Day 29 Some Answers

 SYNOPSIS: I took the minibus to Athaura from where I hired a private car to get to a pre-Islamic fortress named Qala’at Ja’abar at Lake Al Assad.  In the afternoon I briefly met up with Ra’ad to talk about life in Syria.  The evening was uneventful except that I inadvertently ended up at the “wrong” restaurant.WHY THE EUPHRATES NO LONGER FLOODS AND WHY IT IS HARD TO WATCH TV FOR YOUNG SYRIANSA power outage in the middle of writing my blog in the early morning hours reminded me that some things had changed, but others still remained the same.  Since Lebanon, I have not heard of regularly rotating power outages.  I don’t think there is such a thing in Syria.  However, short-time and irregular power outages seem still are an expected part of life.  The frequent display of generators at the souq seems to support that theory; in less than two days, I experienced three of them at the hotel.What also has not changed from Beirut to Damascus to Raqqa and all the cities in between is breakfast.  In Beirut I bypassed local breakfast by buying Nutella and European style yoghurts as well as fruits.  After Beirut I have had local breakfasts.  I don’t know if this is a decree, but whether you are at a multiple star breakfast buffet (I saw that at Ian’s hotel in Palmyra) or at any other place, breakfast consists of various small plates of exactly the same:  One plate of decoratively spread out labne (thick yoghurt -  you can buy it in the States if you look around);  one plate of green olives, one plate of goat cheese tasting like nothing cut into cubes or shaved into little swirls; one plate of delicious apricot jam (always apricots, no other flavors) and a hard-boiled egg, and I mean hard-boiled:  with a black lining.  If you are lucky, a plate with cucumbers and tomatoes comes along as well.  All this is served with flat bread and black tea.  I don’t like green olives at all, but have bravely eaten them every morning.  They add some flavor to the goat cheese and the otherwise bland labne.  I have lasted with this breakfast throughout the day and usually only try to find some freshly squeezed fruit juice and some tea to get me through to dinner.  I miss the hummus, bread and milk dish I used to eat every day in Damascus.  I have not seen it out here yet.  Here there are more rice and meat dishes which are Bedouin inspired and the ever present shwarma.I headed out to the micro-bus station this morning.  You just got to love this system of micro- or mini-buses going to almost wherever there is a road, whenever they are full.  I have yet to experience the time when after hours of waiting the bus would not leave.  Instead it’s usually within 15-30 minutes that it fills and then off they go.  I wanted to see the famous Lake Al Assad which was created by damming the Euphrates.  And there is one of the answers I was looking for:  The Euphrates does no longer flood because not only the Syrians have dammed the river, but the Turks as well.  Like in Egypt with Lake Nasser, antiquities and homes had to give way to create the lake basin which was built and slowly filled in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  It’s a gorgeous lake; even more impressive as it is surrounded by the desert.  A true oasis around here.   In the immediate area surrounding the lake, actual forest sprung up which is an unusual site around here.The fortress known as Qala’at Ja’abar or short Ja’abar existed since pre-Islamic times, but has been reworked and expanded over the centuries.  What baffles the American mind at sites like this is that there are absolutely no safety measures in place for any of the visitors.  The rough edges of the fortress end in deep cliffs way above the water.  One wrong step and you could be on your way to death.  No railings, no paths, no warning signs.  You are on your own.  Use you common sense, I guess.  I had to think of the ridiculous warning labels we create for even the most straight forward product in America to prevent people from doing the wrong thing with it and to prevent from getting sued.  There are two extremes for you:  The American and the Syrian.  I would be most happy with a middle path.What is noteworthy about the castle is that the whole fortress is built out of bricks.  In contrast to Egypt which built tombs and temples with everlasting stone, the brick building method of Mesopotamia is in part responsible for the fact that so little survives above ground.  Often the inner layers of walls and structures are even made of mud-bricks or just debris.  Only the outer casing is fired brick or stone.  There was no wood to keep the kilns going for all the construction.  It is so fitting for the confident and optimistic Egyptians who put all their hope into eternity and the afterlife that their monuments and their mummies survived indeed into the ever-lasting future. On the contrary, the fatalistic Mesopotamians who were sure they were doomed and whose world view was influenced by their conviction that they were at the mercy of “Mafia-style” gangster gods, have little of their constructions survive.  What survives for the most part in stone is Greek and Roman.  The earlier desert towns, the brick castles, the brick ziggurats (in Iraq) are badly damaged or gone.I enjoyed the castle, but my main reason for coming was to get a sense of the lake and the dam.  The dam itself was, unfortunately, a military zone.  A four lane road goes right over it guarded by military personnel at either end. I would have liked to get out of the car to take pictures; but that was not possible.At the microbus station of Athaura, the nearest town to the castle, I was seamlessly handed over from the mini-bus to a private car that would take me out there.  No public transportation is available to that location.  I would have hitched a ride again, but I did not even have a chance of walking through town.  It was just as well.  I likely could not have walked across the dam with my camera anyhow.After half a day I was back in Raqqa.  I checked into Ra’ad’s shop to confirm our dinner plans and he showed me some of his architectural projects: Beautiful designs of a school and a mosque.  Neither one would ever be done he assured me as they were too expensive.  They involved curves, colors, open spaces – all too costly.  But they were good enough for projects on paper.  I was reminded of old East Germany where hardly any creative project ever had a chance of realization, especially for architects.  Our architecture was in many ways as gray and uniform as what I experience here.  One thing Ra’ad said struck a chord:  “When I watch French or American TV it makes me really sad.  That’s when I understand what a bad life I have.”  If even Ra’ad feels that way, a successful student of architecture with his own shop, how must the desert children feel when they are exposed to our movies…Our evening talk and dinner did not happen as Ra’ad had to attend a family emergency.  All my questions about life in Syria remain unanswered for now.  I will have to look for somebody else who speaks English well enough.  But in town, I was the recipient of a free piece of sweets from the bakery again!  And then, I went to a café where I ordered some tea to go over my notes of the day.  When I wanted to pay, the owner refused payment.  Why, I asked.  Let me pay!  A guy at the next table saw us talking without either speaking the other’s language so he offered help.  “This is obviously an all guys restaurant”, he explained.  The owner will not accept your money.  Obviously, an all guys restaurant?!  What?  Nothing was obvious to me.  We all had a good laugh about that.  I asked him how I was supposed to have known.  We are Arabs, he said.  We have a segregated society.  No problem, he assured me.  I am a foreigner.  Nobody minded.  Nobody was offended.   But they would not want my money for the tea.Oh brother!  Yes, there were all guys at this place.  I noticed that.  But there were almost all guys at the wedding yesterday, today in the bus I was the only woman, yesterday I walked down a street where there were dozens of guys gathered for what looked perhaps, to be a funeral – no women in sight.  Was that an all guy’s bus, and all guy’s street?  I kept laughing and so did they.  What a world.  No matter how much I try to understand it there is obviously a lot I am missing.  But it was nice to see that nobody threw me out of the restaurant and nobody was mad at me for breaking the rules and nobody harassed me either.  After all, they could have taken my entering as a come-on…!. Instead, they handled it with a gracious gift of hospitality.  I thanked them profusely and left.  I wonder if I will get away with a faux pax like this in Iran.Good night.