50 days until Syria

The plans for moving from London to Damascus are in full swing. Jennifer and I have created a “get ‘er done” board with all the things we have to do prior to leaving. These include boring bureaucratic tasks like sorting out visas and canceling subscriptions, but also London things-to-do that I just haven’t done in the last 5 years of living here. For example, the National Gallery and Portrait Gallery — how haven’t I been there yet?? Anyway, the board is on the wall now. Items items keep getting added and nothing is getting checked off yet. Time to get into gear.

The reason we’re moving to Syria is to learn Arabic. We’ve been taking part-time night classes for the past couple years and have accumulated a strange collection of stuff in Arabic: children’s books, board games, airplane sick bags, instruction manuals, newspapers and magazines. This has all been well and good, and I’m sure our basic knowledge will prove to be super helpful once we’ve touched down in Damascus, but being fully immersed in the language and the culture is, surely, incomparable. The goal is to leave next summer confident in our ability to fully express our thoughts and opinions in Arabic, to read and understand Arabic newspapers, essays, novels and websites, and even to make informed, logical arguments in Arabic. Is this possible?

I’m hoping at the very least that our current skill level will enable us to get a taxi from Damascus airport to the city center, where lies our temporary abode. Upon arrival we’ll also be needing some breakfast and coffee — Syrian style! At the moment, I can say things like this pretty confidently:

صباح الخير يا سيدي. أريد فنجان قهوة والإفطار من فضلك

الجبن والحمص والخبز من فضلك

Sabah al-khayr ya sayyid. Urid finjan qahwa wa iftar min fudlak.
Jubna wa humus wa khubz min fudlak.

That’s “Good morning, sir. I want a cup of coffee and breakfast please. Cheese, humus and bread please.” 

I’m quite sure our language learning speed will increase dramatically once we’re there, and with intensive classes 5 hours a day, plus people and signs and television and radio all around us, all the time, all in Arabic, we will definitely be fully immersed. And we’ll need to learn more common food orders quickly, lest we become stuffed full of cheese, humus and bread.

Food and drink is an important part of my life wherever I am. I often use food as a barometer of culture and national psyche when I travel to foreign countries. The politics of food? Is that altogether fair? Maybe not. But I think you can learn a lot about society by what they feed themselves and how they treat dinner guests. From what I’ve read and heard, the Syrians do both of these things right, so it should be a lot of tasty fun!