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05/20/2004: "Hospitality"

I feel like I need to apologize to the Syrian Nation for being so impenetrable of motive. The hospitality here is much spoken of, it appears on the coinage and in the visages of George H. W. and George W. Assad whose posters are most places; but it's all kind of wasted on me because I don't like people all that well and like that. There isn't a lot of English spoken here, which makes it kind of hard to explain why we are leaving suddenly to a Bedouin who comes up in the middle of the night when we're trying to look at Jupiter in Frank's Questar, and invites us with gestures and a few words to come into his courtyard, which is not only more brightly lit than the open highway with its late night trucks headed out to Baghdad with ersatz Sumerian antiquities to sell to the American tourists there, but has the added advantage of having a guy there with a welding torch performing some midnight repair & incidentally stick it to whatever dark adaptation you have left after the headlights and trying to see the Green Flash from the citadel here in Palmyra (too hazy). And we've left behind the usual trail of jilted carpet sellers and post card hawkers at the citadel who wanted 250 Syrian pounds for 21 cards, which same packet was for sale at the ticket desk for 50.

We get waved at a lot. Flash mobs of little kids can appear out of nowhere to practice their pronunciation of "Hello" and "welcome". Someone decides that these are important phrases of English to know. Another English phrase that seems to get taught to everybody is "be careful". The sidewalks are uneven. Some of them have been in use for 6000 years. We went to Ebla yesterday --- you'll remember this as the source of much of what is known about immediately pre-Hittite Syrian writing on account of the vast numbers of tablets found there. At the site there is pretty much of nothing, it's a working archaeological dig managed by the Italians and you aren't permitted to go much of anywhere so you stand on top of this little hillock that used to be a citadel with an intellectual appreciation of the Importance of the Site and look at the waving wheat fields on the hills in the distance and then you realize that there actually are no hills around there, that the wheat is growing up the sides of ruined walls 22 meters high and at least that thick and that within and without those walls several hundred thousand people lived and worked and invited tourists in for tea --- a real Ozymandias Moment.

Today we drove to Crac des Chevaliers, a fortification of one of the previous Crusades to the one currently going on. The mountains look pretty much like the Coast Range in California. The Presidio won't last nearly as long. Our guide didn't speak English much but he took us to the important places. Arabic speakers don't take vowels seriously. I have a theory about languages that people in the desert concentrate on the consonants whereas people in Hawaii and the like deal mostly in vowels. Anyway, the guide would say the consonants in the word in the right order but would put in whatever vowels he felt like, like "Kutchan" for "kitchen". It's not regular like Inspector Clouseau either, it seemed to be whatever he felt like at that point in the sentence.

Now we're in Palmyra -- we went up to its fortification and looked at the main ruins area and the town in the sunset light. Tomorrow we'll explore it in more detail. Once again, improbably, there's an internet cafe right across from the hotel.