down to the Departure Terminal. UNFORTUNATELY, the line to get through security there was REALLY long. One of my friends happened to be one of our chief finance people back at HQ and he wasn't down with standing in line. So he got on the phone with our fixer.
See, the way BIAP works is that every major company has a fixer. They call up this person when their employees are traveling and the fixer finds a way to get the employees past all the other people (mostly Iraqis) so that they don't miss their flights. Our particular fixer is friends with the Iraqi Colonel who runs BIAP, so when we have problems we call the fixer and they disappear. Our Chief of Party never misses flights, and our Big Dog employees don't stand in lines unless they want to.
However, unless it is an emergency, the fixer is usually not needed at all. By the time the fixer got anyone to help my buddies they were already at the front of the line (I was not allowed through because I was going to Amman, Jordan and not to Dubai).
So I sat around on my ass waiting for my flight. When it did get called, I went to the front of the line and the guard at the front said "No, you have to go and get a boarding pass from the Royal Jordanian office over there." That wasn't too hard, but it did put me all the way to the back of the loooooong security line. So naturally, I called our fixer. His response was essentially to "suck it up." Oh the life of a peon:).
Eventually I got through security (again) just fine, and then I checked in...and then I got another boarding pass...and then I got my passport checked...and then I got my bag scanned AGAIN. However, while I was standing in all these lines, I did get the opportunity to make some phone calls. With the magic of modern telephone infrastructure, I actually got to call my American friends in Syria with my Iraqi cell phone issued by USAID from BIAP. I told them I would be coming from Amman to Damascus that day and that the party should be waiting for me.
It was at this point that my friends in Damascus decided to tell me that it could take up to 17 hours to get across the border from Jordan to Syria. Now, I had crossed into Syria from Lebanon and crossed into Jordan from Syria. But I had Syrian Christians with me the first time I crossed the Syrian border and I was leaving the country the second time. I had never actually gone from Jordan to Syria. It was at that point that I decided that if I was going to roll into Damascus in style, I would have to get across the border quickly. More on that later.
For now, I was stuck in the extremely comfy waiting lounge that awaits passengers after they finish check-in. Say what you want about the Middle East, they know how to lounge around in big cushions. And while it was kinda nasty that all the seats were absorbent foam, they were very comfortable, comfortable enough to sleep on which many people do when flights get canceled at the BIAP.
At this point my friends still had not gotten off the ground for Dubai, so we all sat around and chit chatted. One of my buddies was a Filipino electrical engineer. He worked in Falluja, actually, and when our HQ was having Electricity problems, we brought him in to fix them, and amazingly, he actually helped! A man qualified to be an electrical engineer...actually being an electrical adviser...SHOCKING!!! The only problem was that he was so good the PRT he was working at threw a hissy-fit and DEMANDED that he be returned to work. Yes, people still through hissy-fits in Iraq. But it was nice to know he was appreciated.
SO this particular guy, on top of being awesome, is something of a god to his fellow Filipinos in Iraq. He had a whole crew of them around him (and he also knows all the rest in the IZ)! I guess because the Philippine Government made it illegal for its citizens to work in Iraq they kinda stick together.
At about 12pm my friends got called onto their flight. This was very lucky for them because the whole time we were waiting at BIAP we noticed that a dust storm was kicking up outside and it was only getting worse. Unfortunately for me my flight still had to come in from Amman and didn't land until 2pm. That turned out to be very unlucky.
Just after my friends left, I heard over the loud speaker something that sounded very much like "The RJ flight to Amman has been delayed." Naturally I was worried so I went up to the extremely cute Iraqi girl behind the information desk and impressed her with my fancy-pants Arabic to find out what was going on. The only thing I got out of it was a smile and a "yes, your flight is delayed."
At this point it was a waiting game. I tried to talk to some people to get them to switch me to an Iraqi Airways flight, but I decided to wait to see what RJ said. I even tried to call our Fixer again, but he said there was nothing I could do and the Iraqi Airways flight was full anyway. So I waited.
But not uneventfully. I did get to see a train of KBR employees go past on their way to Al-Asad airbase. Now, I think KBR does some damn impressive work. But when their employees file past in BIAP (they travel in packs because they charter their own planes) it looks like a prison break. The guys are the most stereotypical Red Necks, hommies and honkies you could POSSIBLY imagine. Only half of them shave and they all wear denim. Anyone in a suit is upper management. The rest are true salt of the Earth.
And, despite their appearance, I gotta say they work just as hard as the soldiers they serve.
A KBR women tried to recruit me while standing in line at the PX in the IZ a few weeks before my vacation and she broke it down for me. KBR employees work 7 days a week, 12 hours a day. They get about 2, maybe 3, vacations. And after the KBR recruiter walked away, the two KBR truckers behind me in line informed me that KBR also didn't pay all that well. So, however they choose to dress, KBR employees are some of the HARDEST working people on the planet. Not to mention the fact that the truckers take the same risks as the soldiers every day. The cabs of all KBR trucks are up-armored and they travel with guns and military convoys. They are hard core.
Eventually I heard that the RJ flight to Amman was canceled.
My vacation was ruined.
But wait...this is Iraq:)
First I had to go to RJ and pretend like they were gonna gimme a ticket for the next day. While waiting I ran into another friend of mine from a different company (expats in the IZ all get to know each other). I also found out that the Iraqi Airways flight to Amman was not yet canceled. I immediately got on the phone with the Fixer and asked him to get me on the flight. He made some calls and informed me it was full. That didn't help.
So I ended up in the check-in area again trying to figure out what the hell to do. I called the HQ PSDs and alerted them that they might have to pick me up at BIAP, which sucked.
It was at this point that I ran into a kindly British chap about my age by the name of Mark. I told him my predicament and he just smiled.
"Don't worry, I've done this before. RJ always cancels, but Iraqi Airways will fly in anything, dust or no dust. All we have to do is get a ticket at the counter."
"But the flight is full," I protested.
"It's never full. They just wait for RJ to cancel and pick up the scraps."
So we went to the counter. The guys at the counter told us to go talk to "that guy" and get a ticket.
"That guy" turned out to be some sort of drama queen. We tried to get a word in past all the Iraqis talking to him for 10 minutes, during which time "That guy" kept walking, stopping, sitting, picking up the phone, hanging up, flailing his arms, yelling, walking, phone, stop, go, sit, stop stop stop GOGOGOG, YEEEELLLLL PHOOOOONEEEE stop. Chat chat.
Eventually I started getting bored. At one point some guy offered to get us tickets if we paid him $400 bucks. We asked him how and made the mistake of saying he'd talk to "That guy."
"Can't we just do that ourselves?"
"....uh...."
"How much are the tickets?"
"$300"
"So you're charging us $100 to go talk to some guy? Thanks, we can handle it."
Having determined how much the ticket cost, I put an end to the dramatics. I pulled out $300 cash and told Mark to do the same.
INSTANTLY "That guy" stopped paying attention to anyone else and walked right over to us. It was so cliche I just couldn't help but laugh. Money talks and bullshit walks.
"Do you need tickets?"
"Yes." Cash.
"No no no, don't pay me here."
At this point he wrote us a little note and pointed us toward the back office of Iraqi Airways.
So we went back through a sneaky side security door and walked into the Iraqi Airways office. Iraqi Airways is not quite up to computers yet. While that makes them inefficient, it also makes them extremely flexible because they had no databases to keep them accountable. So, for a cool $300 Mark and I got tickets on the full Iraqi Airways flight bound for Amman written up for us in 10 minutes flat. God I love the Middle East!
After acquiring our tickets we went back through the sneaky side door. We paid the airport exit tax (a brilliant system where if you don't pay you end like that guy in the song about the MTA who never returned). When we got to the customs agent we flashed our government badges and gave the agent our passports.
The US government worked some sort of deal with the Iraqis that allowed anyone with a certain type of government badge to get into and out of the country without a visa. This made these badges a hot commodity and led to a kind of black market where people would try to take their badges after their jobs ended so that they could still get in and out of the country easily. It often worked.
The badges in general had great use. They could get you onto military bases, into the PX store and into the DFAC (DFAC's are the soldier's cafeterias. Each meal served there costs about $50 and the food is served by Gulf Catering Co. It is quite good, and the contractors regularly snuck in there for food). The ironic thing about it was that the people at my Pentagon job had the same badges. What they didn't realize was that the things were insanely valuable. At the Pentagon we thought they were kinda annoying because you needed them to unlock your computer. If anyone from that jobsite went to Iraq, though, they'd be able to survive off that badge until it expired without anyone knowing the difference.
Once we crossed back into the waiting area, we waited. It was exceedingly boring; most of the time I just sat around. Every once in a while I'd flirt with the cute girl behind the information desk in Arabic to get an update on our flight.
At one point I ended up in a conversation with a security guy named who was escorting an Iraqi banker from HSBC. That was surprising in and of its self because my friends and I didn't even realize there were banks in Iraq. RTI actually paid all its employees in cash, which was a huge logistical issue, but they couldn't deposit money in Iraqi banks so that's what they had to do.
After we swapped stories and information the guy told me about a great Russian hooker he knew in Amman who might be able to help me out. Apparently she was not just for sex. She also was fun to hang out with, incredibly well connected and very knowledgeable about Amman. I thought that was probably the most interesting tidbit of info I'd heard in a while so I took down her number, just in case. Hookers are apparently very well connected people and it was possible she could get me cheap transport to the border.
Eventually my plane to Amman arrived. I ended up sitting next to Mark for the trip and he offered to give me a lift to the Intercontinental in the taxi his company was providing. I did not get a taxi from the airport because I was taking an RRB instead of an R&R so my company paid for nothing. Allow me to explain.
Many contractors in Iraq got deals which granted them two kinds of vacation. One is a Regional Rest Break, where you get 5 work days off, plus the weekends, plus one travel day on EITHER END of the trip for getting in and out of Baghdad. That means you leave work Friday and come back Monday. A 10 day vacation for 5 days off. Sweet. Unfortunately on RRBs the company (and by the company I mean USAID, which means the American taxpayer) only pays for the plane tickets in and out of Baghdad. Once you're out, you are responsible for all hotels and flights, unless your flight gets delayed coming back into Baghdad and you are forced to stay outside Iraq.
ON R&Rs, however, the US taxpayer is more generous. In this situation the contractor gets the flight out paid for, a one night stay in Amman or Dubai for any connecting flight delays, and a first-class ticket back to their home of reference. Or they can get airfare paid up to the cost of a round trip coach-class ticket to London. These vacations are 10 days. With weekends and the travel days added on, they become 17 day holidays. Very sweet.
All told I was entitled to 2 R&Rs and 3 RRBs, plus 3 floating holidays (which became 5 due to the fact that holidays like Labor Day fell on Mondays but we worked on Sundays in Iraq, so the company just made us work those days and gave us floating holidays) which we could tack onto the end of any holiday.
As of the writing of this story these holidays have been trimmed down to just three R&Rs for most people. At the time I wasn't complaining because I was living the high life, but the holidays caused a lot of disruptions in our work in Iraq. Because they were use-em-or-lose-em every 365 days, we had to take holidays every month and half in order to fit them all in. This meant that people starting planning work around holidays, rather than the other way around.
Of course, this all becomes a little more reasonable when you take into consideration that for the first two and a half months I was in Iraq I was under constant rocket barrage. Now that conditions have gotten better, it is a bit much.
But while I do have great respect for all the civilians risking their lives in Iraq, the best people in the country were the soldiers. Those guys worked 7 days a week and they didn't get 3 RRBs. Maybe 1, if they were lucky.
If there is one way we could make development work more effective, it'd be to cut back on the holidays. But then again, there has got to be some incentive for smart motivated people to want to risk their lives in a war zone voluntarily. Patriotism doesn't cut it (in fact, a lot of contractors in Iraq were Brits, Ausies, Kiwis and various other Europeans).
Eventually the plane landed in Amman. Mark and I got through customs, found his driver and headed for the Intercontinental. When we arrived I thanked him and we parted ways.
In Amman the Intercontinental is a good place to start because they have a taxi service right in the hotel (many of the big hotels do). I went into the taxi place and asked how much it would be to get to Damascus. They said $100. I called up the Russian hooker and asked her. She confirmed that it'd be about $100. I figured this was a pretty good price, since it was about 10pm and I was in a rush, so I agreed. I waited about 45 minutes for a driver to arrive and then we took off.
On the way up the driver and I chatted. I told him that if he could get me across the border quick I'd tip him. Besides not wanting to hang out on the Syria border with a US government badge hidden in my shoe (I was paranoid the whole time that the Syrians would find that badge. Probably would have been bad), I also wanted to prove to my buddies in Damascus that I could indeed get across the border in an hour.
And when we got to the border, my taxi friend went to work. At the first counter I told the customs agent that I had just graduated and was thinking about going to school at the University of Damascus, where my friends were at. I gave him their contact info. My driver then led me to the next window in a different building. There we gave my information again. Then we went around to the back of the border compound to some hut that you'd never find if you didn't know it was there and talked to some bureaucrats there.
Once we had done all that my driver said we just had to wait. It could take an hour, it could take 5.
While we waited I repacked my bag to better hide my badge (I took it out of my shoe) just in case the Syrians searched me. Then we went into the huge Duty Free shop on the border. I bought an excellent bottle of liquor for cheap as a gift for my friends in Damascus and chatted with some of the people in the store. The place was amazing. Besides having tons of cheap liquor, it also had Jetskis and Legos! Heaven.
After about an hour, my driver got a call. My visa had been approved. Mission accomplished J.
We headed back to the first window and the customs agent, who now looked a little edgy, gave me my passport with the visa in it.
We left the window and went back outside. Once outside, my driver stopped me and asked for $30 to bribe the agent. He said that the agent didn't want to get paid while I was standing there because it would look suspicious. I gave him the money, he wrapped it in a note and took it inside. He came out a minute later all smiles and said, "Let's go!"
I couldn't have agreed more. We drove across the border with no incident. All the guards did was open the trunk.
After about 30 minutes my driver stopped in a town. He said his brother would drive me the rest of the way into town. I gave him a tip for his help and we parted ways.
On my way into Damascus, I called my friends to get precise directions to their house. They were stunned that I'd made it through that fast. I modestly told them that I was a badass and that's how I rolled.
Eventually my new driver dropped me off at a taxi stand in the middle of the city. I gave him a little more money for him and his brother, and then found a new taxi driver. I used his cell phone to call my buddies again who gave the driver the specific directions.
At this point my cabbie decided he'd tell me his life story. He showed me scars on his arm and informed me that he had fought with Hizballah against the Israelis in the 2007 war against Israel in Lebanon. He told me he killed three Israelis. Normally I throw out "Mabruks" (Arabic for congratulations) like candy, but in this particular situation I didn't. I didn't really know what to say, though, because if I'd started tearing into the guy for being a terrorist, I'm not sure that would have been a very safe idea. So I said that was interesting.
When he dropped me off I got out quick. I wasn't near anything I recognized from my last trip to Damascus, but luckily my friend Roheet found me. We got away from the cabbie as quick as possible.
Roheet and I went back to his house. It was in the middle of Damascus' old city. While the door was actually small and cramped, it opened into a huge three story villa with a fountain in the middle of it. The place was beautiful. I saw my friend Geoff there too and met some new people as well.
The weirdest thing was how refreshing it was to be back among people my own age. I'd spent the last three months hanging out with people way older and far more experienced than me and it had been an intense and stressful time. Being back with my friends relaxing in Damascus (only I could relax in Syria while working in Iraq) gave me a fresh appreciation of how important those RRBs were to keeping the civilians working in Iraq sane. Even then it didn't always work.
Day 2: Saturday, May 10, 2008
Of course that was not the end of the night. Being me, midnight never stopped anything. I managed to convince my friends that it was an excellent time to go out partying.
The first location on the list was a nightclub called Seri. Incredibly, Syria does have quite a few nightclubs. In fact one theme of this trip in general would be the cosmopolitan nature of Syria. It is quite an up and coming country, which may actually contribute to the nationalist tensions between Syria and the US. Personally I think Syria is yearning for acceptance into the global system, but we keep stomping on them because they support terrorists…which of course is perfectly reasonable of us. But with a little creative diplomacy we could probably drag the Syrians to our side.
Which brings me to the nightclub. The only difference between the Syrian nightclub and any place I'd been in the states was that the music in the Syrian place was loud to the point of being painful. I didn't real do too much more observing because we left after a few minutes.
My friend Geoff and I took a break outside the club before going back to the house. While standing there we were attacked by a small Syrian nationalist. When we had gone into the club, Geoff had left a drink right outside on a ledge. The kid had poured it out while we'd been inside. He wanted money, and when we didn't give it to him he kicked us in the shins. He didn't seem to have too many fans among the Syrians hanging around outside either, so maybe he's parents just didn't love him enough.
Either way he seemed to think kicking whitey was ok, so we figured it'd be better to leave than make an international incident out of smacking a small, fat little Syrian kid.
The road we took back to the house was actually an old Roman road and straight as an arrow. All the shops around it were being renovated too, which was surprising. I'm not sure if the Syrian economy is still doing so well, but it was interesting to see the Syrians improving the infrastructure of their tourist center, the Old Town.
On the way back we also stopped off at a Syrian Internet Café called "Google." It was one of the best because it allowed people to access Facebook, which is apparently blocked by the Syrian government (I found out from a Syrian friend later that this is apparently only done at public internet cafes, but that private internet users did not get their Facebook blocked).
After letting my family know that I actually made it in to Syria, we headed back to the apartment. We discovered upon our arrival that Jared, one of Geoff's roommates, was still up so the three of us figured this would be a great time to spend 5 hours on the roof drinking beer and arguing politics.
Jared was an interesting character. He spent many of his weekends traveling to and from Lebanon and earned money gambling in Beirut, taking money from rich people who couldn't gamble. He also studied Lebanon quite a bit. The combination of his time spent in the country and his studies made his analysis of the region excellent and his information current, which was useful because at the time there was a crisis in Lebanon.
If memory serves, the crisis this time around was that Hizbullah had attacked Sunni government strongholds in Beirut and the Druze in the Shuf mountains. Many people in Lebanon were terrified that Hizbullah was trying to restart the civil war. As Jared pointed out, this was actually bad for Hizbullah. In a rare mistake for Hizbullah, they had actually overplayed their hand, especially by attacking the Druze, who weren't bothering any one. While Hizbullah won tactically on the ground, they hurt their strategic image as a peaceful political party in Lebanon. They eventually backed down, but they lost a lot of political clout which they had gained from beating Israel a few years before.
We also discussed Iraq. While the arguments were not entirely original, I noticed that I had become more confident in my arguments (perhaps even cocky…"no, never! Sam? Cocky?"). My experience on the ground in Iraq and the success of the surge had convinced me that while much work had to be done (remember this is May, which was the end of the three month rocket barrage I had lived under since March) Iraq was finally on the right track. There was a consensus that while many mistakes were made, the US did not have any option but to encourage the Iraqi democracy and to do as much good as possible before we pulled out, which wouldn't be until a democrat was elected any way (McCain still had a chance back then…sigh).
Eventually we noticed that the sun had risen and figured we might as well get some sleep.
The next day (err, by that I mean the next chunk of time between sleeping) Geoff and I headed back to Google. The walk to Google was actually quite nice. My friends' apartment was in the heart of the old city, right around the corner from a beautiful Souq (market). Not only was it perfect for tourists, it was also chock full of hot women. I had been in Baghdad (70% men, if not more) for the last 2 and half months, which felt like a lifetime, so this was just fantastic to me. I can't imagine how it must be for kids growing up with all women around them covered in burkas. MTV must be shocking. Actually, I can imagine how that is, in fact I've seen some of the results. Cairo was an excellent example. While there were plenty of fine, upstanding respectful men in the streets, the ones you noticed were the assholes cat-calling the girls and grabbing them as they walked by.
After checking email, we headed off to the fruit market to do some shopping. Apparently there was a party that night at my friends' apartment (Always good to arrive in time for a party) so Geoff had to buy some goods. I had no objections to any of this as I was still dumbfounded by all the gorgeous women in the street. I started to notice that this wasn't just me having been in Baghdad for a while. I realized that Damascus was simply living up to its cosmopolitan reputation. I'd say Damascus at least rivaled Lebanon for beautiful women. Iraq actually had very good looking women, but only inside the IZ. Once the women left, they were totally covered and veiled, unfortunately. Cairo had a mix of the two, but the more conservative women in Cairo actually campaigned to get girls back under the hijab. Of course, no one compares to Yemen. In Yemen I didn't see a single woman wearing anything but a total black burka, except one western researcher who was still veiled. But women in Yemen, as I mentioned in that story, didn't seem to notice that they were veiled. I don't know what women in Yemen look like, but I know they have BEAUTIFUL eyes!
Aaaaaanyway, when I finally got used to the hotness, I started to notice something rather ugly. As Geoff and I wandered through the market I started seeing the same cragly beggar following us around. Even when we made a U-turn and crossed to the other side he seemed to find his way behind us again. Eventually we went into a cramped "supermarket" (I mean cramped too. It was only more amazing that they had tiny shopping carts) and the guy stopped outside. When I checked up on him, I noticed him talking to a group of soldiers. Besides the contrast of the women of Syria, it was depressing to see that these poor people had to live with the dark side of the regime's oppression.
Once we left the store the beggar stopped following us. The soldiers may have concluded that we were unimportant. Or, possibly more likely, the beggar was just bored and wanted attention so he tried to drum up a story to get some from the soldiers. They didn't even look at us. The oppression is still there, but under the new, younger Asad, it is slightly more confident that it does not need to follow every foreigner around. The chances of rebellion are low as long as the regime can distract the people with Israel.
Eventually we ended up walking across town to IFPO, the Institut francais du Proche-Orient (said with snobby voice and a little squiggly line under the 'c' in 'francais'), where my friends were studying Arabic.
IFPO is an interesting institute. It serves as a sort of ad hoc institute for criticism of the Syrian regime. The regime allows it to operate probably because it is a kind of pressure valve for Syrian society. It is also the devil the regime knows. Whatever the reason, IFPO continues to exist and educate students in the truth, rather than regime propaganda. One of the more interesting things Geoff and I discussed while chillin' at IFPO was the breakdown of Syria's political forces. I have attached my notes below.
Basically, Bashar's regime is a little different than his father's, and the tension shows. The Intel, Security and Military guys are more diehard that Bashar is. Bashar is much younger and more interested in moving Syria back into the International System. Victories for Bashar within Syria look kinda like the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, the secret Syrian negotiations with Israel and, to the extent it happens, the Syrian dampening of insurgents flowing into Iraq (that is also good for the security guys, though, cause no one likes crazy terrorists...I don't call them Jihadists because that's actually a compliment).
Victories for the old Hafiz security guys look like the bombings that continue in Lebanon targeting pro-western government officials and Syria's continued support of Hizbullah and Hamas. Bashar dances a delicate line between reforming Syria and keeping control of the country. If he is too hard, he gets sanctioned by the US and the international community. If he is too soft, there may be a coup in Syria.
The one thing many of the students I spoke with seemed to agree on is that the US should be engaging with Syria more in order to strengthen Bashar. There is a legitimate opportunity to pull Syria out of the orbit of terrorists and Iran and bring them onto the US's side. They are a very modern people and pretty well educated. And if the Israelis are still talking to them, after bombing their nuclear facility (possibly something allowed by Bashar to weaken his enemies in the Old Guard…that's wild speculation though), then there must be room for an accord between the US and Syria.
After touring IFPO we headed back to the house. When we got there preparations were underway for the big dinner party. Being a pyromaniac myself, I went about lighting candles and putting them all over the place. When we turned the lights off the candles actually gave off a pretty cool effect, and didn't burn the house down (always a plus).
The guests themselves were worth noting. One girl was veiled and only had her face showing. There was some discussion as to whether or not drinking would be allowed at the party because she was coming. It was concluded that she probably knew anyway and had still decided to come, so it'd be ok, especially if we toned it down while she was there. In the event she did not seem to have an objection. She just didn't drink herself.
We ended up playing scrabble in Arabic. I was totally terrible since my Arabic had sadly deteriorated without the intense study of my student years. I can still talk and get around, but academic stuff like scrabble wasn't going to work out. Scrabble is hard in English.
In Arabic, though, there is one thing that makes Scrabble a little bit easier. See, in Arabic all words are derived from roots of three letters, with occasional two or four letter roots. That essentially means that if one knows the root and pattern structure, one can take any combination of three letters, add some letters to make a standard pattern, and then have a word despite never having seen it before and having no idea what it means. Hans Wehr, the Arabic-English equivalent of the Oxford English dictionary, is the book we use for looking up words.
I think, despite many people making up words, only a single challenge was successful.
Eventually the night wound down with talk about a text message one of the girls got from some guy which led to a conversation about relationships and money…I don't really recall how that played out…
Day 3: Sunday, May 11, 2008
On Sunday I decided to hit the streets early so I woke up at the crack of 11am….
I got out of bed at 3:30 pm ready to start the day.
Everyone had actually gone somewhere that day. I was quite content to sleep, especially since it was my vacation. But eventually Geoff and I managed to get out of the house. I hadn't toured the Old City since the last time I had been in Damascus on my Whirlwind Tour of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, so we went for a stroll.
We ended up hitting Souq Hamadia, which is a big Souq that leads down hill to the Grand Mosque. The first time I came to Damascus I didn't actually spend a lot of time there, so the only part of the Souq I remembered was the lower part near the mosque. It was there that I borrowed the cell phone of a random shop keeper to call my American friend who had been living in Damascus at the time so I could meet up with him for dinner.
This time, the Souq had much less of a feel of urgency so I enjoyed myself much more. Geoff, now playing tour guide, pointed out holes in the ceiling. The holes were actually quite beautiful because Souq Hamadia is covered. The holes in the ceiling looked like daytime stars from inside the Souq. Apparently the holes were put there by the French who strafed the Souq while they were withdrawing for Syria.
Great democracy builders, those French.
But the holes looked cool.
We ended up eating dinner/breakfast at a place called Lela's. I ordered some sort of minty smoothie, which was actually ok, and we watched the news on the Lebanon crisis. Hizbullah was still going crazy and we were actually surprised to see that Hizbullah was still losing public support as they fought what appeared to everyone else as an unnecessary war within Lebanon against Lebanese.
After dinner, we headed back to the house. There appeared to be some sort of discussion going on as we passed through the curtain which separated the doorway from the house. Some housemates were trying to convince the others to go to a free Jazz cultural event sponsored by the US Embassy. The moment I heard about it I was on board, cause that sounded like a guaranteed adventure. Some people opted out and some opted in. When it was decided, the in group caught a cab to one of the major theatres in Damascus.
The entrance to the venue was actually below the street, so we had to walk down a set of steps to get to the door (there was an opposite set of stairs across the way, creating windflow). But by the time we arrived, the area outside the door was packed with people. We wiggled through the crowd to get closer to the door, all the while remarking at how amazing it was that this many people had shown up for a US Embassy sponsored Jazz concert in Damascus (we do have an Embassy in Syria, just no Ambassador).
And looking around at the crowd of well-dress Damascenes (half of whom were women, which TOTALLY blew me away for the Middle East) I realized that I had stumbled into US Foreign policy in action, quite literally. This was a US Embassy sponsored event, bringing US musicians to a country my country considered a state-sponsor of terrorism. Syria was indeed one of the US's major adversaries in the Middle East, smuggling suicide bombing terrorists into Iraq and supplying Hizbullah and Hamas with weapons to fight our strongest ally in the region, Israel. And still yet, the venue was overflowing with Syrians who wanted to hear Jazz.
But no matter how cool the cross-cultural exchange was, that wasn't going to prevent the time-honored Middle Eastern tradition of RUSHING FOR THE DOOR!!!!!!!
The moment the door opened it was a crush of people. DAMN YOU CHILD!! OUT OF THE WAY OLD WOMAN!!!
It wasn't actually all that bad. I was of course laughing the whole time cause what else can you do? But people, while they were rushing the door, were generally pretty polite and let the ladies go first when they could. But it was also a free for all, so those ladies were throwing some elbows too.
Eventually we got inside and it was all style and grace once again. When everyone was seated the place was packed wall-to-wall with standing room only, and people were standing. One highlight was that I spotted a Syrian openly wearing a US Embassy badge around his neck, which I only recognized because I constantly needed someone wearing one of those to escort me into the US Embassy in Baghdad.
Once the lights dimmed the crowed quieted down and a Caucasian, Blond America strode onto the stage. She then proceeded to introduce herself and the event in beautiful, perfect Arabic. Apparently the best use we could find for her was organizing cultural events in Damascus. Then again, it wasn't all that bad an idea. In fact, judging from the crowd, that Jazz event might have been one of the most effective foreign policy tools America had.
The event itself was mildly entertaining. One of my friend's friends ended up being a cute, chatty Indian Canadian who worked at the Canadian Embassy, so I at least had someone fun and ethnically interesting to talk to.
But this being the Middle East, irony was ever present. In-between sets of Jazz songs (on guitar was a music geek white guy and singing was a big voiced big…everything…black woman) my friends and I would talk about the songs or whatever. The one thing we all agreed on was that the event should have been happening at a bar, not in a theatre. At that point, a Syrian guy in front of us turned around and said, "I am really quite sick of your talking. Please stop. This is not the place for talking," or something to that effect.
In case the irony isn't obvious: A bunch of Americans and an Indian Canadian were at a Jazz concert sponsored by the US Embassy in Damascus which was meant to share American culture with Syrians. Part of that culture is to talk while listening to the music (at least in my generation) and the Syrian in front of us, who I assume had come to share in American culture, told us to shut up. CLASSIC.
*Ironic side note in the Syrian's defense: My next trip in July 2008 took me to Kuala Lumpur (very cool) where I visited a famous jazz club and met some fellow travelers. While hanging out there we were drinking and chatting away. It was my birthday as well, and the band was kind enough to sing Happy Birthday Samantha for me. Thoughtful. Anyway, 2/3 of the way through the evening that band also told the relatively small crowd that talking while they were playing was also not appreciated and that anyone wanting to talk should go outside…When did Jazz get so snobby?...IS that an outside the US thing?
At one point all this Jazz elitism was too much for me so I went out to the lobby where I thought there would be drinks. There was one scruffy looking dude behind a bar passing out tap water. I declined.
Back in the theatre, I noticed another tidbit of US foreign policy. There was a cameraman in the event. Unfortunately, because he had to sell a good story for someone, he was always turning to film the crowd. That wouldn't have been a problem, except he kept the massive spotlight attached to his camera on so he ended up just blinding everyone and generally annoying us.
But the songs each got raucous applause, and in the end the crowd seemed really quite happy with the whole performance. In fact, the only disappointed people in the whole place were the Americans. I didn't really care about the music one way or the other, but my friends were not impressed.
We all concluded that they really should have done it at a bar instead, but then one of my buddies pointed out that the Embassy actually does do that. So I guess the US Embassy in Damascus is at least trying.
After failing to get a post jazz-concert date with the cute Indian Canadian gal, I went with my friends back to their pad.
On the way back to the house was the first time I realized how much the rockets in Iraq had affected me. As we casually walked the streets of the Old City a truck backfired. It was something straight out of a movie. I damn near jumped out of my skin and I'm still amazed I didn't dive to the floor. My friends all stared at me and I was just pissed as hell that I'd let the rockets get to me. But I realized that post-traumatic stress is pretty standard for war zones, so I laughed it off and we continued. Those are the kind of situations where I take solace from Russell Crowe: Death smiles at us all…all a man can do is smile back J.
Back at the house the wine had been broken out. The best wine easily available in Syria is Lebanese. It was ok stuff, but it was also extremely cheap, which is great for students like my friends, so they usually had a supply.
And, because this was a house full of students, the conversation quickly lapsed into discussions of flirting, Islamic Jurisprudence and the ongoing conflict in Lebanon. Ya know, everyday stuff…
Then again, that is actually everyday stuff in the Middle East. One of the reasons I study the region is because it is so interesting. But to most Americans, all this stuff is just noise on the opposite side of the planet. This is the reason many people in the Middle East think Americans are ignorant and uninformed. For the most part we are. I mean, Middle Easterners have a hard time keeping up with who is pissed off at who any given day. A nurse in Ohio does not give a damn about what Hizbullah is up to today. But when you live in Syria and Hizbullah is right next door, it is a little harder to avoid.
Normally this isn't a problem. But our country is SO powerful, that we touch everything and everyone, even when they don't or can't touch us. It is something we need to be careful with. Of course, that is why we created a State Department.
Eventually someone said something and a water fight broke out. Lucky for me I was way too new to the situation to be in the middle of it…which was actually quite new for me and incredibly refreshing J. I went to sleep.
Day 4: Monday, May 12, 2008
Day 4 was pretty low-key. All my friends had school or work so I was on my own. I took a stroll around the old city. I ended up at a garden donated to Syria by the Swiss. It had Arabic verses about the Golan Heights inscribed on a metal plaque at the entrance. The irony of that will, again, be explained later. There was a café beside the garden, so I figured I'd sit there, have breakfast and read a little. I got an interesting banana milk-shake thingy and a fruit salad…only veggie food at the garden.
Eventually I got bored of sitting at the café reading, so I figured I'd go to the American Embassy, just to prove it was there. I put on my cool-looking Oakley's (first ones I ever bought, purchased at the Baghdad Px…like a market for military peeps…I never bought Oakley's before cause…well I never had any money before and thought it'd be a big dumb waste. However, once wearing my Oakley's, I realized how much cooler they make you feel. Since I was making big bucks, I felt EEEEEVEN cooler) and then headed off to the embassy.
I caught a cab and told him where I was going. He dropped me off across the street and uphill from the Embassy. I checked it out, walked around it, but I didn't really have any reason to go inside, so I figured the hell with it. I also wasn't all that sure it'd be a great idea to advertise to the US gov't that I was rolling through Syria with a government badge while working on a USAID contract…then again they may have been happier just to know…either way, I didn't tell em.
Instead I just started walking down the street (singing do a diddy…ok done). I ran across a KFC at one point. I wasn't all that hungry but I did stop to take some pictures. Apparently KFCs in Syria are not actually owned by KFC, which I don't think can operate in Syria because of the sanctions. Instead, a former KFC employee decided to start a copy-cat chain in Syria. Since Syria is a bit of an international pariah, no one really bothered to stop him…and according to my buddies it is actually better than the real KFC. Too bad for that guy if and when Syria stops supporting terrorism and the US lifts the sanctions.
I ended up walking all the way to the IFPO, totally inadvertently. Geoff was surprised as hell to see me stroll in, but, again, that's how I roll. He was busy, but it worked out fine because as Geoff was finishing up I checked email (the keyboards were those annoying French ones which the French insisted on because they're special…they may actually be easier to type with in French too…).
At one point I actually ran into an old teacher from Middlebury who worked for IFPO and the US Embassy. The Arabic community in the US is pretty small, so every single person is about two degrees of separation apart.
Eventually we drifted outside to a café across the street and had some tea. We hung out with another girl from IFPO, also cool. The weird thing was that we sat there for an hour and some weird guy wearing not-as-cool-as-my-Oakley's-sunglasses was just standing there the whole time. When we got up to leave the guy was still there, although some "friend" of his appeared and the hugged, as if the guy had been waiting there for an hour for him.
But he didn't follow us so we didn't care. We meet up with Roheet and went to get some food. We ate at some place that was supposed to be really good. It was a skinny little restaurant and it served humus, chicken and rice…just like everyone else.
After buying a neato poster of a tree with all the monotheistic prophets on it and some Quranic recital tapes, we headed back to the house to regroup.
I was feeling up for a massage at that point, because I knew Syria had some kickass Hammams. I had gone to a good one in the northern city of Aleppo and wanted to see what Damascus had to offer. Roheet knew a good spot, so we headed off.
The place we ended up in was pretty sweet. Hammams in general are pretty fun, although they can easily be seen as quite gay since it is usually a bunch of men soaping up and steaming. Europe has definitely hit the mark with the mixed-gender bathhouses and female masseuses.
Syria had not gotten there, and probably was not going to. The massage portion wasn't really a massage anyway, more like skin-peeling exfoliation torture. I am usually pretty white, but I came out of that thing pink…but clean.
Back outside the steam room was actually quite nice too. The place had some cushioned benches and they served kickass tea. It felt so sophisticated Roheet and I actually talked business, which I found hilarious, but the place simply invited it. Eventually I decided to get a haircut and a shave. Neither was worth the money. All-in-all it was an ok Hammam, but I have seen better.
For the evening I bought the round of wine and we did our usual sit around and chat on the cushioned bench in the apartment. Have I mentioned how much that apartment kicked ass? I mean it had an open air atrium in the middle of it which rooms circled around. Above it was a series of metal arches with a plastic sheet over them which kept out the rain and in the middle of the atrium was a nice little fountain with pots and plants around it. Sitting in the place was like sitting out side, but dryer and warmer. Great chi, I guess.
But the chi did not soothe our savage souls. Apparently, one of the guys living in the house was not paying rent. Everybody liked him, so they just let him hang out, but he had gotten in a fight with Roheet the day before and Roheet had banished him to a tent on the roof. Roheet figured his punishment was not enough so we locked the guy out of his tent.
I was trying to remain neutral and enjoy the chaos instead of causing it, so I read some depressing crap by Gram Greene (yes, I'm sure he's a genius, but he's depressing) and then I hit the sack…
Day 5: Tuesday, May 13, 2008…a day that will live in infamy.
I awoke the next day just like every other day. I opened the door to the room I was in and walked outside…I stretched, brushed my teeth, got dressed, stretched…and as I was looking up I noticed the strangest thing.
Geoff's backpack was hanging by rope, twenty feet off the ground in the middle of the air. The rope was wrapped around the metal arches that formed the plastic roof over the atrium. As I looked more I noticed that there were shoes hanging from the arches and there were also slippers sitting on the plastic tarp. I looked around at the ground outside the doors to the rooms and saw that all the footwear which was usually there was now gone. Apparently the guy who had gotten locked out of his tent decided to have his revenge with one of the most ingenious pranks ever: he put everyone's shoes on a roof no one could get to.
As the rest of the apartment's denizens awoke, we all stared in amazement at the footwear and the bag hanging from the roof. Some people were kind of angry, but every one was basically just impressed by the ingenuity and industry of the pranker, a guy who lived in the apartment for free! He had mad good people skills.
But Roheet didn't let it stop at that (I didn't even care cause all my stuff had been locked in the room I'd been sleeping in). With me filming, Roheet snuck upstairs and began pouring pitcher after pitcher of water through the tent onto the sleeping pranker, who begged for mercy he did not receive. After about 7 minutes of deluge, the pranker managed to unlock himself from the tent (he had locked himself in to protect himself while he slept). He was then ordered to get all of the things off the roof.
While he was doing that, everyone else was asking him how the hell he did it. Apparently he had actually insanely crawled across the metal arches to tie some of the shoes. If the arches broke he would have fallen 30 feet to his death. The slippers were easy because he just threw them.
The bag was creative, though. He had done that by tying the rope up above first and lowering it down to the ground. Then he tied it to the bag and hoisted the bag into the air. At first he had apparently tried a suitcase, but that had fallen into the fountain and broken a pot. The suitcase was Geoff's, who, if he hadn't been so impressed by the prank, might have actually been upset that his clothes were soaked.
But the best was yet to come. The landlord showed up. The landlord didn't really show up all that often, apparently, but that day he decided to check in. What he found was a bunch of shoes hanging from the roof and holes in his plastic tarp. Plus one of his nice pots from around the fountain was broken. The fountain water was also dirty from the suitcase, which was bad for the fish in it. Apparently his comment was, "this is very strange behavior."
Not really…just American culture J. I think even an American landlord would have agreed with the Syrian, though. In the end the prankster climbed out on the metal arches, retrieved the shoes and took down the bag. He also bought a new pot for the landlord. Don't worry, even if we Americans break your shit, we will buy you something new and prettier!
I'm not sure that was all a positive look at America, but in the end the landlord took it in stride. In fact, I think he even cracked a smile. I guess American culture really was getting to him.
But, besides making grandiose observations about international relations based on small anecdotes, I had other things to do.
On that day I decided it was time to go check out the Cypriot Embassy and see about getting a visa before my boat ride. I caught a cab and gave the cabbie the directions I had. Apparently it was a pretty far drive, but I told him it'd be no problem as long as he used the meter. Actually, Syrian taxes were pretty good with meters. The cops apparently punished cabbies that tried to rip off tourists and you could pretty much count on a cabbie not using a meter to be ripping you off. There were some exceptions, but not many. To me, the use of meters in taxis is a serious mark of civilization. New York has fricken GPS installed in their taxis. THAT is awesome.
The area that my friends lived in was cheap because it was the Old Town, and it was called that for a reason: it was small, cramped and not all that clean. The area around IFPO and the US Embassy was a little bit better, but the part of town I drove through to get to the Cypriot Embassy was really nice. It had high rise office buildings and banks and landscaping. Now, your average hippie would much rather have been in the Old Town, but for me, I liked the city.
To me cities are way more impressive than Old Towns. Everybody likes the neat-o architecture of the Old Towns of the world, but they really do miss the bigger picture. The simplest way I can put it is that there is a reason we built big, fancy cities.
The more complicated reason is that, especially after my work in Iraq where I helped and got to watch very smart people try and rebuild a whole country, I realized what went into making cities work. Some people are unimpressed by cities because they think they are too clean and proper and that they sap the energy out of our personalities. But the truth of the matter is that it takes serious amounts of effort to keep city streets clean. Sewer systems alone should be marked down as wonders of the world. Have you ever stopped to think about the fact that there are literally thousands of miles of pipes under your feet that carry your shit to a processing plant? I mean, that is hardcore.
And, just for a mental exercise, think about how you would dispose of thousands of tons of trash each year. How would you inform 10,000,000 people how to do the same thing on certain days of the week? How would you design the trucks that picked up the trash? Where do those trucks go? How far do they travel? Where do they put the trash? How is the landfill, if they use one, constructed? Does it have a big plastic tarp underneath it to prevent the waste from seeping into the ground and destroying the aquifer under the city?
Cities are cool; great measure of civilization. Not the only one, not by far, but a pretty good one.
And if you have ever worked for a city or on a development project, you are fully aware of how much personality is involved in running a city.
The best way to put might actually be found in a one-minute commercial which I saw played over and over on CNN in Iraq. It was for some energy company. It showed the process of energy being sent to a city, from the mining of raw materials, to the design of the power plant, the delivery to the power plant of the raw materials, the connection between the plant and the city and finally the connection of the lines to a nightclub so that some guy could dance with a girl with dazzling lights all around.
Of course you could dance under the stars too, but then you'd be camping and you'd have to crap in a hole every night…instead of the filthy bathrooms you usually find at nightclubs…ok there are some clean ones… anyway, you get the point. I think cities are cool. Moving on.
I arrived at the Embassy and put on my cool Oakley's. As I walked up the gate I saw two men standing off to one side talking to a guard. I approached the guard and asked how I could get a visa to Syria. He asked what country I was from. I said America and showed him my passport. All three of the men were stunned beyond belief and wanted to know what I was doing there. I told 'em I was on vacation.
As it turned out the two guys were actually from Iraq. At one point on guy mentioned Saddam Hussein and the other guy said "allah irhamahu" which is a blessing in Arabic on the dead.
I did not tell them I worked in Baghdad and that I supported the destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime. I did enjoy stumping them just a little bit, like when one of the guys said he lived south of Baghdad and I said, "In Mahmoudiya?" He was surprised and said yes. I didn't explain how I knew of it.
I knew about Mahmoudiya because there was a real cool agricultural specialist down there who had single-handedly created the Mahmoudiya Poultry Growers Association. He was so damn good with chickens, that he could bring together the entire chicken growing community of Mahmoudiya and convince them they needed an Association.
The first time I met the guy was in my second or third week at RTI when a group of consultants came in from another consulting company (also paid by USAID) to ascertain from RTI's specialists if USAID should fund a program to train Iraq's Director Generals. The DGs were actually the city managers. At the time I thought they were an anachronistic hold-over from the Saddam dictatorship, and I said so (two to three weeks in mind you). The consultants patted me on the back and told me to keep up my youthful idealism. I figured they were just being nice and thought I was a moron, which I later learned I was, but I didn't really care at the time because my greater objective was to get the attention of my superiors in the hope that they'd notice I was actually trying. Still don't know if that worked (as it turns out, the DGs are the only guys who know how to run Iraq. The central gov't doesn't wan to stop paying them because they keep power in Baghdad. The DGs should be trained, but they should also be folded into the local government structure. At the time I had suggested they be eliminated entirely because I didn't understand their true function as city managers).
Anyway, the Poultry guy fits in here because I sat in on his briefing to this team. He managed to convince them that chicken growing was an essential service. We are talking: Water, Sewer, Electricity, Chicken Growing. The guy was good.
BUT THE BEST PART, was when one of the consultants, a British woman (which only made it seem more like a sitcom) actually complained about how the chickens were being treated. She did not like that they were kept in a chicken coup and wondered if they could all be raised free range. The Chicken guy was not impressed. He first informed her that he had actually dedicated his life to studying chickens.
He then informed her that when you open the door to a chicken coup, the chickens actually just sit there, contrary to popular cartoon movies. And when chickens are actually free range, they usually end up eating small insects which then tear up the chickens' stomachs and intestines, resulting in excruciating pain and death.
He then rubbed it in by asking if she was more interested in free range chickens or feeding people.
He then rubbed it in more by saying that the Brits also had to get on board with genetically engineered food so we didn't all starve to death. It was probably one of the funniest things I had ever seen.
And as it turned out, I didn't need a visa to get into Cyprus, because I was an American. Usually the case. Love the Blue Passport.
I walked off, leaving my Baathist friends behind, and took a stroll through the neighborhood. It was really quite nice. School was just getting out so there were kids running all over the place, and they looked like standard kids. Soccer, gossip, boys hitting on girls, the usual. It was peaceful. Luckily they weren't at war with their neighbor Israel at the time.
As I walked on I eventually came across a Syrian fire station. I had been an EMT in southern Maryland for a little more than a year while working in DC so I had an interest in fire stations. Fire stations are also cool because they fit with my whole loving cities theme because emergency services are one of the key parts of making a city work.
I approached the station and began looking for people. I spotted an open window and walked up to it. It was a room with a table, chairs, a bed and a single, small, wall-mounted TV. Inside were all the firemen on duty sitting around making jokes and watching TV…just like fire stations in Maryland.
When I said hi they were all pretty shocked, as usual, but when I explained that I had worked as an EMT in the US they were very friendly and showed me around. Totally not to my surprise, the place was pretty much exactly the same as the rescue squad station I had volunteered at in Maryland. It had a kitchen, a bunkroom, locker room, lounge, bay for the vehicles, even a bell for waking people up. The only thing I don't remember, which is telling, was a radio room. They got calls somehow, but they didn't have the computer systems to organize it all.
EMTs in the states HATE doing paper work, which today means data entry in a database, but they at least realize the importance of it. It allows bean-counters to count all the beans and then tell the EMTs how many more beans survive if you call 911 before starting CPR or after 2 cycles of CPR. The Syrian guys may very well have had some of that data coordination, but it certainly was not on display. The radio room in the States had two computers where every single call was logged, with location and time. I didn't see a computer in the whole Syrian station.
Their trucks were very neat-o though. The best part about them was that they were donated by the Japanese…the US isn't the only country with a foreign policy. Their trucks had very modern equipment, too, including vehicle extraction rescue equipment like the Omni Tool, also known as spreaders or the Jaws of Life. Apparently true EMT/Rescue nerds look down on the term "Jaws of Life," though, so don't tell them I said that. Actually, the Omni Tool can both cut and spread, hence the Omni part. Whatever it's called it is cool.
Besides the lack of a solid radio room and GPS tracking of all their units, the Syrian fire station was also relatively run down. Of course, I never really saw any fires in Damascus, either, so maybe they weren't all that busy.
After the grand tour I took some photos and said goodbye. Whatever the place looked like, it had the feel of a fire station and the people were friendly enough.
Eventually I got bored with walking and caught a cab back to Souq Hamadia, which was near my buddies' house. When the taxi driver got to our destination neither of us had change so we had to drive around for about 15 minutes to find an ATM, asking people on the street all the while if they had change. Yet another fantastic taxi ride.
In Souq Hamadia I decided to take a different route. I veered off into some side ally and discovered that the Souq had WAY more to offer than I thought. It turned out that there were actually sections of the Souq that sold similar things, one of which was wedding dresses. I have seen Souqs similarly designed, but I have never wandered dusty sidewalk corridors filled with wedding dresses behind cheap display glass before. It was quite surreal. It felt a lot like Blade Runner…
I also came across a construction site in the Souq. They were expanding the place. But construction or not, people still used the place as a walkway (including me) wandering through without hard hats and generally just getting in the way. Construction in the Old City is more of an ad hoc business I guess.
Eventually my wanderings took me out of the Souq. I looked in my Lonely Planet and saw that I was near the Tomb of Baybers and decided I HAD to see that place. Baybers is the big hero of the Crusades as far as Syria is concerned. Saladin was cool and all, and while he managed to hold off Richard the Lion Heart, he did not end the Crusades. He was a great man and reasonable, often letting captured Crusaders go free, but he could not defeat them all.
Baybers was not down with that. Baybers was a Mamluk Turk and he was bred and raised to kill everyone, which is what he did. When he took a Crusader stronghold, everyone died. He burned the Crusaders right out of the Middle East in the most gruesome and violent ways he could imagine.
And right as he finished, the Mongols rolled in. The Mongols, which had just conquered all the lands between Mongolia and Iraq met their match with Baybers. He stopped them from going into North Africa and their defeat at the hands of Baybers was a major blow.
So, I found his tomb. Ironically, it was closed for construction, but the workers let me in anyway. I went inside and they showed me his tomb and they gave me tea. Since it wasn't a museum yet, no one minded sitting on the tomb (they were drying laundry in there too) so I got to sit and drink tea on the Tomb of Baybers. I hope it wasn't cursed.
As it turns out the workers were also Kurds, the people of Saladin, another irony I relished. The Kurds of Syria are apparently the construction guys. They all live in the North East by Iraq and come into Damascus for work. According to them the guy in charge of the restoration was Canadian. I didn't really see any irony there, but it was still funny: a Canadian engineer managing Kurdish workers to restore the tomb of a Turkish general who saved the Arabs from the Europeans and the Mongols. Did I mention that I love the Middle East.
After Bayber's Tomb I went back to the house to relax for a bit. The rest of the roommates were hanging out on the roof sunbathing, a truly Western pastime. I got bored with that pretty quick (I don't really tan as much as get skin cancer) so I figured I'd top off the tourist stuff in Damascus with a run to the Christian Quarter.
The walk to the Christian Quarter took me right through another construction area. The government was repaving and renovating the whole place, apparently. I spent most of my time dodging mini-bulldozers, walking planks and jumping holes. Pretty much everyone else did the same…just another day at work for the Syrians.
In fact, because this king of disorganization is so common in the Middle East, most average folk had pretty thick skin, possibly one of the reasons most people are friendly and polite. Everything is so chaotic and dirty all the time, that little things don't get to you as much eventually. The only thing that always annoyed people were taxis.
Eventually I got lost (best way to travel) and got directions from some guy in a KFC uniform who said I had walked too far. He turned me around and pointed me in the right direction. I was looking for two things: the House of St. Ananias and St. Paul's Church.
As it turned out the street being renovated was the Street called Straight (Acts 9:10-18). Another fun thing about the Middle East: it features prominently in some major religions you may have heard of. Every day you walk the same paths of the people in the Torah, Bible and Quran.
St. Ananias was the man God called upon to cure Paul's vision. His house was quite nice and it emphasized St. Paul's importance to Ananias. There were a series of pictures on the walls that portrayed the journey of St. Paul around the Mediterranean. The best part of all was when I discovered that St. Paul had ALSO gone to Cyprus by boat! I figured it couldn't hurt to have a Saint watching out for me (irony comes later).
I took the time to soak in Ananias's place. I don't go to church very often, but spiritual places have a different feel about them. It might be holiness, or just the importance people attach to them. Either way it is a feeling that I enjoy and indeed one that I feel I need to have every once in a while just to keep my sanity. It is just relaxing, and after two and a half months of rocket fire, relaxation went a long way.
Once I was done getting my spirituality on, I went upstairs to the well-placed gift shop to do some good ole fashion American consuming. I bought an excellent book which contained all the pictures and translations of the journey of St. Paul and some other nick-nacks.
I got directions to St. Paul's church and headed off. It was squirreled away a little bit, but the street leading to it was wide and nicely paved. The church itself was beautiful. I went to the gate and asked if I had to pay and the guy said "Of course not, it is free for all." Christians are great. They are also GORGEOUS. The place was almost deserted, and still I saw three or four hot women walking around. Church is the place to be, man.
But ladies aside, the place itself was fantastically spiritual as well. I'm not sure if it was always like that, but it had an incredibly sense of peace to it. Despite the fact that no one there had any idea who I was, no one bothered me. I took some photos and wandered around a bit and then left feeling like I'd accomplished something.
On my way back to the house I passed through the Souq again and bought some stuff for Mom and then headed home. We were about to start the evening poker game, but still had some time, so I figured I'd go see Sayyed al-Rouqia, the big Shiite Mosque right by the house, while I had time.
The mosque was very cool and the people were just as polite as the Christians. They knew I was a visitor and were happy to let me meander about. This place had a ton of people in it, however, as it was prayer time. People were in various states of prayer or lounging about. I took my shoes off at the entrance and turned them in at a station inside for a token. I looked around and took some pictures, but I didn't really capture the spirit of the place.
It felt homey, and it seemed like a very social place. I don't know if it is because I'm Christian or because I just like relaxing in silence, but it didn't strike me the same as St. Paul's places. But that certainly didn't matter to anyone else and they all seemed to be enjoying it just fine. I grabbed my shoes and headed back to the house.
As it turned out, the game was still some time a way. People were hanging out at some bunker bar for dinner. I headed over and saw Roheet and Ania, one of my friends from Cairo. The bunker bar was an old British hangout and the walls were covered with movie posters. The food was ok, but the company was great, so it was good dinner.
Eventually we headed back to the house and I finished off my touristic spiritual journey with a great game of poker.
Day 6: Wednesday, May 14, 2008
I ended up doubling my money. This was great news, because I had decided to go North that day and try to get to Cyprus, so I'd need all the money I could get.
When the game was done I got directions to the bus station and I headed off to find a taxi. It was about 3:30 in the morning, unfortunately, so there were no cabs. I ended up having to hike it to the main road to hail a cab. It took three tries to find one who would take me for a decent price but the competitive free market won out eventually and I got the price I wanted.
At the bus station I hurried to find a bus to Lattakia, the major port city of Syria, in the North. After some running around I found one that was leaving quick. After a brief argument about not wanting to put my backpack under the bus, I figured it didn't matter and I was too tired anyway. I got on the bus and took a nap.
I woke up in Lattakia.
My first order of business was to find a good hotel that could give me some information. I had checked up on the place in Roheet's Lonely Planet while I had been in Damascus and the best hotel was called Hotel Dura. I found it in a back alley (like ya do) and headed upstairs. It turned out to be quite nice, actually. The owner was very cool and very used to backpackers. He had a world map on his desk, which made it much easier to explain that I wanted to take a boat to Cyprus. He thought I was nuts and said there were no boats, but I told him I had to try anyway. After all, St. Paul had my back!
After getting settled and having a shower I hit the streets. The one thing I had heard about Lattakia before coming was that the women were good looking and dressed very liberally. It was true. Great city.
My first stops were the local travel agencies. I tried one and asked about boats. The guy there said there were no boats, but he pointed me toward the dock and said I could ask there.
I headed down to the dock and asked there. At first they didn't even let me in. Eventually I got to talk to some sort of underling, and he told me there were no boats. I kept at it until a higher up guy came. He told me there were no boats. I kept at it until they started to ignore me because they knew I would not believe them. Unfortunately they won that round. There were no passenger boats going to Cyprus.
I headed back to the travel agencies. The second one I found said there were boats but they were all canceled until June, which was no good for me. They said there were boats from Turkey as well, but at the time I didn't think I had time to go all the way to Turkey to catch a boat to Cyprus. Plus, I didn't want to cross the border again.
While I was at the second travel agency another guy came in who was also trying to get to Cyprus. I figured we should combine efforts.
We went to eat lunch and formed a plan. We decided we'd rest for an hour and then we'd go to every shipping agency in the area and ask if we could hitch a ride to Cyprus.
While we were chatting I discovered that my new friend was Iranian. He had a connection in Cyprus who he was trying to get in touch with so that he could continue on to Europe to find a job. He had apparently gotten kicked out of Iran for owning Salmon Rushdee's "Satanic Verses."
See, Iran being the paragon of the Islamic Revolution and scourge of the evil Americans that it was, could not allow people to have certain books cause all those words might confuse the poor people. I chewed on that one along with my chicken and rice lunch and then we broke for an hour.
I reorganized back at my hotel and then went for a mini-stroll. Highlights: A REALLY REALLY red guy and some old dudes playing Macala at a café. I had only seen Macala at my cousin's house in Hawaii where it was widely acknowledge as a foreign game. These guys seemed like they played it every day.
After an hour I called my Iranian exile buddy and we hit the shipping agencies. We must have walked a good 5 miles in all and visited at least 10 different agencies. We eventually hit one staffed totally by cute girls who pointed us to the one agency that could actually help us: Al-Jazeeri (Al-Jazeera means 'island' in Arabic and the company shipped to Cyprus).
At Al-Jazeeri we were introduced to Muhammed, the head of operations. We did everything we could to get on that container ship, but in the end the owner of the boat was totally unwilling to take on the risk of two passengers on his boat, which was very illegal. On top of being unregistered, there was also the Syrian exit stamp that I would have been missing. It didn't sound like Lattakia was gonna get me to Cyprus.
I was on day 6 of my 10 day trip, so I didn't have time to sit in Lattakia and keep trying. So I said buy to my Iranian buddy, packed my bags, paid for the half-day in the hotel and said goodbye to Lattakia.
My last chance to get to Cyprus by boat was another port south of Lattakia: Tartus.
I caught a bus and got off in Tartus. I had not been planning to go to Tartus so I had not looked for any hotels or anything before arriving. For the first time, in a long time, I had no guide to go on, no guide book to help. It was the first time I realized the amazing value of a Lonely Planet guide.
I was scared.
So, the first thing that I did was start looking for the Internet. No matter what my problem, I knew Google could help. I started asking around and eventually the people in the area herded me onto a mini-bus and sent me off to an Internet café.
The place I ended up was not what I expect, but turned out to be awesome. It was the Syrian Computer Association.
When I showed up at the door speaking Arabic asking for the internet the people were a little shocked, but they eventually showed me a room with a bunch of computers. I didn't ask how much at the time because it did not matter to me; I needed internet.
As an aside, I saw a great Law & Order episode where a kid was kidnapped by a netstalker or something and the psychiatrist guy said that the kid had been addicted to the Internet, which was why he spent so much time online. Jack McCoy scoffed and said "Oh yeah, everything's an addiction now." The psychiatrist responded, "Well, he spends most of his time on the internet, he doesn't sleep, he doesn't eat, he has withdrawn from his friends and family…what would you call it?" Normally I would have been inclined to agree with McCoy, but that psychiatrist made one heck of an empirical argument.
Anyway, I don't think I'm addicted to the Internet, but it did give me a tremendous amount of comfort to be back on. I think that is quite natural since it is a source of tremendous amounts of information and I had exactly none (I also got to chat with my friends in the States while I was on the other side of the planet in a country with which my country had…frosty…relations).
But in the end, the Internet didn't really help except to allow me to update my friends. The employees of the SCA were the ones who helped me. They took me to a good, moderately priced hotel and helped me find an ATM. I told them my plan about Cyprus and they went around to their friends and called the owner of the docks and asked him about it. No one came back with anything, but they certainly put in a lot of effort to help a complete stranger.
They even took me to get a cell phone. The kid that drove me was absolutely crazy (and that's saying something if you've seen the way I drive) but we did get there.
That actually turned out to be quite unfortunate though. As I was purchasing the phone, the cute lady behind the desk asked to take my fingerprint and the kid I was with had to give them his phone number. I really should have refused at that point and gotten the hell out, but I was sort of committed and needed a cell phone. The weirdest part to me was that the Syrians I was with thought this was a normal thing. They said it was for security reasons. I just about flipped out thinking about all the ways it could suck to have the Syrians and whoever they gave it to access to my thumb print.
Then again, I've been to countries where they take your fingerprint at the airport, like Turkey and Jordan. Even though they are nominally on our side, my fingerprints are pretty much all over the place already. It was much more frightening that the Syrian government had so brainwashed their people that they would allow themselves to be fingerprinted to buy a phone.
After I got my phone I returned to the café to finish up my emails and chatting with my friends. I found out the people of the SCA were also Christians. They didn't even let me pay for my Internet time. Now, I know there are some Christians in the world who are fanatical, and I know that Christian history isn't spotless; even in the modern Middle East Christians have been violent.
But on the whole, Christians were the most awesome people I ever met in the Middle East. There may have been a lot of factors contributing to that, but whatever they were, they made Christians the coolest people to meet. They always helped and were always kind. They were so kind they even got mentioned in the Quran for being kind 5:82:
";and thou wilt fin the nearest in friendship to the believers to be those who say, we are Christians. That is because there are priests and monks among them and because they are not proud."
And 57:27
"…and We made Jesus son of Mary to follow, and We gave him the Gospel. And We put compassion and mercy in the hearts of those who followed him."
It is worth noting here that the beginning of 5:82 says: "Thou wilt certainly find the most violent of people in enmity against the believers to be the Jews and the idolaters…" and that the end of 57:27 says: "…So We gave those of them who believed their reward, but most of them are transgressors."
So Christians are well known for being kind people, even though most of them are transgressors. And the whole Jewish-Muslim thing goes back a while. I'm no Quran specialist though, so I'd suggest reading it yourself.
I don't know if this bunch were transgressors in their off time, but they were extremely friendly with me! We settled on having dinner after I got settled into my hotel.
After I cleaned up one of the guys from the SCA picked me up at the hotel. We were going to meet one of his friends and another guy from the SCA. We met up at a nice little restaurant and had dinner by the sea. I think I had fish. I mean, it was a port town. Gotta have fish.
For a while the conversation centered on my Arabic. We all agreed that Arabic grammar was hard. We also discussed how Syrian schools, while free, didn't teach any English. That sucked for Syrians, but didn't really surprise me since they were still trying to shrug off France's Imperial imposition of French on them.
But eventually, as all conversations I have had in the Middle East do, it descended into the Arab-Israeli conflict.
My friends back in Damascus were all smart people. They had all lived in the Middle East for some time and in Syria in particular. They all told me that they avoided politics at all costs. My friend Geoff got asked a political question during a job interview and said he'd rather not answer it. The interviewer agreed.
But I was just way to sick of listening to people bitching about the Arab-Israeli Conflict to let it go. I have seen how Arab governments, and Persian ones, abuse the plight of the Palestinians to impose the most draconian laws on their people. It is the saddest and most pathetic burden the Arabs have forced upon themselves. And all sides are to blame. So here's what I said.
1. The conversation started with talk about what Hizbullah was doing in Lebanon. This was more than a year after Hizbullah's war with Israel in southern Lebanon, but my Syrian friends still thought that Hizbullah was fighting Israel. Armed with all the great information I had gotten from Jared, my friends' friend down in Damascus, I informed the group that Hizbullah was in no way fighting Israel. What they were doing was fighting a vicious turf battle with fellow Muslims, Arabs and Lebanese and killing many of them unjustly.
2. As we went back and forth about how America helps Israel and doesn't help the Palestinians, I explained that I was pissed off at both sides. The Israelis were a pain in America's ass most of the time. They have at least once destroyed an American warship. They are a constant public relations disaster and their settlers are amongst the vilest people on Earth. They may not all be, but their movement is a negative force on the planet.
But in the end the Israelis are the only Democracy in the whole region and they are our best ally. They provide us with fantastic intelligence and they are a staunch ally against terrorism. The Palestinians could not even hold an election without splitting in two. Hamas had thrown fellow Palestinians off roof tops with their hands tied behind their back when they took over Gaza.
All in all, I said, Israel and Palestine eat up way more global resources than either of them are worth. The problem is solvable and it should be solved quickly. The Palestinians and the Israelis are the biggest problem. They appear totally bent on killing each other, and even those who want peace have to tiptoe around murders like Hamas and the Israeli settlers.
3. Leaving the Israelis and the Palestinians aside, Syria was wasting its time bitching about Golan. What the hell good was Golan going to do the Syrians? I asked. I have seen it. It's a small mound where you might be able to grow some crops. It is certainly the high ground above Damascus, but the Israelis most likely have nukes, so what difference does the high ground make. Syria could easily settle for UN mediators on the mound and give it up for the sake of peace.
Actually, I think the Syrians and Israelis today are working on that and might just settle the whole issue.
4. At one point they asked me, "Why do you support Bush, he kills babies." I didn't even bother to explain that I didn't support baby-killing.
What I did explain was that you have to support someone, and baby-killing isn't really a criteria since everyone kills babies, ESPECIALLY in the Middle East. The Israeli airstrikes kill babies. Hamas' rockets kill babies. Hafez Al-Asad leveled the entire city of Hama, killing lots of babies. Syrian suicide bombers in Iraq kill babies. Iraqi suicide bombers kill babies.
That's all a bit morbid, but the point is that Syrians pretending to be superior based on baby killings is ridiculous. I supported Bush because he supported Freedom for my fellow human beings in Iraq (believe him or not, he gave them the opportunity). He was not rolling in simply to kill Iraqi babies, unlike Syrian terrorist Fedayeen who used them as human shields. When Hafez Al-Asad (father of the current Syrian president) leveled Hama, he wanted to extinguish the Muslim Brotherhood, which I assume meant their babies.
Babies, or civilians, die, and it suck. Using non-violence to solve problems is awesome, but it usually takes a very long time and while the Syrians were sitting around waiting for Saddam to die (if they actually were), how many babies did Saddam kill? People try to act like Iraq was better under Saddam, and I still find this ridiculous. It is sad that people think that way. As bad as it has gotten in Iraq, as of March 07 a majority still prefer life without Saddam: http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=67
It seems odd that Syrians are condemning Bush for punishing the Iraqis when the Iraqis are happier without Saddam. Lots of mistakes were made; things could have been done way better. But Saddam was an evil without comparison on this Earth and America whooped his ass.
5. Oh yeah, my Syrian buddies also tried to deny that Syrians are attacking Iraqis. That's awesome. At the time I knew that was wrong, but in the past few weeks I have read two books confirming it ("Cobra II," by Bernard Trainer and Michael Gordon…Check the acknowledgements in the back of the book for my name; and "One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer."). In fact, it is well known that among the Fedayeen forces that the US faced on the way to Baghdad, many of them were Syrian with Syrian passports.
Their "Reason for Entering" Iraq was "Jihad" according to the Iraqi border guard who stamped their passports.
6. I then had to point out that while they were saying America was evil, I was looking at videos of Al Qaeda cutting off the heads of captives and posting them on the internet. The Americans had committed gross violations at Abu Gharab, but those people lived. Al Qaeda was systematically assassinating the tribal sheiks of Anbar and their suicide bombers were TARGETING markets and highly populated areas of Baghdad. Not populated by Americans, mind you, but Iraqis.
America can and will always strive to do better. But in a contest between America and Al Qaeda, who would you want running the world? It is really that simple, and it still saddens me that people can see Al Qaeda through a lens of resisting the Evil Superpower. Al Qaeda is in no way resisting anything. All they are doing is destroying their own homelands and killing their brothers and sisters. When America does better, it means people love us more because we spread the values of Freedom and Justice around the world. When Al Qaeda does better it means it killed a bunch of people.
7. Eventually I got sick of the high-faluten philosophical thought. I didn't feel like any of us were really saying what we meant and it was getting totally confusing with all the generalizations.
So, I cut it down to finances. I began to ask my friends what they paid in taxes. What they told me was that taxes in Syria were pretty low and they were progressive, meaning richer people got taxed more. My friends thought this was great and fair.
But then I asked them about tariffs. They said that Tariffs were actually really high. That, I said, was where the Syrian government snuck the costs of their endless dictatorship past the people. The Syrians had free health care, schools and cheap gas. But they were paying for all of it through increased prices for bread and clothes and everything and anything imported into the country. All their food was more expensive. And their schools and health care weren't even that good.
As the conversation went on I could see I was getting through to them. When I told them the Golan was worthless they argued at first. But eventually they started to agree and argued amongst themselves. When I described how the Syrian government made them pay for all the things they thought were free, they seem surprised and shocked.
I explained that in countries where you have Freedom, you don't have to give a fingerprint for "security reasons" when you buy a phone. They said that they were in a State of Emergency. I laughed and said "Your State of Emergency has lasted 50 years." That got my friends from the SCA arguing with their friend big time, saying that I was right and that it was ridiculous for it to have gone on so long.
I even conceded that Syria could go on fighting forever if it wanted to. The Syrians could continue funding Hamas and Hizbullah to fight some war against Israel for some reason. But then I asked, what did Hamas or Hizbullah ever give to the Syrian people? I mean, the Syrians needed new schools and new sewers. Hamas and Hizbullah were buying rockets and firing them at Israel. They were not importing any engineers to Syria. What did Syria gain from having those allies? They had no answer to that.
And finally I described why they would always lose in a war with Israel. As long as the Syrians were a dictatorship and lived in a country with no Freedom and no creativity, their economy would never match the Israelis. They would never be able to beat them, no matter what they tried. And America would never back a terrorist-sponsoring petty dictatorship over a thriving democracy, even if that democracy had a lot to learn about how to treat its neighbors. Syrians were no more moral than Israelis, and Israel was doing a hell of a lot better with their moral conversations than the Syrians were.
That kinda stopped the conversation. They knew that was true. And we all knew that once Syria was actually a democracy, they wouldn't really want war with Israel, just as most Palestinians actually want peace. They voted for Hamas because they thought they'd be less corrupt than Fatah, not because they actually thought Hamas' endless war was a good idea.
But we did manage to settle on a few points we agreed on: Kids drive too fast, taxes suck, and Syrians really are the nicest people in the Middle East, especially Christians! I assume that's still true, since they didn't turn me in and I lived to get out of the country…of course they probably would have gotten in more trouble for talking to me, but no matter what our disagreements were politically, the Syrians were extremely kind and polite the whole time.
And that is actually one of my favorite traits about people in the Middle East. I have gotten into the nastiest conversations where I was on the polar opposite side from the person I was talking to, but we always managed to part friends.
I went back to my hotel, watched "Ronin" on the most awesome movie channel in the Middle East, Channel 2 (Arabic subtitles), and crashed.
Day 7: Thursday, May 15, 2008
I woke up with a plan. It started with the internet.
When I got to the SCA I learned that there were no boats going to Cyprus from Tartus. One of the ladies there also gave me a present. I think she may have been hitting on me, although I wouldn't have known unless she actually hit me.
After checking email I went with her to a shop around the corner and bought a cheap 4 gig memory stick, simply because I could. It cost about $20. I found out that there are 8 gig memory sticks out there later on, and eventually just bought a 500 gig harddrive, so it was all kinda moot anyway, but it was cool to see that technology was advancing so fast and could be so cheap, even in the developing world. I remember that the first memory stick I bought cost $100 and could store a whopping 1 gig.
I also bought a phone charger cause mine kept breaking.
After that I told my friends the next phase. If I couldn't find a commercial boat, I'd have to find a civilian. There was one place in Tartus I thought shady enough for that and it was the island of Arwad.
Arwad is a small fishing village on an island about 15 minutes from Tartus by boat. I asked my friends how to get to the dock and they put me in a cab.
When I got to the dock I discovered that it was right across the street from my hotel. Unfortunately I had checked out, expecting to leave that night. Anyway, when I got down there I found the boat to Arwad. My suspicion that Arwad was shady was confirmed when I found that Syrian security officials were taking down names and passports of every passenger getting on the boats. It cost a couple bucks, but it was no problem.
The boat ride was pretty cool. I got to sit on the roof wearing my cool-looking Oakley's and chat with the locals. It was a bit bouncy, but nothing terrible. Eventually we pulled into Arwad.
When I got off I surveyed the situation. Most of the other tourists were actually Russians. Syria was a good vacation spot back from the Soviet times. I saw the same thing when I visited Poland in 2005. There were advertisements for great, cheap plane tickets from Poland to Cuba. The travel deals stemmed from when they were all Communist and they had a hard time going any where else because the Soviets wouldn't let them out.
I spotted a café to the right as I exited the port and figured that'd be a good place to start. I walked over with my backpack. As I approached a man came out and asked if I would like some tea. I thought for a second and then agreed. I asked if there was a boat to Cyprus as well. He looked at me for a second and then, in true conspiratorial fashion, said that I should sit and have tea and afterwards come upstairs to talk with him.
I finished my tea and then he beckoned me to follow him upstairs. I went up and met a boat captain named Haj Muhammad. The manager of the restaurant, also Muhammad, but not a Haj (didn't go on pilgrimage to Mecca) said that this was the man who would take me to Cyprus. While we spoke Muhamad had some fish brought up for me. It wasn't that good.
The price started at $6000. I had about $3000 in the bank at the time so I told them that would not be possible. In about an hour I negotiated the price from $6000 to $2000.
Plus Muhamad wanted my Oakley's.
That was my first inkling that something was weird. It all seemed very cool and conspiratorial, but it was also way too easy. It was fun to prove that money could make the impossible possible, but I wasn't sure that needed to be proven. Plus, if the trip cost thousands of dollars for them to make, I doubt very much they would have lopped $4000 off in one hour. And the demand for my Oakley's made it seem very much like an old-fashion scam.
However, the Oakley's were expendable and I could buy more when I got back to Baghdad. I would not get another chance to smuggle myself to Cyprus. So I agreed, knowing full well I'd never see the shades again, even though I threatened to come back if the trip to Cyprus didn't go down. I did demand that I get a pair of shades to replace them though, even though they were cheap, crappy shades.
With that I headed back to the dock and returned to Tartus. I returned to the SCA and spoke with the manager. I told him what was up and he seemed a bit worried, but he did not try to deter me. There was an ATM right outside so I went there and withdrew 20,000 lira, which was about $500 at the time.
I was very worried about all the money I was spending for this little trip, so I figured I might just be able to knock off another $1000. I called Muhamad and he seemed to confirm that the price was only $1000. But then he said something odd. He said that Haj was sleeping and that he was thinking about not going. I was a bit pissed, but I told him "No problem I'm coming back for my Oakley's."
So I returned to Arwad. When I got there Muhamad was no where to be found. His friends asked me how expensive those shades were and I told them $100. They seemed impressed. Muhamad was most likely bragging about ripping off the American. The friends told me Haj Muhamad was waiting upstairs to talk to me though, so it was possible he was still going and I didn't need to take my shades.
When I went to see Haj he was clean and had on new clothes. When I first met him he looked like a dirty sailor. He agreed to my new price, and to me paying half in Tartus and half when I reached Cyprus. I told him visas were no problem because I didn't need one to get into Cyprus. He told me we were good to go and that I could meet him at the docks at 1am.
We shook on it and I went downstairs. I saw Muhamad then, but the shades were not on him. I said goodbye and walked off to the dock. Haj Muhamad came with me and said that we would not have problems because he had a friend who was a cop. I thanked him, paid the ferryman and got on the boat back to Tartus.
While I was sitting waiting to leave, I saw Haj talking to a cop, so I figured he was telling the truth. Eventually some Russians got on board. Something got confused and we had to switch boats but the Russian ladies didn't want to. There was lots of arguing, but I got bored, so I got off the boat and decided to walk around the island.
As I was walking various people came up to say hi. I wasn't feeling very talkative so I told them my name was Bill and that I was Russian, since they thought I was Russian anyway. First time in my life I had been mistaken for Russian instead of British or American. They get a lot more Russians in Syria than anyone else.
The island was nice enough, if a bit run down. It had apparently been an old Phoenician fort and some of the defenses were still standing. While I walked I came up with a plan to prepare for my trip. It required the Internet, though, so I went back to the ferry. I got on the boat and headed back. While we sailed for 15 minutes, the sea felt much choppier. It was a little bit rougher than earlier that morning.
Back in Tartus I did two things. First I wrote an email to my brother and friends telling them of my plans (I did not alert the parents since they probably would have freaked). I included names, times and phone numbers. The boat ride was supposed to take about 12 hours. If I didn't check in after 16 hours I said there was probably a problem and those numbers should be called. They included the number of the SCA and the boat guys who were supposed to take me.
After my rescue plan was in place I called Haj. I said I would be ready to go sooner than 1am and asked if we could move it to 10pm. He agreed.
I left my bag at the SCA and went to the market. I figured that if I was going to take a boat to Cyprus I better have some plastic on hand to keep all my stuff dry. It might also be useful to have some things that could hold a lot of air in case the boat sank and I need floatation devices. There were no ziplock bags anywhere in Tartus, unfortunately, so I had to make do with regular plastic bags. I managed to find some big trash bags as well, and I bought some Tupperware which I figured would be great for holding my camera. Then I bought a whole bunch of snacks and big plastic bottles of water. If I was going on this trip, I wasn't dying of dehydration.
After I had all my supplies I grabbed my stuff from the SCA and said goodbye to my friends there. I headed off to the dock. I picked a spot right across the street from the dock to have dinner. I ate as big a meal as I could and tried to hide my supplies. Some officers came in to have dinner as well, but they didn't pay me any mind. When I finished I grabbed my supplies, which were all in big black plastic bags and walked out.
I crossed the street to the dock. The dock was L shaped. The long part of the L led from the road to the water, and then the short part made a right turn to where the boats were docked. There was a small building there and some boats tied up. Now, I assumed that Haj would be waiting on the boat so I wouldn't have to sit around on the dock raising suspicion, so I walked all the way down the dock to the very end of the L, past the Syrian police with all my supplies. Eventually a man came up to me and said Haj was waiting for me in a tent which sat on the corner of the L. Sooo, I walked back to the tent, past the Syrian police again and into a dark tent which was about the shadiest place I could imagine to have a meeting like this.
Haj was sitting there along with two other men. I sat down and asked what was going on. They said, "This is very illegal. You could go to jail." I asked why and they said it was because I did not have an exit stamp in my visa, so if we got caught I'd be arrested. At this point a cop walked up to the tent and asked what we were doing. The guys said nothing, just talking. Then they went back to scaring the shit out of me.
"You could go to jail. We could all go to jail. We could all get beat up. The police man that runs this place is crazy. He will arrest you, but he might kill us," they said. "Are you ready for that?!"
"No," I responded.
"Do you really have to go??" I thought about that for a second. I guess they were assuming I was someone besides a guy on a trip who wanted to go by boat for some reason. They may have thought I was doing something illegal, when in fact I just wanted to take a boat to Cyprus. They started to outline their plan and at one point I thought they said they would have to hit the cops to get to their boat.
"You have to hit the cops??" I asked.
But I asked a little too loud and just as I did the crazy cop approached and demanded to know what was going on. Haj, who had his hand on the back of the couch, was pinching my arm, silently telling me to shut the hell up. We told him nothing and he looked at me. I told him we were just friends and we were talking. I told him they had been nice to me and I had bought them some gifts, indicating all the Tupperware I had bought and the left over chicken from my dinner (he didn't know it was leftovers). He looked suspicious but he walked away.
At that point I decided this was a lost cause. These guys were way too scared (maybe for good reason) and the cops were now suspicious as hell. They suggested I could just take a plane and this time I agreed. I took two of the big bottles of water I had bought and left the rest of the $15 worth of supplies with them. I walked off the dock and never looked back.
I walked around a little bit until I found a fancy hotel where the concierge pointed me to a 24 hour internet joint. I went there (it was packed with teenagers wasting their life away like I did playing video games as a kid…they're fun, but I got the feeling these guys didn't unplug a lot) and got online. I emailed my friends and brother that there was nothing to worry about and that the show was off. I checked out my stocks, which were doing ok, and then, out of curiosity, I checked the weather.
It turns out that on the night I was planning on going to Cyprus there were 20 knot winds and 4 foot waves in ocean. It was windy and rough and the boat we would have gone on was about the same size as the ferry I took to Arwad for 15 minutes. 12 hours would have been intense, and it probably would have been more like 20 hours in rough seas, if we made it at all.
I checked back into my old hotel contemplating my failure. As I dozed off to sleep I thought about St. Paul and his rough boat ride to Cyprus. I was kinda upset that I didn't pull it off, but considering that weather report, I concluded that St. Paul may have had my back after all.
Day 8: Friday, May 16, 2008
I woke up on Friday and took stock of my defeat. I had lost my $100 shades (I was not going back past the police to Arwad again for those…they weren't even polarized), I had $500 in Syrian pounds that I would never use, I gave away $15 of supplies and I had lost a $350 dollar return ticket from Cyprus to Damascus to Amman. I guess it was a heck of a lot less damage than the $1000 I could have lost going to Cyprus by boat, possibly dying or getting robbed by the crew.
I tried to call Muhamad about my shades, but he simply did not answer. Eventually I headed to the bus station. I was resigned to defeat at that point so I figured I may as well check out some more stuff in Syria. I caught a mini-bus to the Krak De Chevaliers, aka Qalat Al-Husan.
Unfortunately the mini-bus took me only half way. He dropped me off on the side of the road on an overpass and said I need to walk "that way."
I took some stairs down to the lower road and started walking. I walked for quite a while. I did see some signs for the castle, but I didn't see the castle itself, which concerned me because the thing was supposed to be huge.
But as luck would have it a mini-bus full of Polish archeologists just happened to be coming down the road (there are lots of Polish archeologists in the Middle East for some reason, and the old Communist ties probably didn't hurt with Syria either). They invited me in and took me up to the castle.
As it turned out it was a 15 minute drive. It would have been a 2 hour walk uphill if I'd tried it. Thank god for Poles!!
The castle did not disappoint. It was huge and cool, like the other castles I had seen, and it was still there 1000 years later. The Poles said I was part of their team so I could get a discount on the ticket. On the roof of the castle there was a restaurant and the Poles and I sat down for lunch. The chicken was surprisingly good and they even had beer. The castle even had a Red Crescent office inside of it, which I thought was weird.
After checking out the castle we moved on. The Poles said they were heading to Homs and then to Hama. I had to go that way anyway, so I went with them. In Homs there was actually a ticket system for the mini-buses, which impressed me. We caught a bus to Hama and then in Hama caught a bus to the center of town.
Hama was quite a city. Besides having been totally rebuilt after Hafez leveled it, it also had ancient wooden water wheels in it that were a tourist attraction. I checked out the sites, saw all the rebuilt walls and then wished my Polish friends goodbye!
I went back to the bus station by taxi. I didn't have change for the taxi, again, and he didn't have any either, so he waited outside while I broke a larger bill by buying some Pringles. I then went and found a bus company and bought a ticket for Damascus.
When I showed the guys my passport they seemed confused. They passed me off to a younger guy who spoke English. I paid him and he said he'd bring the ticket out to me. I waited outside and eventually he brought me the ticket. When he did he stopped for a second to ask,
"Why do you hate Syria?" I assume he asked because I was American. At this point I was way too tired to try and explain life to this kid so I just told him,
"Not everyone's the same." He seemed ok with that and I took down his email and wished him luck. I didn't really know where the bus was going to stop. The announcements where in Arabic but the speakers were hard to make out. At one point a bus pulled up and the kid announced that it was the Damascus bus. I went up to it to board and then I heard the announcement again, but in English. There were no other tourists at that terminal, just Syrians. The kid had made a special announcement for me to make sure I got on the bus. Nice of him.
I slept the whole way back to Damascus. I called my cabbie friend who had driven me up from Amman and told him to stand by to drive me back south.
Back in Damascus I found the house. When I got there everyone was very excited. Apparently a group of people had gone to see Richard III and had actually sat right next to Bashar Al Asad in the front row. They were all meeting up at a place called the Journalist's Bar. I grabbed some dinner and then headed off to meet them.
When I got to the Journalist's Bar it was laughs all around. Everyone had stories to share, them about Asad and me about Tartus. It was pretty amazing to hear that Asad had gone to a play about a dictator's rise to power. That says something about his style right there.
But that did not turn out to be the most interesting part of the night. I ended up seated across from two actual Syrian girls who did not share the American's enthusiasm for seeing Asad and, in fact, openly expressed their hatred of him. I looked around the Bar at the waiters. I thought someone would arrest them on the spot. But apparently the Journalist's Bar is kind of protected from that.
The conversation was damn interesting. We talked about Iraq and what I was doing there. I usually get in heated debates with Americans about it, but the Syrian girls and I actually ended up agreeing a lot. We both saw that Saddam was wicked, and that a lot had gotten screwed up, but, in the end, the Iraqis should at least try for Democracy.
The thing that amazed me the most was how calm I managed to stay. I think in the past I substituted noise for reasoned debate, and my time in Iraq made me quite comfortable that we were doing the right thing over there and had to see it through.
As it turned out, 4 months later, after I left RTI and was in Amman sitting in a coffeshop waiting for my new job to start, one of those girls spotted me and said hi. We ended up being roommates for 10 days, which was great because she cut my housing costs from 10 dinars a day to 3.33. She saved me quite a bit of money when I was on a tight budgetJ.
Back to the Journalist's Bar. As I was sitting and chatting, Ania, my friend from AUC came up. She was apparently at the place too, for totally different reasons. She was also hanging out with a bunch of OTHER AUC people. I went over to say hi and we all took some pictures. They were all amazed at my exploits over the past few years since we had studied abroad. Ania admitted that the last one with the boat had her a little concerned. It was apparently the one time she thought, "Wow, Sam is taking this seriously. This might be serious." I took it as a compliment…
But eventually I had to go. Back at the house I was bored and sad that I wasn't going to Cyprus.
But, as it turned out, there was still a chance. I had met a guy way back at the beginning of the trip who I thought was named Kerby. He was going to Cyprus by plane and he was on the way to the airport. When he got there he called me and said there was room on the plane and if I hurried I could get on.
So in 2 minutes I packed, said bye to everyone who was awake…which was no one, and ran off to the airport.
Day 9: Saturday, May 17, 2008
I found a taxi quick this time by paying a little extra. I told him to hurry, but for some reason he had to stop to grab some tea. He gave me some, though, so it was cool.
He did make it to the airport in record time. When I got to the airport I found my buddy Kerby and we headed to the ticket counter. At the ticket counter they told me I needed some sort of receipt to prove I had spent money in the country or something. They wanted me to spend US dollars to buy my ticket and they didn't take credit cards.
See, the Syrians don't have a very strong currency, so one way they increase their foreign currency reserves is by hijacking people at the airport and forcing them to pay taxes in US dollars or Euros. Despite the security officials supporting terrorists against the US, they still wanted our dollars.
But they were out of luck with me, and I had a ton of Syrian currency which I had taken out of the ATM for the boat ride. I went to the booth where I was supposed to get the receipt and I stood there long enough bothering the guy that he eventually just gave me the proper documentation. I went back to the lady at the ticket counter, bought my ticket and headed to the check-in.
The one thing I was worried about was that they would find my government ID on me. However, my friends had told me that the Syrians were paranoid, but they never body searched foreigners. So I just put it in my wallet. I put my wallet in the tray as I passed through the metal detectors and they were never the wiser.
The check-in was a bit chaotic, but it was efficient enough once they opened it. While we were waiting around for check-in I discovered that Kerby's name was actually Toby and I had heard it wrong over the phone!
After we checked in I headed to customs. The customs official searched through my passport. At one point I swore he stared right at my Iraqi exit stamp. He grilled me about what I was doing there but I looked like a grungy student, so telling him I was a student worked just fine. The plane was boarding, so he let me go.
As it turned out the plane was nearly empty. I fell asleep quick, but the flight was only 45 minutes, so when I woke up in Larnaca I was still tired.
However, I had finally gotten to Cyprus! Albeit the easy way, but still there. Lucky for me Toby had a hotel. We caught a cab from the airport to the hotel. We had agreed on a price with the cabbie, but as usual when we got out he tried to rip us off. He grabbed Toby's hand and when Toby told him to piss off the cabbie threw his hand. Not a great introduction to Cyprus.
However, the owner of the hotel made up for it. We told him what happened and he rushed outside to yell at the cabbie, but he'd already left. He apologized profusely on the cabbie's behalf, saying that it was really rude and that Cypriots were really much nicer than that.
Cyprus is an interesting island. It has Greeks in the South and Turks in the North, but it has a truly British culture. It is one of the most, if not the most, conquered islands on Earth. So far I was liking the Brits better than the Greeks. But, in the end they all turned out ok.
Toby was nice enough to let me crash on one of the two beds in his room. I took a nap and a shower and then we headed off to check out the city a little. There was a farmer's market going on in the parking lot and the beach was actually right past it. The beach was nice too. Apparently all the spies in Syria left through Cyprus, which was one reason I got such a grilling at customs. But looking at that beach I could see that was not only a good escape route, but a nice place to relax.
Eventually Toby and I parted ways. I grabbed some lunch and then I headed back to the airport. My plan was to get to Ayia Napa which was apparently THE party town of Cyprus, so it had to be checked out. Ayia Napa was also near one of the most fascinating negative side effects of international Peacekeeping in the world: the abandoned city of Famagusta.
When the Turks invaded Cyprus in 1974 they captured Famagusta. The Greek Cypriots of the town had evacuated before the troops arrived and under the bombing of the Turks. When the Turks arrived, they sealed off the thriving tourist town and major port of Varosha, which was in southern Famagusta. To this day the city is a ghost town, totally frozen in time while the Cyprus dispute between the Turks and Greeks continues. There are still clothes in the department stores and restaurants with tables set.
No one is allowed into the zone by the Turks, who control the northern half of Cyprus. Naturally I was thinking of sneaking in. However, I didn't have enough time at that point. But I heard that there were boat rides from Ayia Napa that you could take to the border and look at Famagusta, so I settled for that.
When I got back to the airport in Larnca I went to rent a car. I checked all the agencies for the best price and then realized I had left my wallet with my driver's license in Iraq. I used a badge holder (like a pouch you wear around your neck) popular with contractors in Iraq to hold all my credit cards and cash, so I didn't carry my wallet anymore. That meant no rental car.
That sucked. My flight was the next day and I wanted the car for the flexibility and because it would have been cheaper and more fun than a taxi. But it was not to be. I went outside and caught a 45 Euro cab ride to Ayia Napa.
Oh yeah, they use the Euro in Cyprus. Double sucks.
The most obvious mark of British influence is that Cypriots drive on the left side of the road and their steering wheels on the right side of the cars. It is very strange for Americans, but I got used to it.
The landscape of Cyprus was pretty nice. There was a lot of ocean, which I always love, but it was distinctly different from Hawaii.
Hawaii is pretty much totally urbanized. There really are not any farms and everything depends on tourism and the military. The infrastructure is pretty good and there are tall buildings and mountains everywhere.
Cyprus still had villages. Hawaii has suburbs. There were small towns in-between the big cities. It actually seemed like a pretty nice place, although it was quite flat.
But Ayia Napa did not disappoint. It was chalk-full of girls in bikinis and dune-buggies. I found a hotel in the middle of town which was a set of apartments that just got turned into a hotel, really. That basically meant I had to buy my own soap and shampoo. Luckily I had brought a towel (always bring a towel).
For the afternoon, I checked out the beach and did another one of those spiritual sit-around and think about life things. I went swimming in the Mediterranean as well. In fact, that may have been the first time I ever did that. I gotta admit. Hawaii has some nice ocean. But the blue waters of the Mediterranean around Cyprus were gorgeous, and fresh. It was probably one of the most refreshing swims of my whole life.
I went back to the hotel for a nap and then went out in the evening. I checked out a British bar called Tommy's for dinner. It was apparently Karaoke night. I enjoyed that before checking out what nightlife Ayia Napa had to offer.
It was actually quite cool. There was essentially one major area where all the clubs were and you could hear it from about half a mile away. The best part was that all the clubs were thematic, and were built like their name suggested. There was a pirate bar shaped like a ship; a castle bar shaped like a castle; a Flintstones bar with the characters scattered around with a Stone Age design; a Communist bar which was all red, etc. It was really impressive. Unfortunately hitting up the nightlife while traveling alone gets boring pretty quickly, at least it did for me, and so I headed back early. It was probably the healthy thing to do anyway.
I could hear the party thumping away as I drifted to sleep.
Day 10: Sunday, May 18, 2008
I still had a little bit of time to explore before my flight out of Cyprus that evening, so I headed back to the beach. I found a Bangladeshi kid renting out Jet Skis. I tried to negotiate the price down because I was running out of Euro, but the kid couldn't budge without the owner there.
I said I'd come back and I headed to the dock. As I was walking a guy on the dock handed me an advertisement. I usually would have ignored it, but when I read it I saw that it was for a boat ride out to see Famagusta! I turned around (shocked by the irony that the handing-out-little-flyers-to-random-people trick had worked on me) and asked the guy when the ship was leaving. He said 15 minutes. Just enough time!
I took off at a sprint back to my hotel. I packed quick and checked out. I ran back to the dock…but stopped at McDonalds for breakfast take way. I continued running looking like a true tourist: Hiking backpack on, a Mcdonald's bag in one hand and a medium coke in the other. I made it to the dock just in time to get on the boat.
The ride itself was pretty low key. The owner of the boat was apparently from Famagusta and he told us that he hoped to go back there one day. On the way to the ghost city, we stopped so people could jump off the boat into the water.
The city itself was unfortunately not all that impressive. First off, it was cloudy so we couldn't see it. Second, it was too far away. The boat had to turn around at the invisible Green Line in the water which split poor Cyprus in half.
We headed back to the dock, stopping once more for swimming. As we pulled into the dock, I saw the Captain rush to the stereo equipment. He quickly switched the music and began blaring "Let's Talk About Sex," as we pulled into the harbor. I laughed my ass off.
After I got off I went back to check out the Jet Ski guy. The owner, a big fat greek guy, had showed up. He agreed to let me ride the Jet Ski for half time at half price, saying I could pay "his" Bangladeshi boy when I was done. I love Jet Skis so I had a good time. I came back in and paid the kid. I asked the kid his name, trying to be nice, and he told me he didn't know…I stared at him unsure what to say. But he just smiled and shrugged. I shook his hand and headed off looking for a last meal before heading back to Larnaca. As I was leaving the beach I saw some naked Russians sunbathing…
You don't see that in Hawaii very much at all…
Eventually I found a place to eat. It was nice enough and it was attached to a hotel too. After I ate they let me use their showers. I changed and headed off to find a cab.
I found a guy pretty quick, but I realized I had one last thing to do. He let me keep my bags in his trunk (he didn't have very many customers and wanted to make sure I stuck around) and I went off to find a soccer jersey. The first store I checked didn't have anything, but the store right next to it was the jackpot. I bought my Cypriot Soccer jersey and even got a flag to top it off.
With that done, I jumped in the cab and headed for the airport.
UNFORTUNATELY, my plane was late. When I finally caught it, I had to do a layover in Damascus. That sucked because I was back in Syria, one, and two, I missed my connecting flight to Amman and there was not another flight for 8 hours. That meant I was most likely going to miss my flight to Baghdad and that meant I was going to have to use one day of PTO and pay for my hotel stay in Amman because RTI would not cover me for an RRB.
I found a first class lounge in the Damascus airport. I had to pay something like 1000 lira to stay there for 4 hours. But I was making plenty of money in Iraq, with no expenses, and I had tons of Syrian pounds left from my massive ATM withdrawal. The girls at the counter seemed surprised that a scruffy-looking ruffian like me could afford their Prestigious First Class Lounge and I enjoyed their surprise with a smile. I also made up for it by eating the free food and drinking the free water. They didn't have any Internet, though. I passed out on a couch. They woke me up after 4 hours to ask for another 1000 lira, which I gave them.
Finally my flight to Amman showed up. I went to the gate and gave the guard my passport. He told his supervisor that I did not have a Syrian entry stamp and I cut in, in Arabic, explaining that I was transiting through to Amman from Cyprus. After a little shock, they let me through.
As I suspected I got stuck in Amman for a day. Luckily RTI got me the corporate rate at the Intercontinental, so it was a little cheaper.
At that point I thought the adventure was over and I headed down to the bar/restaurant for some food. I ended up sitting next to some Scottish Oil pipeline engineer who had an armed Syrian driver paid for by his company and they were going out on the town. I agreed to go with them and they drove us for about 30 minutes out to some bar. It seemed like a nice part of town, although I had no idea where it was.
The bar itself was crazy! It was loud as hell and just as blue. There were scantily clad women inside dancing around for rich Jordanians and Lebanese princes who were escaping from the fighting in Lebanon. We sat down and a girl came up to our table.
Apparently the way the place worked was that the girls would flirt and dance with you and ask you to buy them ridiculously expensive cocktails. They would not drink them at all, but if you kept buying them they'd flirt with you more. I don't even think they went home with any of the guys. The proceeds went to the bar and the girls got a slice.
Since I totally missed the point of all that, I didn't buy the girl at our table any drinks and neither did my buddies. She became progressively less friendly and went to serve other tables.
But the most RIDICULOUS spectacle was the weird ass custom of toasting the girls. The crazy Lebanese princes would apparently toast to the girls by paying one of the guys from the bar to pour an entire bottle of Black Label, about $70 worth, into a fire…literally, I watched them pour $70 into a flame to toast some girls who worked at a bar. I mean, it might be fun to burn money if I was stupid rich, but why would I pay SOMEONE ELSE to burn my money? At least pour the Black Label in yourself…wacko.
To top that off, they did another toast where they put 10 bottles of Champagne on the ground in a circle, stuck sparklers in the top of them, and lit the sparkers. Then they danced in the middle of the circle. Then they poured out the Champagne. That one cost around $200 bucks. My new buddies took great amusement in the perplexed look on my face.
At the end of the night the driver drove me and the Oil engineer back to the hotel. I headed upstairs and crashed. The logic of the Jordanian nightlife still escapes me to this day…
But it was a great way to end one hell of a trip.
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