freeing housing and caving vs spelunking
Free housing is like what my mom has said about free advice, worth what you paid for it.
In Damascus that spring I was given free housing from a Syrian friend who ran a travel agency, in exchange for helping him with some editing work and secretarial stuff for the travel agency. On the surface, this was a great arrangement - I was living in an absolutely gorgeous room in a restored Ottoman-era bait 3arabi (Arab house) that his travel agency used as a bed and breakfast. It was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever seen, hands down, and, since my friend went on a multi-week business trip to Iran about a week after I moved in, I ended up not actually having to do that much work for it. The offer also came at a time when I needed it, financially.
Until, that is, the bedbugs came out to play. I’d wake up every morning, itchy red bites lining my wrists, ankles, arms, legs, knuckles… I’d feel itchy just lying down in my Ottoman-era bed. It was constant hydrocortisone/bite cream, all the time. The caretaker for the house didn’t believe me when I told him about the bugs, and, with my friend away in Iran (only in Syria do you know ppl who go on business trips to Iran…haha). Eventually, a Spanish guest at the house, an amazing woman who’d lived in India and Nepal for over 8 years and was married to a Swiss guy who worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Iraq, noticed that me and her baby also had lice. She told me a trick to get bed bugs out of mattresses (bed bugs don’t like light, so the key is to place the mattress in direct sunlight and flip it a few times… they’ll jump out), and we got lice shampoo and did tons of laundry… I went from 20 new bites per night to around 5… so it helped. But the whole free housing thing…. Yeh. See me get excited about Ottoman palaces again.
Now, same deal. But (thankfully) minus the bed bugs. My co-worker is away for the next two weeks, and offered the other intern and I a chance to stay in his nice, new apartment while he’s gone. Considering that my former housing had been really, really far from the Embassy (and with the crazy German woman…, and expensive, like everything in this country…), his offer had seemed almost too good to be true and came at just the right time. His apartment is nice, he has a microwave (which I pretend I know how to use…), washing machine, dishwasher (also something I haven’t had in a while!), even a drip coffee maker! And I’ll be saving so much money! BUT [cue one of my favorite quotes from Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation, “and that was when I learned that you can never have salvation without a catch”] the internet/wifi that was supposed to have been hooked up last Friday does not actually work (well, the broadband won’t work on my computer, and the the wifi doesn’t work at all), and this morning, the water wasn’t working.
Today is a Cypriot holiday (Cypriot National Day, or something like that), and I really, really want to go out and take a walk around the city to see what’s going on, but instead I’m stuck inside on a beautiful morning (after a long night’s sleep which started at like 8pm the night before) waiting for the maintenance guy to come. I haven’t taken a shower in 2 days, and I might not be able to go to work tomorrow if I can’t shower and do laundry today. All I want to do is brush my teeth.
Ugh. Free housing.
‘Had a dream last night, during my epic long sleep, that I was hanging out with A and C-B3 on the tires/ropes at the old Catamount playground in my hometown. A asks, with purpose, “is there a cave around here?”
I responded, telling him about the cave at SVC, and how you can enter into a large sort of room, but going beyond that requires crawling on your stomach for 100 yards, more or less. I’d never done it before. He replied that that didn’t sound so appealing.
I was going to launch into a discussion on the difference between caving and spelunking. How spelunking is a funny word and gets a lot of use, but caving is the term more professionally used. I declined to bring up the humor of spelunking, instead responding “yeah, I’m not much for caving.”
I woke up thinking about that cave, and wondering what it’s really like to go farther inside of it. I think when I get home this winter I’m going to hike to it.