Crap! I Have a Blog!

I chewed qat the other day. I first heard about qat in two books about Africa a few years ago. In "Black Hawk Down" and "We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families" the Somali and Rwanda militias who were destroying their countries and committing genocide were described as "hopped up on qat." So at the time that my friend Alex told me that everyone chews qat in Yemen my idea of the drug was that it made people want to shove a tire through their earlobe and hack their neighbor to death with a machete. It gave me second thoughts about coming here. But I came anyway. My taxi ride home from the airport was on a Friday, the weekend and a big qat day, and I was watching Yemeni men speeding by on motorcycles with one cheek bigger than their helmets, (Yemenis don’t wear helmets for safety - only to indicate that they are a taxi service. Passengers who rent the back of the seat are not given the helmet - or goggles in case the driver’s qat is accidentally dislodged in the wind.)

I didn’t notice anything unsusual in the behavior of people with qat in their mouths here and eventually I got used to the sight of half the men on the street looking like they’ve got a cartoon toothache. Eventually, after talking with people who do it and wrestling with the whole addictive nature of it and my alcoholism/recovery thing, I decided to try it. Once, at least and three times at most, (it apparently takes a few times to even notice the effects so I’ll give it three tries and that’s it.)

Bjorn at the Qat Souk, with "the good stuff."

We made a big ordeal out of it. That’s what the Yemenis do. I started off to the qat souk, (open-air market just for qat), with Bjorn, a Danish friend and qat connoisseur, around noon. Bought the stuff - the good stuff, then headed back toward home. We stopped at a Yemeni restaurant for some "salta" - the traditional pre-qat meal, which is also something like the unofficial official food of Yemen. Salta had been built up to be some crazy food to intimidate foreigners, like habaneros in Mexico. When I was talking to English language students at a local business school the mere suggestion that I try it provoked laughter. It is nicknamed "the volcano." It only looked the part. We sat down at the metal bench table in the back o the restaurant and the 15-ish year-old waiter brought out a large cast-iron pot that had been filled with the salta from the bathtub-sized cauldron that was raised up above a giant masonry fire pit in the front of the restaurant. The salta was boiling and steaming, looking very much the part of a witches’ brew of frogs’ eyes and lizards’ testicles. The Yemeni gigglers had been right about this stuff looking like lava. But we didn’t even have to wait to let it cool. It wasn’t that hot - just the pot, apparently. We just started tearing off pieces of pita bread and scooping the stuff into our mouths. It had a nice flavor actually - like chili but with a unique flavor and less spicy. It was kind of a disappointment. Salta is ground beef, tomato sauce, some vegetables, beans, egg, and fenugreek, (whatever that is). There was a ton of it. With a couple of cokes the meal cost $2 for the two of us.

Salta!

With our guts full the rest of the preparation for qat chewing consisted of getting drinks for the rest of the day, (Yemenis apparently favor water and cherry Canada Dry), and find a place to relax for the session. We went to the mufrage, (the top floor of most Yemeni houses - that can afford it - is reserved for sitting on specially designed floor cushions and chewing qat), at the school. Unlike most mufrages, the school’s mufrage has a satellite dish with about 350 channels, the best being the Saudi and Emirate movie channels and the Lebanese music video channels. On the Saudi station we caught the tail end of The Magnificent Seven then started Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving it until the first half hour convinced us it stunk.

So we’re sitting there with two big sandwich bags full of leaves we’re about to start chewing on. Bjorn shows me how to tell the old leaves from the young ones, (the "good" ones), and how much of the stems to break off and throw away. It’s some sort of art form and picking apart the leaves and stems for hours is supposed to be a part of the appeal of chewing qat, but I can’t tell one leave from the other so I made like I knew what I was doing by checking each leaf for bird shit before I ate it. They tasted like leaves. I was eating lawn clippings like it was bon bons blessed by the Dalai Lama. One by one I checked the tiny leaves for bird shit, chewed them a little bit and tried to shove them into one cheek without swallowing any. I swallowed about half. Yemenis must have the tongue dexterity of a lesbian parrot because all I was doing was coating my tongue and throat with this woody pulp. Eventually I was ablt to get some build-up into one cheek but the effort had me inadvertently chewing the stuff up too much and channelling it behind my back teeth and into my throat. Apparently since chewing up and storing a fist-sized ball of leaves into your cheek for most of the day isn’t considered disgusting at all there’s no limits on the other disgusting ways you may have to make the process work. So I was told to go ahead and hock this mulch out of my esophagus and jam it back into my cheek where it belongs. This is where I learned that a finger is a poor tool for controlling an undisciplined wad of saliva and plant fibers - you just end up looking like Steven King in the grass monster scene of "Creepshow" - "Meteor shit!" Without a napkin in the whole Arabian Peninsula, trying to lick this stuff off my finger was like a lost Middle East Lucy skit until I finally thought of the underside of my mufrage cushion. I wasn’t the first to think of that hiding place.

"…calm as Hindu cows."

Finally I start to build up a nice cud and I can start to look for the effects of the drug that’s taking up about half of this country’s GDP. Nothing. Except for whatever endorphins I may be getting from the tongue workout I don’t feel a damn thing. That may be just as well since I haven’t had so much as a hit off a whipped cream can in 8 years, but I did want to understand what all the hub bub was all about. I’m told that the active chemicals in the plant are the same as amphetamine, but with the drug limited to the amount of leaves you can fit your cheek the effect of the drug is about that of strong coffee. I suppose I did feel less tired than I did every other time I’ve sat around doing fuck all for five hours, but nothing worth the nuisance of trying to wrangle a mouthfull of lawn trimmings away from my windpipe the whole time. In the end - I don’t get it. Obviously this crap is addictive or 2/3 of the whole country, (including women - but in the privacy of homes or under the ninja suits they have to wear), wouldn’t be spending their families’ salta money just to walk around looking like a shoplifter at a sperm bank. It may be a weak drug but it’s an expensive one. That sack of qat I mashed into my face cost me $5. Most meals I get in restaurants cost me less than $2. While many people here chew it on weekends or holidays - "Honey, will you take the Christmas tree out of your mouth, please!" - a good proportion of them chew every day. While I suppose a weak and pointless drug is better for a poor country such as this to be addicted to than, say, crack, model glue or reality TV, but with its cost in time, money and the massive deficit on the "Am I Hot or Not?" scale, this drug is a serious problem here. It is already a political issue of sorts, with bans coming close to passing in Aden, where apparently the socialists are virulently opposed to qat, the viel, and teaching Islam in schools. Occasionally you’ll see an anti-qat bumper sticker. The Yemen Times, one of the two English newspapers in Yemen, which is pretty much just pissed off about everything since the other paper, the Yemen Observer, is owned by a friend of the president’s, and really is just a shill for the government, regularly prints articles trying to nag the country into kicking the qat. In English though. Good thinking. Anyway, I’m not here to fix this place or set up some sort of Grazers Anonymous, so I’m really just pondering this to amuse myself - over a nice cup of strong coffee.

It’s been awhile since I’ve sent off a dispatch. So where do I start? Where am I? Oh yeah. I’m in Yemen. Last I remember, I was in Amman, after having Christmas at Petra. Don’t remember if I talked about New Years Eve, but I spent it at an Irish pub in Amman, Jordan with some people I had been traveling with and a few others from the hotel. Actually it was a large group of us. The bar was just like any bar you’d find in the US - same atmosphere, same styles of dress, drinking, dancing, some making out in the corner, music too loud to actually have a conversation so you make like you understand other people and yell "hell yeah!" at everything anyone says, - the only difference is half the people didn’t speak the language of the person next to them, which, given the volume, was completely irrelevant. I spent most of the night avoiding the dance floor, and talking politics to people who showed about as much interest as the people do when they can hear me. I was eventually tricked onto the dancefloor by Sue, who convinced me there was a Congressional hearing in the middle of the floor and next thing I knew it I was doing the cabbage patch like it was 1987. I had been watching Sue most of the day during the trip to Umm Cais, Jerash, and some castly thing inbetween. I hadn’t talked to her, of course, because I’ve got about as much game as a Trekkie with a hairlip, but here I was dancing with her at midnight. Needless to say, she had low enough standards to take a liking to me, and we spent the next week traveling together like an old married couple, (no offense Dad). She’s a wonderful, beautiful girl, ("girl"? She’s almost my age), and I would have loved to have more time with her before she had to go home to London. It was an interesting experience travelling as a couple in the Middle East. There are rules about showing affection in public, but it depends where you are as to whether they matter. In the Irish pub on New Years there was a Jordanian couple that was tongue wrestling for some sort of championship belt, I think, but anything other than holding hands on the street in the old part of Amman, where the cheapskate backpackers all stay. In the western half of Amman, the newer half, no rules of dress or conduct - or, the same rules you’d expect in the west, (at some point you’d have to get a room). For the most part, Sue and I just enjoyed our time together, (I’m taking her word for it), and plan to keep in touch and maybe meet again someday. Right, Habibi?

So, for the second week in Jordan I did Petra and Wadi Rum again, and again saw no sun on the ruins of Petra, (I guess I’ll have to break down and pay for Photoshop when I get home). Back in Amman I made the decision to go to Yemen to study Arabic. I contacted the school and arranged for them to get me the student visa I needed and planned on leaving at the end of that week. Well it was "Middle East time" and on top of that the week-long Islamic Chritmas (Eid) and I was stuck in Amman for another three weeks. Amman, for me was the most ordinary, "western" city I’d been in in two months - the food stunk, it was expensive, it was noisy and smelled like smog and ass, and in three weeks in Amman I got sick three times. I’ll let that be all the complaining I do to you all, but Hani, the night manager of the hotel, was ready to pay for my room at another hotel just to shut me up. In the mean time I did take a trip to Madaba, Mt. Nebo, (where Moses saw the "promised land" - allegedly), and swam in the Dead Sea. Then the last full day in Amman I took a trip hitchiking to some of the desert castles east of Amman with a Dutch girl, Renee, who was very strict on her budget and was to adventurous anyway to want to rent a taxi for the day. It turned out to be the best way to travel. We spent about $5 each for meals and some bus fares, and we saw the three best castles, and met some interesting people along the way, (some more interesting than we’d like). I’m sure I’ll give some detailed, (and wrong), descriptions of the day and the castles with the next batch of photos.

So, now I’m in Yemen. First day, I get to the airport and sit for two hours because the cops apparently wanted me to pay to leave the airport but neglected to tell me so. They had me sit in the corner until I figured out the scam, which I never did. I was just so happy to finally be in Yemen, I figured they were messing with me in some way, and, screw it, I’ll just sit here and do what I’ve been doing for the last three weeks - squat. I read "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest" for the whole time, and smiled at the cops when they went past, which seemed to piss them off because they couldn’t come right out and ask me for money, and I didn’t seemed to be getting the message. Finally the kid who was sent to pick me up got tired of waiting and argued our way out of there while I finished another chapter. I was shown the school and to my apartment, (see photo that looks like Van Gough’s room in the assylum), and was on my own.

This place is crawling with Americans, oddly enough. In my two months in Egypt and Jordan I probably met a half-dozen Americans. I’ve met that many living here a week. Don’t have an explaination for it, but if I don’t find one I’ll make one up for the next dispatch. One American who lives in my building, Theo, showed me some restaurants and grocery stores a long way away from our neighborhood, but that didn’t help me for the first few days. Next day I started class and then went foraging for food the rest of the day. I think I ended up with a couple bananas and the three Cup-O-Noodles I bought the night before. Next day I ate the box of crackers and half the bag of cookies, some more bananas, and that was the end of the supplies I bought on that first night. The next night I cooked, (this email is FULL of surprises, isn’t it?!). The thing I’m learning is that, unlike Egypt and Jordan, this place isn’t just bustling to make a buck. Restaurants open and close about three times a day, and if you don’t eat on everyone else’s schedule, you’re screwed. The other thing is most of the restaurants worth eating at, (there are surprisingly few I’m finding), are outside of Old Sana’a, where I live, so you really have to learn your way around to avoid starvation - or having to cook on a regular basis. Lonely Planet was no help in that regards as their map of Old Sana’a had literally every location on that map wrong. The most prominent site on the map, the "Great Mosque," is labelled as Hill Town Hotel and Cafeteria. The other odd thing is that the foreigners here are actually busy. I don’t know what the hell they’re doing, but they’re doing stuff and I’m just not used to that. I expected to be given the tour by a different person at least every day - that’s what you’d expect when you’re travelling. When you meet someone travelling and you’re going the same direction, you’re pretty much travelling with them until you have to part ways. Here, it’s different. These people are never around. Theo writes for the Yemen Examiner, the biggest english newspaper in Yemen - which is to say it’s bigger than the other one, and he studies at my school. Shawn, my neighbour, from Texas, teaches English and studies Arabic. Margaret, the German girl downstairs, studies Arabic and… well, I’m not sure what she does, and I’m not sure I want to know, but she’s never around either. Basically, there’s some sort of lives that these people have, and their work and school doesn’t explain all the time they’re never home, but needless to say, it’s killing me that I don’t know what it is. Again, you’ll get a true or false explaination next time.

Yemen is an odd place. It’s very conservative. Women are always fully covered, exept for the odd prostitute. That’s what I hear anyway. Some public places are basically segregated. Some restaurants are for men only, some have women’s sections, (that I hear are nasty), and a few have separate sections for families to sit together. Women are free to walk around and do what they need and want to do - don’t get the impression this is like it was under the Taliban, but it’s closer than Egypt and Jordan by a long shot. Western women are strongly urged to wear at least loose-fitting dresses and the hijaab, (head scarf). Some were slow to adopt the hijaab and only started wearing it to cut down on the unwanted attention they got from men and children, (the assumption of many that if you aren’t covered, you’re a hoowah). The situation of women here is the thing that bothers me the most here. In Egypt and Jordan you can make the assumption that if a woman is covered it’s her choice. Here, there really isn’t a choice. I’m not here to change the place, but as long as I’m here, the situation is going to bother me.

I talked to some Yemeni women the other day. I know! Holy shit! I was asked to talk to some English classes at a Canadian business school. They had the women on one side and men on the other and they got to ask me questions, (native English speaker - you get the idea.) In one class most of the women were professionals - a doctor, two dentitsts, teachers, etc. The men were all shiftless fuckers: "I, uh, am taking this class because I don’t want to get a job…" Tool! The women had personalities too, which were wasted on the men. Anyway, after not talking to Yemeni women for my first two weeks here, yes I got a boner talking to classrooms full of them. It’s getting like that. If I catch a glimpse of a wrist or an ankle on the street I get wood. It’s like whatever you can’t see or do with a woman, that’s what you get horny for when you finally get a little.

I get the impression that this country’s future is going to be in the hands of the women here. 60% of the college students are women, and 100% of the worthless sacks lying on the street with a fat wad of qat in their mouth looking like Billy Staples six hours after Red Bank, are men. When that half of the country under 15 hits adulthood, the men running this place better turn them loose to do the work because this place is fucked without them. A Saudi-American friend is going to meet the Yemeni Minister of Human Rights this week and she said she’d try and take me. That would be interesting. I’m trying not to get involved in the politics with this place but I don’t think it’s any secret that I’m obsessed with politics and this place is like a free buffet with only a slim chance, as a westerner, of ending up in the political prison. Yes, they have a separate prison for them.

The other major difference between Yemen and the other two countries is the children. About half the country is under 15. Think about that: half the country is under 15! IT IS "Lord of the Flies" here. I go into a small grocery and haggle with an 8 year-old over a sack of onions - and get hosed of course. Most of the kids mind their own business, some of them like to say "Hello. How are you? What’s your name?" and what-not. A few are little shits that like to yell in your face or trash talk westerners from the sidelines. One wanted to hit me with a water balloon but wouldn’t do it until I looked away, so I denied him his moment of glory. It’s not as horrible as some of the westerners make it out to be. It’s more odd seeing SO many damn kids everywhere. I worry what this place will be like in 10 years when the half of the country becomes young adults with nothing to do. I’m glad I won’t be here.

So that’s the basics of Yemen. The plan right now is to spend the month here, then probably head back north to Damascus, Syria to finish my Arabic lessons. I don’t know why but as much as I had been told by travelers that Syria was a great place to travel, nobody told me that it was among the most religiously liberal of Muslim countries. And it’s cheap, and more things to do. So I’m looking into relocating there. There’s also a possibility to spend a few weeks next months in Africa with my good friend, Lynn, who is scouting human rights connections for her doctoral field work in Rwanda, the Congo, and Uganda. She probed me for interest in joining her and I’d really like to do that. I had thought of doing some of Africa before I left, but I wouldn’t pass up the chance to travel there with Lynn.

That’s it for now, except for the captions for the attatched batch of photos. Hope you’re all swell, and enjoyed the holidays. I did.

Bonedaddy

The photos:

My apartment in Old Sana’a. It’s basically Van Gough’s room in the assylum, but with toilet paper and Cup-O-Noodles. It’s costing me $100 a month, but if I was staying past this month I’d probably be able to talk it down to $50.

2098 - View out my window on the first night in the joint. I left the shutter open for a few seconds to brighten up the image, but you get the picture, (literally).

2100 - same view, next day.

2136 - The outside of my building. The oldest documentation on the house that the owner has is 350 years old. About 70 years ago it was restored and the top three floors were added. Some things they kept though. Every morning I jump out my window and slide down a brontosaurus’ tail and land in my car to paddle off to school.

Friday I went up to the mafraj, (a special room for hanging out with the boys, and western women, and smoking the sheesha, but mainly for chewing qat), and we had a special guest - the Yemeni Minister of Poetry and Art. He wasn’t too amused by my demonstration of how NOT to chew qat. Virtually all Yemeni men chew huge cheekfulls of qat, a mildly narcotic plant, and they set aside several hours a day and at least one day a week to do nothing else. It’s expensive, it smells like moldy ass, it apparently tastes worse, it ruins the gums and teeth, but apparently it’s great stuff! I’d try it if it weren’t for that whole alcoholic thing. And the assy smell.

The rest - photos of Old Sana’a from my window, roof and walking to the internet cafe. Old Sana’a is one of the oldest, and best preserved medinas, (walled city), in the Arab world. The architecture is unlike any other in the world. The city was made a UNESCO world heritage site in the 1980s. These are incredible buildings - the detail in their designs and the care with which most of them are maintained. The city is literally an art gallery. There are about 50 mosques in the city, each a little different than the others. They actually keep the streets clean too. There’s always someone collecting trash and sweeping the streets. I’ll have a ton of pictures when I get out of here. I also plan on seeing some of the sights of Yemen this month. Some of the most remarkable scenery and buildings on top of massive boulders and steep cliffs - all kinds of cool shit. Enshalla.