It’s been a long time since doing this kind of thing. beyond spluttering about broken cameras- no luck still as yet making visual updates to the blog o reading public- I’m in the Christian quarter of the Old City in Damascus, planning my next move and thinking perhaps not the greatest thoughts, for reasons not to go into here. Unlike Beirut, which sometimes seems contradictory and at pains to remake itself, this place appears immediately, relatively at least, whole. Maybe what I mean is whole in its otherness. You really feel out of Arabic here, or I do today. We were walking around the centre earlier, in the stifling midday heat, and a kid started talking to me in bare bones English, common denominator topics to many perhaps. We spoke, till he got to the door of his mosque, about God and Football. A list of European players, and affirmations of his devotion. The intensity of the old city, full of the bustle of millenial commerce, all the souks with clustered specialities- silks, perfume, wooden cookers tools, inlaid chess sets, Islamic literature, gold lame shirts- I might get one for the next bad taste party- sweets, spices, carpets of course, tools and hardware of every shape and size, old phones, tiny repair workshops… is almost overwhelming. I understand so little, and I’ve not shot a frame.
2008 07 30
