Rant A Car
One of my favorite things about Damascus is the atrocious mispellings of English words. Like the "Rant A Car" center, or the surely-reputable "Dintist" across the way. These delightful childish mistakes belong right beside fresh hot street food and cool lemon-mint slushies on my list of Damascus pleasures. But even better than the mispellings, which are quite understandable and innocent in their own way, are the incoherent phrases and mis-translations. For instance, there is a common sticker that one sees on the windows of taxis here: it is in a font that looks like it is dripping, or melting, or bleeding, and it says "No My Friend." No My Friend? What could that possibly mean? And why is it melting? Or crying? Or bleeding? Or take, if you will, the sign in the National Museum of Damascus that says "Please No Enter." Really? At a museum, a bastion of knowledge and history and culture and learning, they couldn't get someone who knows that "Please No Enter" sounds like cave-man speak?
For a brief outline of less-amusing things, let me list for you: 1) heat, 2) buses, 3) department of immigration.
1) HEAT. when i was in palmyra, it was 48 degrees celsius. go look that up in fahrenheit.
2) BUSES. ok, ok, not all buses. sorry to offend all you rabid bus afficionados out there. more specifically, i am referring to the 3-hour bus ride from palmyra to damascus. this bus had no shocks, so it swayed sickeningly from side to side throughout the entire duration of the trip. sometimes i was genuinely afraid that the bus was going to overbalance. the only creatures on the bus that weren't nauseated were the plentiful flies, those lucky bastards. worst of all, though, was the bus attendant who kept inundating the air with a cloyingly sweet vanilla-scented spray, probably to combat his own lively body odor. he would wander up and down the center aisle offering each individual passenger a squirt of his foul spray. he must be punished.
3) DEPARTMENT OF IMMIGRATION. this one is for you, hayley. you are never allowed to come to damascus for more than a month. because if you stay for more than a month, you have to get a visa extention from the department of immigration....it might be figuratively described as "hell" for someone like me, but for someone with a fear of being crushed in a suffocating throng of clamoring people, it might actually be hell itself. imagine being stuffed into a large un-air-conditioned room with about 200 people, many of them iraqi immigrants desparate for residency in syria, who are all pushing, sweating, and yelling in arabic. then imagine that the people in charge of directing this pulsating mass of humanity are the laziest and cruelest people in the world. so no one knows where to go or what to do...but i certainly knew that i was confused, sweltering, and often smashed between the shoulders, backs, and bellies of smelly and angry people. i am a stronger person for it.
For a brief outline of less-amusing things, let me list for you: 1) heat, 2) buses, 3) department of immigration.
1) HEAT. when i was in palmyra, it was 48 degrees celsius. go look that up in fahrenheit.
2) BUSES. ok, ok, not all buses. sorry to offend all you rabid bus afficionados out there. more specifically, i am referring to the 3-hour bus ride from palmyra to damascus. this bus had no shocks, so it swayed sickeningly from side to side throughout the entire duration of the trip. sometimes i was genuinely afraid that the bus was going to overbalance. the only creatures on the bus that weren't nauseated were the plentiful flies, those lucky bastards. worst of all, though, was the bus attendant who kept inundating the air with a cloyingly sweet vanilla-scented spray, probably to combat his own lively body odor. he would wander up and down the center aisle offering each individual passenger a squirt of his foul spray. he must be punished.
3) DEPARTMENT OF IMMIGRATION. this one is for you, hayley. you are never allowed to come to damascus for more than a month. because if you stay for more than a month, you have to get a visa extention from the department of immigration....it might be figuratively described as "hell" for someone like me, but for someone with a fear of being crushed in a suffocating throng of clamoring people, it might actually be hell itself. imagine being stuffed into a large un-air-conditioned room with about 200 people, many of them iraqi immigrants desparate for residency in syria, who are all pushing, sweating, and yelling in arabic. then imagine that the people in charge of directing this pulsating mass of humanity are the laziest and cruelest people in the world. so no one knows where to go or what to do...but i certainly knew that i was confused, sweltering, and often smashed between the shoulders, backs, and bellies of smelly and angry people. i am a stronger person for it.