Category: Travel for Fun

NZ/Oz

Well, before everyone starts anticipating too much, I’d better post _something_.

I recently read that Chuck Thompson, surly author of an expose of the hollow soul of the travel writing industry, characterized New Zealand as “a junior-varsity version of the Pacific Northwest.”

I’m never one to encourage Americans to stay home and keep their worldview narrow, but, uh, New Zealand doesn’t seem to have anything that Oregon doesn’t. Hobbits, maybe? Oh, wait, no: glowworm caves. We totally failed to see this natural phenomenon, and also penguins. In fact, we didn’t really manage to see much of anything nature-y in New Zealand, nor we did appreciate its cities much because everyone was on holiday. Auckland especially felt like the H-bomb had hit.

Australia was a lot livelier, sunnier and full of people we knew. We did a whirlwind tour of three cities, interrupted by a 16-hour train ride that prompted our Ozzie friends to say, “Good on ya for taking the train!” and then just look completely puzzled.

Perhaps it’s easier to analyze the trip in terms of…quelle surprise…food. Here, a tidy list:

What NOT to Eat and Drink in Australia and New Zealand (not to start with the negative–it’s just easier to get the short list out of the way first):

1) A lamb sandwich from Subway.
Well, duh, you’re saying–why eat at Subway at all? But it was 8am, and we were about to get on a 12-hour train ride. Subway was the only thing open, and Peter said the photo was very appealing. And what could be more local than lamb in New Zealand? Well, the meat was fine (thin-sliced, rare, like roast beef), but too bad about the hideously sweet mint sauce.

2) A meat pie in a plastic crinkly bag.
Purchased in the same desperate move as the Subway sub. Glutinous and terrifying. Not a fair introduction to the genre of meat pie at all.

3) Abalone fritter
I could go either way on this one. It didn’t taste actually bad. But it was black, which was disturbing. I guess I never knew abalone meat was black. I wanted to order something aside from the usual fish and chips, and use a Maori word (paua?) while I was at it. Halfway through the fritter, I got distracted by the silver-haired 60-year-old woman in black rocker skinny-leg jeans who walked into the fish shop, in bare feet. No one in NZ seems to wear shoes. Britney Spears: there’s a place for you.

4) Dog food
Again, obvious–but weirdly tempting. I didn’t actually eat the stuff, but I was staggered at the selection of fresh dog food in the grocery store: big plastic tubs of fresh meat chunks, and long rolls, like the kind breakfast sausage comes in but much bigger, of really hefty meaty stuff. Kiwi dogs must be the best-fed in the world. That was some of the most appealing-looking food in the whole supermarket, for any species.

5) Hot food on Australia’s long-distance trains
Wow. We haven’t eaten such substandard food since the bad old days of airplane cuisine–and this stuff (butter chicken, beef lasagne) didn’t even come on nifty sectional trays. Oh, and thanks to the grossly weak US dollar, it was expensive to boot. Probably while I was busy chewing the tasteless stuff, I missed seeing a kangaroo. Thanks for nothing, Country Link.

6) Lumps
Another thing I could honestly go either way on. These pineapple-flavored marshmallow, chocolate-enrobed Australian candy bars are just plain weird. At first bite, it feels like you’re starting in on a long and loving relationship with a piece of chewing gum. Next thing you know, the stuff is slithering down your throat. There’s the barest soupcon of pineapple in there somewhere.

Hmm. I told you it was a short list. The positive stuff will come tomorrow…

Syria: the New York Times Travel Section

See, I’m not crazy: even the New York Times says Syria is a nice place to visit, in this June article. I like that the lede addresses the very first query everyone has: Won’t they hate me because I’m American?

What I find a little irritating is the obsession with new nightclubs in Damascus, and how this is equated with modernizing/Westernizing/objective good. This is such a problematic assumption that I’m having a hard time articulating a cogent response, but basically, when American journalists go around praising how another country’s youth are learning to booze it up and make out while wearing skimpy clothes, it kind of confirms that country’s worst suspicions about American culture and what this “freedom” is that we’re so psyched about.

But I’m not sure what the answer is–it is illuminating for a lot of Americans to read that there are nightclubs in Damascus, because they may have not even had any idea people drink alcohol there. (Oh, they do! And like a culture that’s accustomed to drinking, and not a culture that’s like teenagers when the parents are out of town.) Guess what: Syrians are a lot more like us than unlike us.

What’s even more interesting, if not surprising, is the freakout letters the NYT got in response, which unfortunately I can’t seem to find online. Many were in the vein of “How can you support that evil regime?!”

The only thing going directly to the “evil regime” is my $100 visa fee, which is so high precisely as a diplomatic “right back at ya”. I think it cost $35 back in 1999, when Syria wasn’t part of the axis of evil. Once I get there, I’m doling out cash to extremely nice people in person, and I’m happy to do it, and talk to them face to face. If we limited our travel to officially sanctioned “good” places, we’d get a very skewed idea of what constitutes good. I don’t see anyone objecting to Americans traveling in Egypt, which has an equally self-perpetuating, randomly-arresting, torturing regime. And I will cheerfully visit Myanmar/Burma when I finally get my ass to Asia.

Peter’s blunter analysis is here (scroll past the pics).

Also, Syria Comment has a very interesting summary of Bashar al-Assad’s recent state of the nation speech, and anecdotal responses to it. What Syria’s government says to Syrians isn’t really covered in Western media–we only get to hear official statements to the West, or little snippets like Diane Sawyer’s interview, which is a little excruciating. (More excruciating: the part where she asks him what’s on his iPod. Hard-hitting…and probably for the best it’s not on YouTube.)

End rant. Just wanted to connect my summer vacation with the larger situation.

Summer Trip: The Food

About the time I was eating the most amazing mussels in the world, on the beach in Greece, I realized I should cut a teensy bit of slack to all those lazy food writers who overuse the phrase “a revelation” to describe whatever they’re eating. (I loathe this, for the record.)

I’m not saying the hand of God reached down and chucked me under the chin while I was eating, but I did have a moment of “a-ha” that was close to revelatory.

The next thought I had was: Maybe American food writers use “a revelation” so often because Americans have such awful food. In a cosmopolitan place like NYC, you can eat duck confit, medium-rare pork chops, assorted artisanal cheeses, and fresh veggies of all kinds, but very often you’re just eating a flawless simulacrum of the real thing…and probably paying a lot for it.

I use the prefix “art” to describe this, as in “an art pork chop.” Not at all to disparage the field of art or the process or art-making, but a food item that resembles food in every way but flavor may as well be an object placed on a plinth and lit with halogen bulbs. Then people can come peer at it and call it “cunning” in their critical reviews.

Because our food production system is so fucked up, and our palates so stunted by a relative lack of food tradition and our demand for cheap over tasty, we Americans eat art food all the time–and a lot of the time we don’t even know it.

It’s not till you eat a mussel that is briny and sexy like an oyster, but also sweet like a scallop, and sitting in a gorgeous translucent green shell that you realize exactly why people like mussels so much. It’s not till you eat a green fig off the tree that you realize what all the hype is about. And of course there’s always the “real tomato” issue.

So part of the problem I have with food writers having “revelations” all over the damn place is that they’re just showing exactly how little experience they have eating good food. If you’re having a revelation in print over some duck confit, it means you haven’t eaten good duck confit before. And shouldn’t that be just the barest qualification for getting paid to write about food?

Also, of course, food writers are always getting rapturous about their meals in France. Every food magazine every month has something about France–even Saveur, which is the most worldly of mags, and I admire them for it, still does the fallback “X region in France is amazing” story every couple of months.

I know France is great and all, but again, food writers are just revealing how un-stamped their passports are if all they’ve got to talk about is the charming village market and the authoritative French woman who prepares a revelatory lunch with her strong, assured hands.

Anyway, what I ate on my trip, which was soooo much more adventurous, and for which I was a million times better informed than even the most highly paid professionals:

1) Those motherf***ing mussels. We went back and had them a second time, and they weren’t as good–maybe they’d been overcooked, maybe they were not as fresh. It was good to know at least that Greeks in Eressos weren’t sitting around smugly eating mussels behind our backs every day.

2) Quick salt-cured sardines. Also in Greece, from a nice old lady in the village of Andissa. They were plump and succulent. A little obscene, like if you really did bite off your husband’s nice plump lip and ate it.

3) Pigeon in Cairo. I’ve already mentioned it, but that was truly, truly delectable. (And not a single bite of birdshot–there’s an urban legend in the city that all the pigeon comes from the shooting club, and friend-of-a-friend broke a tooth on birdshot once.) The pigeon gets stuffed with rice or freekeh (cracked green wheat), then it gets simmered for a while to cook the stuffing, and then it gets plopped down in a searing hot pan, to crisp up the skin. The broth from the simmering is served on the side in a mug, and it’s incredibly peppery and delicious. I would drink just the broth, but the resto has a policy that you also must order pigeon–but once you do, it’s all-you-can-drink broth.

4) Malta plums in Turkey. Not that these were the world’s most delicious fruit–just that I’d never had them before, and they were sweet and fascinating. They’re the color of apricots and have big, slippery seeds in the center, and they’re outrageously sticky. In the same day, I also got to sample some fresh chickpeas. Cool-looking, but enh.

5) Olive-oil-stewed sea beans, served cold, at Ciya in Istanbul. Every time, this restaurant has something delightful. They were still a little crispy-bouncy in texture, and the sort of salty you know comes from the inside rather than being added in the kitchen. (Incidentally, this is why Mediterranean fish are so delicious, claimed the fish grill man at our resto in Eressos.)

6) Ayran in Syria and Turkey. I’ve had it a lot before, but it’s always remarkable just how thirst-quenching salty, watered-down yogurt can be.

7) The world’s sweetest yogurt in Ayvalik, Turkey. We were eating a basic little lunch while waiting for the ferry, and I saw the guys at the next table had big plates of homemade yogurt. We got some for ourselves, and it was dairy-product heaven–light, not heavy like Greek strained stuff, and sweet-sour, and with a nice crusty layer of cream on top. Costa in Greece insisted it was because the Turks put sugar in everything–or at least used grape must to start the souring process. Which is interesting on its own. (On a separate dairy-product topic, I saw rennet for sale in a grocery store in Ayvalik–made by the major milk producer, and in a little bottle, right there next to the premade cheese. Great that there’s an assumption your average shopper would make cheese at home.)

8) Everything in Syria.

9) Apricots right off the tree in Greece, and even a few cherries. The local cherries (some we actually paid for, from the fruit stand) were exactly the sort of thing that make people say “a revelation.” They just kept tasting and tasting and tasting and tasting.

10) Best. Beans. Ever. in Istanbul. Fittingly, the name of the restaurant was ‘bean.’ At first, we ordered only one serving, and the waiter looked nervous. After I’d had a couple spoonfuls of Peter’s, and ordered my own, he looked relieved. Order and balance were restored. These beans were perfectly tender, just so they gave a bit when you bit into them, but held their shape. And they were swimming in this tomato-ish sauce that can only be described as pure umami. I have no idea what the magic ingredient was, but it did make me realize I hadn’t eaten pork in many, many weeks. Because that kind of tastiness I associate with pork bits, and here, they’d managed to get it by other means.

11) Assorted other things: kalkan (turbot) in Istanbul, baklava in Istanbul, borek in Istanbul, ice cream in Istanbul. Oh, and did I mention the man selling sardines, who had a beautiful silvery pile, but also a bucket of live ones, and periodically he’d grab a live one and throw it down on top of the silvery mound, where it would jump and thrash, as if to say, “These fish are soooo fresh…” Maybe a little sadistic, but a genius sales technique (right up there with the bra vendors I saw on the street in Cairo, tossing the biggest bras up in the air like pizza dough).

**For the record, Peter and I decided we’re against Turkey getting into the EU. Sure, some people might be a little less poor, or something. But it will inevitably make food worse, as produce-starved northerners demand Turkey’s farms yield bigger and more stuff. Currently, tomatoes are sweeter and cucumbers are crispier than anywhere but Syria, and I don’t want that to get fucked up by greenhouses. (Egypt, incidentally, has started using greenhouses–retarded, considering the one thing Egypt doesn’t lack is sun and dry weather. The tomatoes now suck.) Also, Turkey is already perfectly functional in other respects: you can drink the water, and you can even buy train tickets online. They don’t need the damn EU.

That is all. Must go eat breakfast/lunch. Probably no revelations to be had, alas.

I Got Crabs–Twice!

(For pics, see my Flickr page.)

Turns out Peter and I didn’t have to travel halfway around the world to slurp up the milk of human kindness–we just had to take the three-hour train trip to Baltimore.

Travelin’ fools that we are, we popped down there Saturday to attend a wedding. Food and transport geeks that we are, Peter charted a path that involved light rail and crab cakes before the wedding.

The light rail train was pulling away as we reached the tracks, which meant we had to abandon that plan and take a taxi, where our chatty driver said he wasn’t so into Faidley’s, but he always swore by G&M on Nursery Road. His only complaint was that it was a long drive, and by the time he ended up delivering all the crab cakes that his friends had ordered, “My own crab cake done got cold!” he declared, hitting his steering wheel for emphasis of the cruel paradox. I discreetly wrote down the name of the place while he was talking.

In we marched to Faidley’s, on the back side of Lexington Market. These crab cakes are so fucking tremendously life-changing that we’ve even ordered them for delivery to NYC–at horrific expense, as you might imagine. But eating at Faidley’s is really part of the experience. There’s the crab-cake part, but there’s also a whole seafood market part, and a huge raw bar. I don’t know why, but I love to see “normal” people eating stuff like oysters, lobster and crabs. Once upon a time, these weren’t luxury food–they were just the things people scooped out of the ocean they happened to be living by. So it seems only right to enjoy them standing up, with a can of Natty Boh and a squeeze-bottle of hot sauce.

But first: the crab cakes. To do a side-by-side comparison, we ordered a pure lump one and a backfin one–the backfin is smaller bits of more shredded meat, and five bucks cheaper. I think I liked it a little better, as you could get a whole bite of mixed texture, whereas the lump was so big and lumpy that you wound up with only one lump of crab on your fork.

But the taste–if you haven’t eaten these things, true Maryland crab cakes in the state of Maryland, well, do it now. They are sweet and buttery and purely crabby. Nowhere outside Maryland seems to get this, and chefs are always ruining perfectly good crab by putting their own “signature touch” on crab cakes. Bullshit–Maryland already did its “signature touch” and anyone else should get their grubby little hands off. Crab cakes should get DOC status.

Anyway: We also ordered, because we could, a soft-shell crab sandwich. I also love anything called a “sandwich” which is really just said item balanced on a couple of pieces of white bread. There was a little lettuce here as well, but that’s beside the point. And the point was a whole crab, battered and fried–looking perfectly lifelike except for the tasty little crust he was encased in.

The guys next to us at the long stand-up bar tables had ordered sandwiches as well. One guy picked his up to eye level, peered at it with a triumphant glare, and said, “I’m gonna eat you!” The fried crab’s pinchers poked out of each side of the white bread, helpless in their batter. Soon, he made good on his promise.

Then we proceeded a few steps to the raw bar and ordered up just half a dozen clams and oysters. The clams set me off on a terrible memory hunt–I swear I ate the most amazingly sweet and delicious clams sometime in the last six months, making me realize what all the fuss was about. I can’t remember where, or in what form. These clams were not the most sensational, nor were the oysters, but they were ridiculously fat. And they tasted great with beer. (The raw bar was out of soda, so we had to drink beer–really.)

We wandered out the far side of Lexington Market, past slabs of steaks, piles of snickerdoodles, rows of cakes, and even a nice stack of pig ears.

Then we hopped our light rail out to BWI airport–the wedding was at the neaby Ramada. The tremors of the light rail are good for digestion, I think.

The next morning, we woke up a little hungover, and hungry. The Ramada’s breakfast service looked unappealing, and in the course of the previous night’s revelry–in between Peter’s cop friends dancing to Meatloaf and Abba in equal measure–we got confirmation that G&M was the shit, and it was only “one exit away” from our hotel. (Ah, the charms of rural navigation…)

In the cab on the way to G&M, we of course talked about crab cakes. Our driver–like everyone else we’d asked–absolutely loved G&M, and got a little misty-eyed about it. “Oh, Sunday’s the best day for eating crab! Well, actually, crab cakes are good any day, of course–but on Sunday you really have time to enjoy them.” And here’s where the kindness really started to flow: Turned out we were in the cab of a woman whose mother had been a champion cook (her funeral lasted three hours, due to people standing up and praising her coleslaw), and she wasn’t so bad herself. She figured that yes, we could make crab cakes ourselves. So on the way to G&M, Amelia told us her technique. Not much goes into a quality crab cake, but just about the time she hit parsley flakes (“they’re only in there to make it look nice, really”) I realized I would certainly forget one essential ingredient.

We popped out at G&M, and arranged for Amelia to pick us up in half an hour to take us to the train station.

In that half-hour, we conducted serious comparison studies on the subject of Maryland Crab Cakes. We were not distracted by the fact that G&M made no indication from the outside that it even sold crab cakes.

Nor were we distracted by the baklava and Greek salads and massive list of sub sandwiches on the menu. (The owners appeared to be from the northernmost island in the Dodecanese, for the record.) After all, “crab cake” can only ever take up one line on a menu. There’s no real variant, except at Faidley’s, where they come in lump and backfin. Amelia had suggested the clam strips as well, but there was a glitch in our order, and we never got them.

G&M’s crab cakes were a different breed. Where Faidley’s stood up straight and tall, G&M’s slumped messily over the white roll they were served on. Faidley’s has a shameless butteriness, and maybe even a touch of sugar; and you can taste the mustard they put in the mix. G&M’s tasted like crab and nothing else. They were bound together with an almost souffle-like egg mixture, dotted with little flecks of Old Bay seasoning. I don’t know if they were better than Faidley’s, but they were fucking tasty.

We also were able to do right by Tamara, who’d been consumed by bitterness the day before when we SMS’d a pic of our Faidley’s spread. Faidley’s is closed on Sundays, but G&M was wide open, and happen to pack a to-go box with half a dozen of the guys–half a dozen because it didn’t seem worth packing just one or two in styrofoam with cold packs. (“There’s mayonnaise in them,” the counter girl told me sternly when I implied I might carry them home unrefrigerated.)

On the way out, a woman in the parking lot spied our box. “You can really get those to go?” she asked, wistfully. She stroked her chin, clearly doing the math. (Crab cakes are pricey–$12 for an 8 oz. delight. You do our math–and add a good $45 for cab fare.) “I live in Virginia now,” she said, “and boy, do I miss these.” Peter allowed how he was in the same boat, living in New York. “But in New York,” she pointed out, “at least you’ve got a lot of other stuff to choose from–pizza, Chinese food, hot dogs, corned-beef sandwiches…” We got a little sad imagining culinary life in Virginia, especially if you don’t like barbecue much, as this woman said. “I love seafood–that’s all I want!” she sighed as we got in the cab.

Amelia cheered us right back up. While we were eating, she’d been writing down her recipe for us. Of course no real amounts, but that goes without saying.

Here’s what goes in a quality crab cake, per a kindhearted taxi driver in Anne Arundel County: 1 lb. lump crab (“MD only”), “1 egg raw,” bread crumbs or crackers, Old Bay seasoning, mustard, mayo, baking powder, parsley flakes. Bake at 450 degrees.

But what to do if we had problems? Oh, there was Amelia’s name and phone number at the bottom, so we could call if we were confused.

Peter and I got out of the cab blinking back tears, toting our little box of G&M wonders and smiling like idiots. We took those crab cakes straight over to Tamara’s, and she forgave us for being so mean to her via cellphone the day before. See, New Yorkers can be sweet and kind too.

(For pics, see my Flickr page.)

Turkey: On Toilets

Duh: Persian cats come from Persia.

I only realized this when we were in northern Syria and the cats were starting to look quite a lot shaggier and fluffier than all the lean, mean Cairene felines, which look just like temple paintings say they should.

Double duh: Turkish toilets come from Turkey.

This only dawned on me in Antakya, just after we’d crossed the border from Syria and checked into our cheapie hotel right by the bus station. In itself, this was quite exciting–normal travel rules dictate that the hotels by bus stations be utter flophouses. This one had spotless tile floors and posters of alpine heaven adorning the walls next to a carefully dusted tchotchke case.

We dumped our stuff, and I walked to the shared bathrooms–and started laughing like an idiot. It’s not like I hadn’t seen a million squat toilets already on my trip. But here we were in Turkey–experiencing all its cultural contributions to world civilization! And I’m not being sarcastic–I kind of like squat toilets. Very efficient…as long as your knees are strong and you have a decent sense of balance. I even enjoy the challenge of using one on a moving train.

Then I walked over to the shared shower room, and laughed again. Who would’ve guessed? Turkish baths come from Turkey too! I was delighted to see the grand technology of the hammam scaled down for home use.

Granted, there was a rudimentary little shower head in the square, tile-floor room, but it was clearly a retrofit to the basic Turkish bath setup: a marble basin, a tap, a drain in the floor and a shallow wide-mouth bowl (purple plastic, in this case, but exactly the same shape as the silver ones they use in fancy hammams). Sadly, the usual burly masseuse in nylon thong underwear was not a part of this home hammam, so I was on my own.

I toyed with the shower for a second, but the water was on the unpleasant side of lukewarm. So I gave Turkish bath tech a chance–and boy was I glad I did. If you’re going to take a bath with nippy water, it’s surprisingly pleasant to soap yourself up and just dump that water over your head again and again and again and again and again….

A million douses later, I finally toweled off, slipped on my clean caftan and stepped into my flip-flops. (Our $20/night hotel room actually came stocked with two pairs of plastic bath slippers…but only in men’s sizes, and they were a little bit stinky. It’s the thought that counts.) I floated back to my room on that mellow, limbs-turned-to-jelly post-hammam buzz. Guess I didn’t need the burly attendant to scrub me down after all.

Here’s Peter enjoying his free slippers, and a cold Efes. (The bathrobe: model’s own.)

Cheap hotel in Turkey

On Head Scarves and Anti-Americanism

Just to answer the two most frequent questions I got before leaving for my trip:

1) Was I going/would I have to wear a head scarf?

No. None of the countries I’m visiting have any laws requiring it, and I tend to think tourists who adopt this look when traveling anywhere but Iran and Saudi are a little dopey for doing so. First of all, their scarf-wrapping skills are inevitably bad, and they look all lumpy. And they are probably not Muslim, so not required to. Cairo is a giant city with a global outlook, and the fashion on the street is more cool urban than frumpy babushka.

That said, wow, there are a lot more women wearing the hijab (head scarf) now, and even quite a few wearing the full black niqab, and even a couple doing that spooky thing where they put the sheer black veil entirely over their faces, so they look like ghosts. I’d say the split ten years ago was maybe 60/40 covered to uncovered, and now it’s more like 90/10.

Which doesn’t mean everyone is looking all modest and pious. Lordy, no. I haven’t seen so many tight clothes since Queens. And the care lavished on selecting the colors of scarves and the pinning and so on–straight off the pages of Hijab Fashion, and I am not making that magazine title up.

I’ve never been too bent out of shape about the hijab. It is not keeping women down–although it can be used to do so, along with a million other things. For the most part, it’s just another piece of clothing, and taking it off is not going to liberate anyone by itself. That’s not what women thought a generation ago, though–and it’s these older women, resolutely in polyester business suits and perfect coifs, that I don’t see much in Cairo anymore. The same backlash against overt feminism is happening in Egypt as is happening in the States–it’s just manifested differently. In the US, “I don’t consider myself a feminist” goes with midriff-baring tops and visible thong underwear; in Egypt, it goes with a bright-blue hijab tied to show off your earrings and a super-tight long-sleeve shirt and ankle-length skirt.

I’m sure there’s more to it, and every woman has a different reason/explanation/story (or none at all) for why they wear the hijab. It’s none of my business, really. I just appreciate the fashion parade.

(Though I do carry a scarf in my bag for wearing when I visit mosques, which is just polite.)

2) Don’t they hate Americans?

No. A lot of people really, really hate George Bush & Co., but they’re perfectly capable of distinguishing me from George Bush. No Texan accent, to start with.

There has been so much talk of anti-American sentiment in the Middle East that even I was starting to believe it might be true, even though I could not imagine someone in Egypt or Syria actually telling me they hated me because I was American. And it’s not like I believed it enough to start telling people I was Canadian or some crap.

Yes, I counted exactly two awkward silences following our admission of nationality–if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, these two guys were clearly thinking.

More often, though, we got smiles, thumbs-up, “Ahsan nass!” (The best people!), “Yankee doodle!” and even “Hotsy-totsy!” (Huh?) One Syrian security guard said, “George Bush!” with a thumbs-up (we told him he was nuts), and another guard said, “George Bush bad!” while smiling apologetically. People in the Middle East are smarter than the American press gives them credit for.

And they are still kinder than most Americans would ever be to visiting Middle Easterners. I feel especially ashamed about this last point, and I will be practicing my crazy hospitality skills on anyone who comes within range–brace yourselves.

Syria: On Human Kindness

When Peter and I went to Syria in 1999, we were bowled over by just how incredibly nice and kind people were. Unlike Egyptians, however, these people did not have a clutching, crazed fascination with us as foreigners, and so were also exceedingly polite. It was odd to be in a place that was more closed off from global culture and yet also more blase and cosmopolitan than Egyptians could ever be.

More concretely, it was disorienting for me to sit in a park, alone, for half an hour and have absolutely no one bother me. Well, finally a young kid approached me, and he very nervously, blinkingly asked, “D-d-do you have the t-t-time?” After that, he asked me if I was Russian (aka a prostitute), and scampered away in shame when I said no.

Fast-forward to Syria 2007: Mobile phones, Internet and satellite porn have arrived, but not much else has changed. People are still exceedingly nice. Legitimate businesspeople still offer you the very thing they’re selling for free, which makes no sense at all. People say “Welcome” and don’t use it as a preamble to papyrus vending. Basically, Peter and I walked around for a week on the verge of tears of joy–every time someone did something nice, we would grab each other and blink the moistness from our eyes. I thought often of my mother’s made-up Spanish phrase, “Mi corazon es gordo”; my heart did indeed feel fat with love for all human endeavor, whether that came in the form of directions given clearly or an especially tasty sandwich.

Before we knew it, we were tearing up over, say, the bike-shop owner sharing his lunch with us, the tamarind-juice seller asking us whether people drank tamarind in America then offering us our drinks for free, Koko the adorable tailor making Peter a perfect shirt, everyone who offered us water and Kleenex to wash our hands, the bike-shop owner giving us a box and packing tape, the guys at the post office telling us how to navigate the system instead of being the usual sullen bureaucrats, the guys at the restaurant giving us cheese and salad when they saw me eyeing their plate, the bike-shop owner telling us he would give us a bicycle when we had a baby…

I could go on. And we really liked the bike-shop owner. He should get a medal. He’s certainly the only person who’s ever made me think twice about not procreating.

I realize there are some slightly problematic issues with us fetishizing Syrians this way. Egyptians did many of the same nice things (some were even helpful at the post office!), as did Turks once we crossed the border, but I’m not bursting into tears over them–is it just because they’re not locked away in a pariah state? And it’s hard to ignore Syria’s questionable political situation, along with the kerjillion posters of Bashar al-Asad, the most un-dictator-looking dictator ever. (In fact, because he’s so dorky, I simply can’t believe he means anything but good. I’m rooting for him, but I’m afraid I’ll regret that I typed this one day.)

See, one free lunch and I’m an apologist for a dictatorship. Did I mention how you can drink the water and there’s no crime? Excuse me–I feel a little crying jag coming on.