and then our exile

i've started posting every day - direct relationship to the quantumly increasing amount of other work i need to do. "blogs: the new great escape", except that the word blog itself is so ugly. incandescence, such a prettier word.

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1. from the time i moved back to the rukn in early june till the day i left in early august, tahseen and myself instituted "moaz-freyz-haleeb nights". we would meet regularly, once a week or so, until late july, when we did so more often - we would meet after midnight outside the sham palace theatre and walk down to shari' bakistan, where he would order a strawberry-banana milkshake with cream and i would have an icecream-mango "imbirator". we would sit on plastic chairs by the side of the road and talk about the men and women and shuyukh in our lives, different classes we were taking and things we'd learned, ideas, societies... if we were hungry we would go to the fancy restaurant nearby and have soup and hommus. "they must think we're cheapskates." at about 2 or 2.30am we would walk back to saba' bahraat, where i would wait for a miekro and he would taxi back to mezzeh. once i took the camera along - behind me you can see the stairs to the fountain in the middle of the square, and the cell phone advertising above: "awfar bi k'tir!"

2. this man squeezes orange juice and sells it with crushed ice in the little glasses shown for 25liras - expensive relative to 5lira tamar hindi, but about $0.60CAN. this is when one is leaving the old city, and you can see white tourists sitting in the cafe on the far right. he's known by abu 'ala'.

3. "downtown." white van-type things are the infamous "miekros", otherwise known as public transportation. i must have mentioned them before. you stand by the side of the road and wave one down, tell the driver when to pull over to let you off. 5liras ($~0.12CAN) per ride, you pass your money to the person in front of you, who passes it on until it reaches the driver, who counts out and passes back change while navigating traffic. notice the absence of coloured lines on pavement, and also the advertising. it is less insidious than in the west, and sometimes made me laugh - once, on those very-same billboards, i saw a woman with light skin and dark hair, and "you too can have skin this white".