Wrath or blessing?

It seems like this town has been punished by the Almighty and Allmerciful. Day after day it is stricken by thunderstorms like I haven't seen any in many years.
It usually happens early afternoon. The sky darkens to a dirty blueish-gray, the branches of the tree in the garden start fluttering in the blowing wind, which picks up speed and makes the curtains perform a fast and frightening dance in front of the open windows, which are opening and closing, loudly dashing against the frames. The air appears to become heavier by the minute, pressing down on your shoulders. Grim, black clouds are looming over the city, announcing the imminent catastrophe. People start running in the street, to get home before the sky falls on their heads. You can already smell the rain, as the light slowly fades, dimming down the colours. And then - it suddenly returns - in thousandfold brightness, connecting earth and sky for a split second like Zeus' angry, glistening sword. A roaring thunder explodes above and seems to break the sky into pieces, releasing an unequalled downpour of rain, which within minutes turns every dry patch of land into a murky puddle.
It all ends as quickly as it began. The rain that was coming down in sheets suddenly stops, as if someone just turned the celestial taps off, but the streets and courtyards remain flooded and the trousers soaked for a few hours, until the waters have drained off. That in itself is not such an easy process, as the town has no drainage system, so the draining only takes place on the surface, turning all the roads that are even slightly sloped into rapid streams, creating a network of rivers, almost as if the town had been lifted up and dropped into the Mediterranean, next to Venice.
Only last night, it kept on raining - not quite like the almost tropical rainfalls in the afternoon (more like British rain), but the whole night through. This morning, many cars were stood at the side of streets, abandoned during the night, because their engines had filled with water, as they toiled, making their way through the water masses.
But what made me shudder, hide inside and curse the day, made the Yemenis say: "al-Hamdu lillah" - thanks be to God. Water is a very scarce resource in the Yemen and these heavy summer rains are maybe the last for another 2 or 3 months. The legend goes that the Yemen was in fact the first place of human civilisation on the Arab peninsula, because its inhabitants were skilled in the art of dam building and thus turned a harsh and hardly inhabitable land into something considered a paradise and mentioned as such in the Holy Qur'an. But their arrogance grew as their wealth did and they soon thought themselves greater than their creator. Thus one day the great dam in Ma'rib broke, causing a massive flood and destroying what was once a thriving civilisation. The population dwindled, people moved out of their former paradise and began settling in other parts of the Arabian peninsula, thus laying the groundworks for such great civilisations as followed in Mesopotamia and the fertile Crescent.

There is so much I still want to say in this blog, so many experiences I haven't managed to put into words, stories I haven't told etc, but I have but a few days left and will be travelling. In shah allah, I will find some time inbetween.

مع سلامة -- blackout

The late-night baker, the TV repair man and the shoe vendor

I cannot get enough of the sooq at night. It's magical. The best thing is when the electricity goes and all the lights go off. Then for a few seconds it's dark, there's a few shouts and claps, and slowly lights go on again, warmer lights, candles, torches and gas lamps and make everything even more magical.

Wadi Da' Trip

Wadi Da' is an idyllic valley north-west of Sana'a, where the Imam (who used to rule the country as the religious and political leader until he was ousted a couple of decades ago) had a big house on top of a rock, where he lived in the summers. The village above, underneath his house is a typical example of a Yemeni village, built entirely out of mud-bricks or rough-cut stones, and painted white especially around the windows, giving it the typical Yemeni touch. Sorry if this sounds like an excerpt of a guide book... (-;

This and the next picture show the house of the Imam, called "Daar al-Hejar", which means as much as 'house of the stone'. It's quite spectacular and attracts big crowds of tourists, luckily mostly Yemeni, though. I also saw a small Japanese group there and one of them was such a styler, could have walked straight off the set of "Lost in Translation" - in the Japanese rebel-schoolboy look: white shirt - buttened up, black tie, mushroom-hair, tight black jeans around his tiny waist and then big black paratrooper-boots, pushing the end of the jeans up over his shins, a cool leather laptop-bag over his skinny shoulders. With all that and his minimal black sunglasses he looked so completely removed from that place, so without any relation to it at all. And then there was me, trying so hard to fit in: turban, skirt-type thing and belt & dagger around my waist. It's funny actually, while I'm trying to look Yemeni, most of the young people I meet here (especially the wealthier ones in Sana'a, not so much in the country) are trying similarly hard to look European/Western - with tight, overly-coloured and -patterned jeans, funky shirts and gel-soaked and -styled hair. Anyway.

Traditionally, weddings in Sana'a happen on Thursday nights (the first day of the weekend here) and on Friday mornings the bridegroom and his male companions make a trip to Wadi Da' and perform the Janbia-dance under the "Daar al-Hejar". It is one of the few times in the life of a Yemeni man, that the dagger is actually drawn, other than to show it to friends. The dancing itself isn't really as spectacular as I'd hoped for -- quite slow, but it looks terribly funny to see a bunch of men waving big daggers around and running after each other in a circle, especially when viewed from above. The fact that every other Yemeni man (in villages probably more like 80%) is armed with at least a dagger, does have some consequences. I wouldn't say that it makes the place insecure for foreigners, quite the contrary, actually, but if a personal conflict or family feud between Yemenis DOES ever escalate, the obvious thing after the first few punches have been exchanged - is to draw the Janbia. So it is one of the more common causes of an unnatural death here. The presence of fireweapons is a bit of a different issue. A recent law in Sana'a forbids people to carry guns in public except if they have a specific permission to do so, i.e. if they're either in the army, or work as guards for the many embassies, sheikh's homes and random rich people's residences. Still one sees them around and only yesterday a man got into one of the little Suzuki-buses with a classic AK-47 in his hand. His dress didn't distinguish him noticably from the other passengers and everybody seemed at ease with the presence of that weapon in the car. I'm not really alarmed anymore either, it has almost become normal.

In the country things are different. One still finds older farmers, who carry a bunduqiya (long rifle-like weapon, of ancient origin) with them, when they go into the fields. Last weekend I went on a trip to the area of Manakha with a group of ex-Pats and other Arabic students and found myself walking through the mountains, that are carefully terrassed to make best use of the scarce water, with an AK-47 dangling over my shoulder. Earlier in the day, when we drove into the village around which we went hiking later, there was a group of men crowded around a bridegroom on the side of the street. He was parading with a long sword in a golden and beautifully decorated sheath and at the edge of the crowd stood a young boy, maybe 13 years old, with his arms resting on a black Kalashnikov, strapped over his shoulder.
The driver of the Malaysian vice-ambassador who was part of the group, had an Israeli-made hand-gun in a holster attached to his beautifully embroidered waist-belt, which also held his Janbia. "Why are you carrying a gun?" I asked him. I had asked this question a number of people before and the answer is always more or less the same: "For protection, just in case there's trouble." This doesn't mean that it will act as a means of self-defense in the obvious sense, but rather as a kind of weight to be presented against that of possible aggressors or road-cutters, as they're called in the Arabic langauge. They are rare, but apparently do exist, especially in very tribal areas and in the Bedouin part in the North-East of the Yemen, but will show no aggression if they see that you have a gun in your possession.

So it's quite a rough and traditional society in that sense, and it is partly what gives it the impression that it hasn't changed a great deal over recent centuries. It feels like the Arabia that was marvelled about by British expeditioners some two centuries ago, where you found incredible hospitality and a devout and friendly society, but have to be prepared for the harshness of desert life and the general unexpected at any moment. When we think of "an Arab" these days, I think we are more likely to imagine a tall, rich Saudi in a long, wide and white dress, than a bearded Yemeni in a cream coloured thaub with a belt around his waist, a dagger in front of his belly and a gun over his shoulder, are we? But to me the latter is much more appealing and feels more like a real, original Arab.
Every Yemeni, so I've been told, has at least one Kalashnikov in his home. That might seem weird to us and might make the Yemen sound like a dangerous place to go to, but then nobody has ever had any concerns about travelling to Texas, have they? (-;

In shah allah

I met an unfriendly man today -- a real rarity in these parts. I almost wanted to take a picture of his grim face, as he was stuffing it with qat leaves. It was the first face I've seen since I got here, that didn't welcome me, that didn't open up, didn't smile or say "Ahlan wa sahlan", that wasn't curious to look at me or to ask me where I'm from. He pretended I wasn't there and talked to his little boy, who he forced to sit on the floor, although there was plenty of space to sit in the bus.
Meeting him made me realise all of a sudden and with such intensity, how friendly everyone is to me and to each other here.
Shortly before I got on the bus that Mr. GrimFace was in, I think I met God, or one of his angels. The small Suzuki mini-buses that make up about 80% of the public transport system in Sana'a, have two benches in the back, facing each other and a constantly open sliding door - it was on one of these buses, that he sat opposite me. As I was getting in, with my head bowed, muffling the obligatory "Salaamu aleikum", I could already feel his smile. I sat down on the dirty and ripped terrycloth-covered bench and immediately looked up. He must be blessed with eternal peace, so joyful and light was his smile. All around his kindly wrinkled, smiling face was hair, dyed orange (a custom among some elderly men here, mainly with the beard), which made him appear even more like a sun, radiating light and joy. His face was round and his eyes shone bright in the dim light. A short and only half-understood conversation with him and the other men in the bus followed, before I had to get out, but I won't forget meeting him in a hurry.
Whether he was an angel or not is probably irrelevant, he was for me in that moment and somehow reminded me of the image we have in Europe, of the perfect, smiling, enlightened Guru. He was just missing all the beads in his hair and beard.

I've had many conversations about Islam with various people since I got here and am glad to finally get a deeper insight into every-day Islamic life. The significance of religion and its prominence in every-day life is so much higher and stronger here than from what I'm used to. Even now, as I sit in the internet cafe, I can hear Hassan, the owner and his brother having lunch upstairs and Allah's name is ever-present, in every conversation, greeting and good-bye.
Yesterday for the first time in my life, I went to pray in a Mosque [for those of you with prejudices against Islam or who fear that I might turn Muslim, you can relax. I'm merely trying to explore the culture and way of life of the (Yemeni) people as good as I can, and if someone prays at least five times a day, then I consider that an important part of their life and culture and to understand those two, I feel I have to experience that, too]. It pains me to realise the growing division between what is commonly called the 'Islamic' and the 'Western' world and the increasing presence of prejudices and misunderstanding on both sides, caused by lack of inter-individual aswell as inter-cultural communication and a big deficit in knowledge of and education about the respective 'other side'.
I have developed a theory that the root of this problem lies in primary education, or education in general. We need to establish mixed schools on both sides, where, Palstinians share a bench with Israelis, Turks with Germans, English Muslims with English others, Yemeni Jews with Yemeni Muslims etc. Such communication on a inter-personal level will have the strongest impact and if we want these issues to change at any point in the future, then it is now that we need to be brave enough to face the prejudices, the fears and reservations, to send our kids to a school with what might be regarded the enemy and to say hi to our neighbour who wears strange clothes and prays five times a day and invite him over for a cup of tea. Britain especially is facing a huge problem now with a big part of the population suddenly being alienated because of the deeds of a few lost souls that were of the same religion and ethnicity as them and the rest of the population being scared of that other part and what THEY might do next.
In-shah-allah, these things will change.

Sana'a al-Qadima

The magic of the old part of Sana'a, which, according to the legend, was founded by Noah's son Sam, cannot be described in words. Maybe these images convey a glimpse of it.

Rain and more rain

Did anyone ever think that it rains in Yemen, especially in August? Well, it does. There have been very short and heavy showers in the last few days - it is officially rain season, after all - but nobody and nothing seems to have been prepared for what happened today. The rain started at about 4:30 in the afternoon - first very gently, almost pretending to be harmless, but then, within minutes, it quadrupled in strength and quickly turned the whole town into an intricate network of streams, brooks and rivers (formerly roads, lanes and streets) flowing at great speed to lower grounds. It was quite spectacular to see the persistance with which the traffic was defying water, which came in two forms: as a hellish downpour from above and as a river with ever-increasing water levels from below. I was tempted to join the kids that were jumping around in the puddles, which quickly covered the ground and connected together to create lakes of brown soup with plastic-bottle-and-rubbish dumplings.
Most memorable was the bit of road that leads from the city centre to the suburb of Haddah, where I'm living: it used to be the runway of Sana'a airport until the 70s, and is therefore incredibly broad (probably more than 15 lanes on either side, but not marked as such), flat and in unusually good condition. But for some reason it has tribunes on the side, so it must have acted as a race-track, too, at some point. So it was just getting dark when the rain started and the flat asphalt area of the former runway was rapidly covered with several centimeters of water. Many cars, slowly working their way through the water masses, put their hazard-lights, giving the scene an eerie and emergency-type lighting. Several small groups of people had collected under the roof of the tribunes, making them look like those at a badly attended training game of a mediocre small-town football team. A jeep showed off his superior position in such conditions as he whizzed past the slower and lesser equipped traffic participants, splashing water several meters high and wide to both sides. He was considerate and kind enough to use one of the outer 7 lanes.

The mini-buses , which are the cheapest and easiest way to travel (that is, if you know where they're going to and where they're leaving from) were still driving with their slide doors open, as always, but showed a considerable decrease in customers.

Nobody seemed to be terribly suprised by the whole thing, except Arnaut and I. We took our sandals off and ran around like crazy, checkin out, where the water was deepest, evading the gigantic splashes of the faster cars, wading through rapid streams to cross the roads, taking lots of pictures of cars and people and shouting out aloud.

The children loved driving their bikes at full speed from dry side-roads into the flooded main roads and putting their feet up just before they hit the water. The braver ones continued to treadle, not to loose speed so quickly and made a sport out of not-loosing-your-sandals-as-you-treadle-through-the-water.

Just to give you a quick impression of what Yemenis look like. That is, Yemeni men, of course. I can't really say that I've seen a Yemeni woman yet. Although the there are no strict laws on the covering-up of women, the only ones who are not covered completely (i.e. where the face can be seen and only the rest of the body is hidden under a black cloth), are the ones of African origin. Yemen being at the bottom of the Arabian peninsula and on the Red Sea, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea aren't far away at all and one can definitely spot a considerable part of the population with African origins.
So the men wear the thaub (the long dress, which in Egypt they call Jalabia), a Jacket, the scarf (on the head as a turban or over the shoulders) and the famous Jambia, (the traditional dagger) which is attached to a wide, beautifully decorated belt. The most prestigious Jambias have a hilt made of rhinoceros horn. But don't blame the Yemenis for that poor animal's extinction, they're only the one's buying the horn after all (so they all argue).

A vendor in the spice- and grain-sooq packing a bag for a female customer. Behind him you can see the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and on his left: Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the Hamas leader who was killed in an Israeli missile strike in March 2004. Hamas is not viewed as a terrorist organisation in most of the Arab part of the Middle East. Under the picture it says: "Kullunaa Ahmad Yassin" meaning "We are all Ahmad Yassin". When I asked someone to explain this to me, he said: "If you want to kill Hamas, you have to kill all of us."

The more I travel in, read and hear about the Arab Middle East, the more I want to live in Israel for a while. I want to experience the difficulties, pressures and fears that come with living in Israel. It is so easy for us to talk about our opinion of the conflict from afar, but can we actually estimate the severity of the situation of every day life there? Is our (hopefully) rational opinion accurate? When you have to live with a constant threat to your own life, as well as to those of your friends and family, can you really be expected to act rationally? Can we really afford an opinion from afar?

(c) Anselmo - - - - - a baker in the sooq making delicious bread. Hmmm, yummy!!! Best eaten hot and fresh.

Abdul Karim

The electricity's gone again. By candlelight I write with pen on paper for a change. These days they cut it twice a day.
I've just been playing football with a few kids in the street - Hamid & Hossein (our neighbours) I knew already, they're two of the sweetest kids I've ever seen - slightly malnourished, but therefore incredibly light to pick up and throw around in the air. When they're playing on the street and I open the door in the big metal gate leading from the institute's garden to the street, they'll shout "ya Selim!!" and come running towards me with stretched out arms. I'm not allowed to get past until I've picked them up into the air, turned them around over my shoulders and put'em down on the ground again at least twice. They're great.

Then there was a few other children from the nearer neighbourhood I hadn't met before, most of them called Mohammad or Abdullah (Islamic countries aren't famous for variety of names) and there was one boy called Abdul Karim - not a friend of mine, I've decided. He claimed to be 15, which makes him much elder then the others, but he's probably around 12 (Yemenis don't know their age, but more about that later). He was wearing a dirty white thaub, cut in half by a brown leather bullet-belt around his waist, filled with live copper bullets. Over the thaub he wore a vest of the kind either soldiers or retired German tourists wear (with dozens of pockets and zips for all their camera equipment!), in which his discman was stored. He had a big mouth and his feet seemed to sometimes be acting independently of his mind. After he disturbingly joined our hitherto peaceful and enjoyable game, Arnaut & I asked him, why he was wearing the bullet-belt.
"To kill the Jews in Israel"
"I'm a Jew!" I replied quickly.
He said: "Where's my gun?"

It made me very sad to meet Abdul Karim, who obviously came from a wealthier family in the neighbourhood and has probably been utterly neglected as a child. I felt both aggression and pity for him, as he repeatedly mimicked the sounds I was making while playing football. What made me sad was, that with his unfriendly and impolite attituted he would probably meet a lot of aggression, which is the opposite of what he needs. The lack of love he received from his parents has made him into a person that causes aggression in other people. How will anyone ever be able to give him the love that he needs?

You want pictures?

(c) Anselmo - - - - - - - - President Ali Abdullah Saleh and his new mosque



(c) Anselmo - - - - - - - - The Sooq at night



(c) Anselmo

First Impressions

It is getting night again in Sana'a and the Jasmine trees open their blossoms behind the high walls that line every street, but their pleasently seductive smell defies the alienating boundaries and gives a glimpse of paradise into the otherwise not too welcoming streets.
The quarter that the Arabic Institute lies in is called Haddah and is the diplomatic and villa-quarter of Sana'a. At night the broad streets are dark and empty (unlike the bustling lanes and alleys of Sana'a al-Qadima, the ancient, famous and often-photographed part of the city). Apart from having frequent and sometimes half a meter deep potholes, the streets in this area are often littered with roadblocks - huge yellow-black concrete & steel blocks or monstrous steel-lined plastic tanks filled with sand - because of all the embassies and ambassador's residences here. Armed guards everywhere, in funny little corrugated-sheet-iron huts, sitting on plastic stools, carressing the AK-47s in their lap.
It is amazing how quickly the eye accustoms itself to seeing things that are all but familiar to what it normally sees. I've now been here for four days and the battered cars, which make you wander how they can even still drive, with doors open and no lights at night; the covered-up women, which (apart from minimal differences in clothing, visible under the black) can only be differentiated from one another by the ~3cm high and ~10cm wide slot through which their eyes look into the world; the numerous boards with beautifully curving Arabic writing on it, which is now not just a random assembly of shapes anymore; the hundreds of unfinished buildings that stand behind their walls, like dinosaur sceletons behind museum-fences; the grubby and rugged, earth-coloured clothes most men are wearing that make them look like retired Taliban fighters; the utterly different ideas on city-planning the people and the authorities here seem to have - you can almost never see the ground floor of the buildings, because of the grey and un-plastered walls lining the streets, behind which a small garden or patio will lead to (in this area & through European eyes) often utterly tastelessly luxurious dwellings; the infinite numbers of mostly elderly people who seem to do nothing but sit at the edge of the road all day, chatting, dozing, staring, chewing qat and drinking shaay; the ever-present name of Allah, written on walls, doors, products, integrated into architectural designs, tattoed on people's arms, constantly in everybody's mouth (in-shah-allah, min-hamdu-llah, bism-allah etc.) and sounding from the minarets 5 times a day -- all these things and many more have already become 'normal' and are threatened to be left unnoticed, but I have decided to make a huge effort at trying to pretend to having just been healed from deaf-&blindness, every time I leave the house -- speaking of which, - a house is just driving past the internet cafe on a lorry that sounds a horn like a container ship, reminding me of the lovely caravan parks back in Scotland... (-;

One thing my eyes are never going to become used to is the constant presence of arms. From Kalashnikovs in civilian hands and armed cars to medieval-type bunduqyas on the backs of elder men from the country - you can hardly walk down a street without seeing one. Only 5 years ago, Kalashnikovs were still sold at roundabouts --!!-- "I must be able to protect my family from any trouble" explained Bashir, a shopkeeper, to me, who has an AK-47, a rifle and a hand-gun at home; there's comouflaged pick-up trucks with massive flak-like guns on the back, standing near embassies and driving down the road; the beautiful, barren mountains that lie in and around the town are often not accessible and along their ridges one can see long, black rods coming out of half-circular structures made out of sandbags.
But on the other hand I am incredibly eager to go to one of the arms markets (suq al-aslahaat), that I've heard about. Is that a contradiction? I just want to take pictures - where in the world can you witness something like that?

Munich - Doha - Sana'a

I'm sure many of you are familiar to the scene I find myself in now ... an internet cafe abroad. This time in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen. There's a guy watching one of those rediculously cheesy Bollywood movies next to me, another one playing the blood-soked "Half-Life" game, someone is listening to Britney Spears unnecessarily loud, one guy is trying to get a girlfriend in a chatroom "are you handsome - hell yeah - you have a pic? - no scanner, husband won't let me have one - tell me you want me - I want you baby" - this is true!! I shouldn't stare at his screen so much, but I'm startled!! Next to all that, there's really annoying flying ants around, which get everywhere and interrupt one from typing every other minute. Aaargh, one just got under my Futah (the Yemeni equivalent of a sarong). Somehow, they're not very good at holding on to the turquise wall, so every now and then, one suddenly drops to the ground - quite amusing, well, for a German, anyway. I'm at PC 8 and having some difficulty with the keyboard. Each key has between 3 and 5 different signs on it, Arabic and English.
Anyway, now that I finally got something together for this weblog and have big aims at keeping it up to date, I want to start from the beginning...
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31 degrees celsius at 6 o' clock in the morning. Welcome to Doha airport, Qatar. The sun has only just risen above a huge shed (hangar) at the end of the air field. As I walk down the stairs from the plane to the bus, still shocked by the heat, I try to imagine the temperature at lunchtime... Nobody seems to want to stay here - everybody queues for "transit".
Inside the ice-cold airport building , a group of young Koreans has occupied a corner of the busy gate-lounge area, where they sit singing. I grab a seat near them. A guy who is either very tired from the journey or mildly disabled is holding the songbook, while staring through the ceiling with half-closed eyes. A tall, lanky guy is playing the guitar and a group of girls opposite him are singing compassionately. I look away - over to the Arabs in their long, white, perfectly ironed Jalabas, standing next to the shiny, red Porsche - the star-attraction of the aiport's "shop & win" raffle competition. All of a sudden all the Koreans have their eyes closed, intently listening to a beautiful, moon-faced girl in yellow, saying a prayer. She smiles like the first rays of the morning sun as she finishes. A stealthy look of hers meets my eyes. Then, like an army of believers, all of them take out little books with thin pages - bibles? - and bow their heads to read. What do these young people believe? Are they ... religious? ( - has this term acquired negative connotations in recent years? - am I religious?) They seem so devoted, holding their leather-clad and zip-able books, discussing over them in little groups, nodding as they turn back to the pages.
I think one can spot Korean girls by their hair style. It's either very short & boyish, but still covering the top part of the forehead, OR long in the back, bound together in a bun and with a stereotypical pony-cut, falling across the forehead, until it reaches the temples, where it abruptly becomes much longer, framing their pale, flat and tenderly gesturing faces in the coal brown of their hair. Maybe they are Buddhists. I have only seen Buddhists smile and laugh so much when speaking about their religion.
An airport official with a walkie talkie enters the rectangle of seats, somewhat approaching me (the only European in the area), but keeping his question general: "anyone else flying to Bangkok?" -?- funnily enough the German border officer at Munich airport asked me, too, as I indifferently passed him my passport: "Bangkok?!" - in fact, it was almost a statement, delivered with confidence. Do I look like one of the 20 male German pensioners that die of a Viagra-induced heart attack in Thailand every year? I have to think of the poor, pretty, fragile and young Thai girls that suddenly have a fat, old German dying and gasping for breath in their makeshift beds. What a repulsive thought.
Four Arabs with red versions of the famous Arafat-cloth covering their bearded heads are waiting for the plane to Sana'a with me, laughing to each other. They seem nice, amusing and friendly. We pass through the blazing heat into an airconditioned bus. Despite their positive first impression, I can't keep myself from being critical: they wouldn't speak & laugh like that with their women, would they? -- They carry little black man-purses, which look funny through European eyes, dangling from their tanned hands.
As we get out of the bus and walk up the stairs towards the international stewardess-smile, kindly waiting to welcome us on board, I pray that my backpack may be on this plane. Either way, I forgot to bring my Arabic dictionary, which is really clever, considering I'm going to do an Arabic language course. But hey.
Qatar Airways - their logo is an Oryx antilope in a circle - I wonder how many Oryxes still wander the deserts of Arabia. -- After take-off, the screens on the plane show the direction of and distance to Mecca. From just over Sana'a, it is 811 kilometers to the right rear part of the plane, i.e north-north-west.
In the queue (this has got to be the most awkward English word!) for the visa-counter, Florence, the French psychoanalyst I met on the plane, proudly shows me her filled-out visa application form (with an extra xerox copy) and the two passport-size photographs, which she insists we need in order to get a visa. Manuela (an Italian traveller) and I, not having either, look at each other with a mixture of surprise and "I'm sure it'll be fine". The visa official takes Florence's 60 US$ and her passport and begins issueing the visa. He makes a minimal dismissive gesture with his hand as she also offers her photos and the application form. Poor Florence.
She explained to me earlier, that Freudian psychoanalysts don't speak much. She was not a Freudian psychoanalysts. Lacon was her man - supposedly the single most important French psychoanalyst and he was the master of her school of thought. She also explained that most people, who become psychoanalysts later in their life (she was a city planner - "une urbaniste" - before) have had a frustrating sex-life.
Having discovered my backpack in a corner of the arrivals hall after waiting next to the slow and dirty baggage belt for a while, I said bye to Florence, who had by now found the other French people from her group and Manuela, who was also happy, because somebody had come to pick her up with a big sign saying her name. As I walk past the blue-uniformed custom officials, with my look firmly directed ahead (although this time I wasn't even smuggling any alcohol into the country), I see the first Yemeni faces - eagerly awaiting the arrival of friends and loved ones. Stern and proud faces of bearded men, wearing brown suit jackets over their light coloured Jalabas and around their tummy sits - just above the waist - the thick belt holding the famous and traditional Djambia - a short, broad dagger in a flat, bent sheath. This is one of the peculiarities that makes the Yemen such a fascinating and traditional Arab country. If anyone believes Dubai will give them an impression of Arabia, they might aswell come to St.Andrews to get an impression of Scotland. The Yemen [or al-Yaman, as it's called here (whoo-hoo!!)], at the very bottom of the Arabian peninsula, bordering only Oman and Saudi Arabia, is where the West has yet had the least influence and where life seems - at least from what I can say after my first day here - pretty much the way it always has been, except maybe that donkeys have now been replaced with Suzukis, camels with Range Rovers and horses with Mercedeces... back to the dagger, though. At least every second man you see on the streets, in the market, in cars and in tea houses has one right in front of his belly - it gives them such a manly readiness, such a mucho but also rough touch. Entering old Sana'a later in the evening, I feel quite like Indiana Jones. One can easily imagine everyone of these dagger-bearing men to be potentially dangerous and hostile. Their keen and lively eyes follow you, as you try to very unsuspiciously (with your bright blond hair) make your way through the narrow lanes lined with shops and stalls. Anything could happen. You almost begin to expect some little boy to jump out of a shop and run for his life with a stolen box firmly grasped under his little arms, followed by the infuriated shopkeeper, whose collegues immediately leave the shop to their assistants and jump to his help, drawing their daggers as they run to catch the thief, who, in the meanwhile, has brought havoc to the market, as he throws everything he can get hold of during his risky escape in the way of his pursuers. But he can't shake them off. A big barrel of dried chickpeas finally wins him the battle - he knocks it over as he flies past one of the spice stores. Moments later thousands of tiny peas cover the ground behind him and cause the angry and exasperated shopkeepers to slip and fall ... something is pulling on my shirt and brings me back to reality - a young lad offering me to try one of the fruits he's selling from a wheel-barrow. They're cactus fruit and taste delicious, refreshing and not too sweet, despite a large abundance of pips.
There's three other young people studying Arabic in the language institute here. Arnout, a really friendly Dutch guy - tall, blond and somewhat positively earnest in all his endeavours - Germans and Dutch are very similar I've decided - he's always properly dressed, with a stripy or checked shirt, trousers and Timberlands, whereas I have already started wearing a probably rather unattractive mix of Yemeni clothes and my own. Then there's Corinne, a pretty English girl, who has a bit of a Manchester accent. She often wears the whole black cover-thing, because she's also working for a Yemeni newspaper. She talks a lot and buys a lot, but seems nice otherwise. Finally there's John, an English guy also from St.Andrews, who has a very cute smile, especially with the little grooves which form in his cheeks when he laughs. He left today, unfortunately, having undergone a complete Yemenisation. He wore a far more traditional version of the futah than me and sometimes even the Djambia. His posture and maneurisms seem to have adapted entirely to the Yemeni surroundings. Maybe he always moves like that, but he seems completely at ease with the people (particularly the kids), the culture, customs and the language, greeting shopkeepers and having little polite or funny conversations with them, as if he's been speaking Arabic for years.
Together with the institute's two employees, Ghalib and 'Esaam (who deserve an extra chapter at some point) we four had a wonderful evening eating the best fish I've had in months (with our hands of course) and wandering the streets of ancient Sana'a.