Culinary Culture

You can tell a lot about a people by their food. Mexican food is at once frugal and exciting, Japanese food is elaborate and rituialistic, Chinese food is practical and tasty, Eastern European food is "101 ways to use the staples". Syrian food is no exception.

Syrians take pride in their national dishes and style of cooking, which is very different from Saudi cooking or Jordanian cooking or cooking from any other Arab state. This is wonderful because their food is tasty and their abundant local fruits and vegetables give it freshness and variety.

That variety only goes so far, though. Because Syrians love their food. And when I say they love their food I mean they love THEIR food. Most restaurants in Damascus tempt your pallate with.....exactly the same things everyone makes and eats at home. There are only about twenty five dishes you can usually get at restaurants, and they are the same at almost all of them. Appetizers like tabouleh, hummus, "birok" (white cheese surrounded by square-cut dough and fried) and baba ganouj and main dishes like m'jedderah (burgul and lentils), shish tauk (grilled chicken on skewers), and Kibbeh (fried burgul dough with ground meat inside). If you crave variety or foreign foods of any kind you have to venture out to a restaurant devoted specifically to that genre (and don't get your hopes up. It won't be like the real thing). When I first came there was only one foreign restaurant in town: a Chinese restaurant. Now there is a bit more to choose from but it's still not what it should be for a city of this size and sophistication.

This phenomenon speaks volumes about Syrian culture, where there are rigid (arbitrary but rigid) rules about everything and everyone is expected to conform to them. There doesn't seem to be much "marching to one's own drummer" going on here. Everyone follows the band. Take fashion for example: in Riyadh they have the religious police who scold women for not covering properly. In Damascus I would not be the least bit surprised to find fashion police deriding some unsuspecting loner for carrying the wrong purse or (literally) wearing the wrong socks. Fashion is taken very seriously here and people follow it like schools of fish, all turning as one body from trend to trend. Even women who cover all do it the same way. Trenchcoat/monteau with scarf tucked in. We refer to it as the "Syrian uniform". There is some leeway granted in terms of color but wearing your scarf out or wearing an abaya instead of a trenchcoat marks you as a definite outsider.

The result of this mindset is that Syrians have a definite national identity. Their dialect and accent, their style of cooking, their clothing, all serve to form a cohesiveness that has served them well throughout their long history. When someone is trying to colonize you, having a strong national character that can't be broken by mere military force is a definate asset.

But it sure makes it rough on those of us who wear what WE like instead of whatever's current and who get an occasional hankerin' for sushi.....

Watch that Spiggot!

Ya gotta love Arabic housecleaning. Every two days you wrap a towel around a long squeegie and mop up all the dust from the floor. Even so, evil little dust bunnies gather under the beds and couches, and these have to be washed out every week or so by dumping water on the entire floor and squeegieing it down the drains which are conveniently located outside the bathrooms. It's a good method in theory, but it's very labor intensive (although not nearly as labor intensive as the Arab women think, compared to American housework. They have this idea that American houses somehow don't have to be cleaned and that if we ever lift a finger to do so, the cleaning requires no effort whatsoever. In case you were wondering we don't cook, either.)

Besides dust, hair is also a persistent problem here in Damascus. When hairs fall off our heads back home in the States they must enter a zone located somewhere near the lost sock zone. I'm not sure where it is, but the point is that dislocated hairs have someplace to go. Here there is no portal to the hair zone, so hairs, once they have left the relative safety of your head, are homeless. They are not allowed to sleep in the libraries or parks, so they wind up hanging around, loitering in your sheets, under furniture and on counters. They are everywhere. And the really audacious ones bum free baths by trying to sneak into the washer with the laundry. I swear they congregate in the dirty clothes and when you are sorting it you have to make a separate pile for transient hairs. I now understand why people use hairs to do black magic. They just get so sick and tired of picking other people's hairs up all the time that they curse them. I'm sure the most popular curse is that the owner of the hair will go bald and not shed anymore.

Anyway.....the last time we were here we had only a bucket to use for washing the floors. We'd fill it with water, dump it, squeegie that bit, then refill it and start again. This time I thought we were in for the easy life because we now had a hose to hook up to the spiggot! We tried one spiggot and the hose did not fit, so we tried a second. The one with the red handle. This one fit and we turned it on, with my 10 year old daughter standing in the hall holding it at the ready, with her finger over the open part of the hose so she could spray it. Just as I told her, "Take your finger off!", she turned toward me and the hose began spraying - into my face and all over the floor. Anyone who has lived in an Arab country knows what it was. Maazote. Kerosene.

It was all over my lips, my glasses, my clothes, the floor, and of course all up in the hose. We turned it off right away and then weren't sure what to do. I washed my face and contemplated calling my husband back in the States, where it was 3 AM. The other option was to call my mother in law and tell her how stupid I was.

I called my husband and woke his behind up!

"It's 3 AM," he said.

"I know, but we have a domestic emergency. Can you put maazote down the belua'a (floor drain)?"

"Yes."

"And if there's a hose with maazote in it can it be cleaned or do we have to throw it away?"

"Throw it away," he was going back to sleep on me.

"OK, I'll email you later." I hung up.

It took us a half hour to clean the kerosene and then, when we were thoroughly exhausted from the whole affair, we had to clean the rest of the house. My mother in law called, wondering why it was taking us so long.

I told her I was busy cleaning hairs out of the laundry.