Syria, Day 12 of 85: Everything about me is starting to make sense.

Today's the last day of Ramadan, so in 11.5 short hours I'm done with fasting for a while. I say "a while" because I have to make up 17 days I missed this season because of poor health, traveling, and girl stuffs. 13 out of 30 days is a weak Ramadan, Maggie. Weak! And I had an awesome 20 days last year. Sigh...but since I have until next Ramadan to make up those 17 days, I'm going to enjoy my regularly scheduled eating for at least a few weeks.

I was dying to do some geeky posts on my livejournal about manga I'm currently in love with, then reminded myself that I'm in a thousands-year-old culture right now and haven't posted anything about that. Now I'm prioritizing. On a related note, why am I such a loser?

My trip getting to Damascus was about 25 hours door-to-door, and involved a 9-hour layover in Russia. I had Euros on me, but I know 2 things in Russian: how to say "good-bye," and how to say "bless you" when someone sneezes. My spectacular language skills necessitated my communicating via pointing at the airport eatery, and thus I spent those 9 hours enjoying sustenance in the form of a small bag of pistachios and a coke. Before I make the return trip, I'm learning how to say in Russian, "I would like an enormous meat sandwich."

I had my fully-charged laptop and Gameboy with me as well as a slew of new games, but I barely touched them during the trip. My hours in the airport and waking hours in the plane were mostly spent contemplating the universe (read: fantasizing about ridiculous things, like Tokyo street gangs and How Awesome Is It That My Left Thumbnail's That Long?) and listening to the 4 CD mixes Becca made me as a going-away present. The mixes were so awesome, so filled with nostalgia, I just...didn't need anything else. She is awesome, and her awesomeness is reflected by her music collection.

On the last plane--the one from Moscow to Damascus--I was crammed into a tiny piece of scrap metal Aeroflot figured could make it the 3.5 hours to Syria. Neither of my two reasonably-sized carry-on bags could fit in the overhead compartment, so they went under my seat and on my lap. I lost most of the feeling below my waistline, but I guess that's what I get for...having carry-on bags for an international trip. I was on the aisle seat next to a nice Russian woman and her adorable 9-year-old son, and about an hour into the trip I figured a little Gameboy might be in order. When I turned it on and started playing, the lady and her son talked in Russian, then switched seats so the boy could be next to me and look over my elbow. Since I'm an adult and he's a child, I offered the game system to the boy, but he shook his head. His mother explained, "He doesn't play--only watches." This pretty much broke my heart, so I went through my games in the hopes of finding some universal game he could play without any real gaming experience (or knowledge of English). And then I remembered I was in Russia. Needless to say, he spent the next 30 minutes playing my Tetris.

Since arriving in Syria, I've discovered that every unique quality I have, every strange desire or inexplicable compulsion, can be traced to my heritage in this place. My study is only qualitative so far, but I'm working on a graph.

1.) Babies are everywhere. EVERYWHERE. And if there's a baby, you pick it up and shake it and kiss it and make it kiss you back because you're in charge. Then you put it down, wait until it's doing something, poke it until it's annoyed with you, then revel while it attacks you with its squishy baby fists. My God...I thought only I did that.

2.) Wild kitties roam freely in the streets. They stare at you, come when you make kissy noises at them, circle you a bit if they think you're cool, then go back to slinking under parked cars. There are no filthy, stupid dogs. Maybe...maybe they're all dead.

3.) The stinky, awesome foods here can rival the stinky foods of any nation. I've had grape leaves wrapped around nuts and croissant filled with olives. I've washed down goaty cheese with coffee you can chew. Please keep in mind that despite these foods, my body itself is still as fragrant as a rose garden in the dewy morning.

4.) The boys touch each other here in platonic love. Like, a lot. Two guy cousins in their 20s will high-five, pull it into a hug, then kiss on both cheeks. Two boys will walk arm-in-arm in the streets, or sit next to each other and drape arms over shoulders. I was nearly killed by a college-aged boy who wanted to dive and grab his friend on the street in a headlock/head rub, regardless of the bystanders in his way. It's so very entertaining.

5.) Nobody here seems to stress about much, and they party whenever they have a free moment. They go to work, they come home, they eat, then they party at night. Oh, they love the night. "You're going to bed?" asks my aunt, who's in her 50s. "But it's only 11 pm!" "You're doing work at 1 am?" asks my cousin, fully dressed and smelling like Axe. "Why aren't you out on the crowded streets partying with me?" I watched my cousins give their young children chocolate on a school day at 10 at night. The Fat Baby (a cousin--he literally has a onesie that says on it, in English, "FAT" for no discernable reason) played with me after dinner one night, watched me fall asleep on his couch, then woke me up three hours later by slapping on the pillow by my head. "What?" he asks with his sinister baby eyes. "I'm not done trying to eat your precious things yet!"

So yeah, that pretty much explains...my life until this point. I never figured I'd get an explanation.

Oh, and I already have a favorite Arabic TV show. It's a comedy about a Muslim farmer and his godless wife getting into really strange situations. They even had a Very Special Episode where they learned that communism is a bad idea. Oh, how I’m so happy that I'm not kidding about that.