Christmas felt a bit empty without Ian and christmas music and traditional christmas breakfast and everything. But it was still christmas and there were still good presents. For dinner William made camel stew because there were no geese, turkeys or hams to be found. And as he put it, what else would the wise man do with their extra camel after delivering all the presents it was carrying to baby Jesus? It was delicious. The taste of camel is somewhere between lamb and beef, in case you were wondering.
The problem with not writing about things right away is that I am now a bit hazy on what I did each day, but no matter. Other highlights - lots of walking in the souks and eating fuul. In Egypt fuul resembles refried beans and can be eaten in a sandwich. In syria it is more like a soup that is eaten with bread. It has fava beans, some of which are whole and some of which are mashed, tahini, spices and olive oil, and will keep you full for hours. And the whole bowl and bread is only 50 cents. The guy in the souk also sells the best humus in the world.
I bought presents and then mom and william were sending me back with things, and so I decided that it would be good to get a small daypack that I could also use later on for weekend trips. I thought it would be easy to find, but similar to Istanbul, you have to find the right souk. So after getting advice from Mattey, or however you might spell his name, William and I set off. We walked through clothing and through leather bags, and through the back streets all along the length of the souk unsucessfully. After that we went to Samer a bit discouraged, and he suggested that we go to the toy souk. Going through the toy souk ment that we also had to go through the housewares souk. And sure enough, in the toy souk we found backpacks. I was very tempted to get a teenage mutant ninja turtles bag, but didn't. The guy spoke some Turkish, so we ended up doing the transaction in Turkish. I also got some olive oil soap - Aleppo is famous for it, as well as scarves and a table cloth, as they are also famous for their textiles. The scarves in Muhammed Salah's shop were amazing, and all stacked very neatly until I tried to start looking at them and managed to dump them all over the ground. They told me mom did the same thing when she was looking at scarves.
We had two other amazing dinners, both of them with Samer. The first was home food, with mezze and then one stew with Ayva, or quince, and meat and the other with sumac and meat. Facinating. We also went to another really really nice resturant that is in a restored courtyard house with a fountain in the courtyard. They had covered the couryard for winter. We had muhamara, a spicy paste thing, kibbi, eggplant something, and then I had kofte (meatballs) in cherry sauce - mmmm. In typical turkish fasion we had a waiter take a photo of us all at the table.
I went with William one day to visit Muhammed video (not his real last name). He just happens to sell pirated DVDs. I guess William bought a lot of DVDs there, but then they learned that you cannot ship DVDs or CDs out of Syria because the government is afraid that you are smuggling out military secrets, and because they don't want to check every CD or DVD, the just put a ban on them. The ones that remained I carried out in my suitcase.
All of us went to visit Hala and her mother the last day to take her the printer, coffee pot and christmas tree. Mom had never met her mother before and so we were invited up for tea, and then Hala's mother gave us some cold meat thing she had made and then sat there and insisted we eat, bordering on force feeding. She even did it to mom. Mom tried her arabic and Hala helped as needed. William and I sat there and watched.
We also visited the brother of the Ahmet, the man that owns and lives in the house where mom and William were also living. They are living in a run down house, as they renovate the large courtyard house next door. The husband was out, so mom and I were taken up to the family's room. William was taken into the house that was being renovated. We met the wife's parents and her children who were gathered around a heater. Mom gave them the things she had for the family. Then we too went into the rennovated house to look around. The wife was married when she was 15, and did not know how to read or write, so her husband, 15 years older, taught her. She too gave us some dessert and then insisted that we eat it.
It was really interesting to get a glimse of the position of women in Syria. I would be past my prime in terms of getting married at the age of 23. Many women marry around the age of 15. In the area where mom and William lived, the most conservative part of the most conservative city in Syria, there are few women out on the streets or doing shopping, and when they go out it is sometimes in groups but most often with their husbands. They wear all black, most of them covering even their eyes. Men work in the stores, men do the shopping. In other muslim neighborhoods women wear western clothes and cover just their heads with bright scarves. In christian neighbhorhoods women have their heads uncovered. In other areas there are more women on the streets, but still less than in Turkey. Mom said that living in Syria helped her understand how women can be a part of their own oppression. She felt uncomfortable going out on the streets full of men, and so William did most of the shopping and such. As an extremely independent woman, even she gave up some of that independence without being explicitly asked to.
But not wanting to end on that note, I think that everyone I met in Syria was really nice. They are very welcoming and hospitable and curious about other places. The food is amazing, the old restored houses are beautiful. The government, for all the faults it may have, is subsidizing a huge number of iraqi refugees with its subsidized transportation, food, educating etc that no other country will take. And after being shut off from the world for so many years they are fairly self sufficient in industry. Especially in America Syria does not get enough credit for what it is doing to stabalize the region and most of all for the wonderful people that live there.
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