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?