Hit the Ground with a Thud

I've come to accept the fact that I'm not going to do a solid poo for three straight months. I've been here a week now, long enough to have my travel legs back a-flex and pulsing. But there is something inside my body, small and annoying and bug-like, which really seems to like it down there, which I imagine to have set up a cushy little La-Z-Boy, which has had me feeling like a tourist of toilet bowls (some squat, some sit-down, all ceramic), and which I have finally come to accept as a part of me, albeit flawed. I'm going to blame the thing in me for the slow start here, diary-wise.

It's felt like a year. It's been nine days. It's hot, dirty, noisy, crowded. My four days in Damascus were good, it's a nice, palpably ancient city with many explorable aspects (I'm not Lonely Planet). Then Homs for a night, which was typical only-white-guy-in-town fare, a shitty one-star hotel with literally horrifying toilets, which previously I would have revelled in, these toilets -- the lack of pretension, the lack of tourist luxe -- felt tough and intrepid and authentic in, but which now it turns out I just feel weak-kneed and vulnerable in. Interesting.

And now I dwell in Hama, which is pretty green for the Middle East. Quite zanily, it has water wheels: big, creaking, giant wheels embedded in the river (Rebel River, named so for its unconventional south-to-north flow, instead of the usual north-to-south get-your-flow-on around the old Mesopotamia [Go river, go!]), formerly performing an irrigation function but now merely cosmetic, wheeling around in big whomping circadian loops for onlookers. I like these wheels, their sound. Like dinosaurs passing by on some distant plain, big friendly tourist dinosaurs. They have a soothing effect.

And the soothing effect is turning out to be especially important here, I'm finding. The Middle East, what I've seen of it thus far, isn't really to my, uh, likings. I've been charmed by the impossibly old buildings, brought awestruck to my knees at the mountains abutting town. But there's something uncaring and ascetic about the place, the general landscape. Just desert life, I guess. As a died-in-the-wool Landscape Man, I thought I'd be feeling it wholesale, the whole Lawrence of Arabia thing. Nay, it turns out I'm having to work very hard to even begin to appreciate the dust in the eyes, the plain ochre palette, the rocks and rubble and million variations thereof.

Here is the beef of it: 3rd world, Islamic culture, authoritarian politics. Do you like that combination? Do you think it adds up the sum of its parts? Do you want to live here yourself, with your young family? How exactly do people live meaningful lives here? And what comes first when it comes to the foundry of culture: the chicken or the egg? Questions like these are what occupy me, full-time. This, dare I say it, is the Middle Eastern experience. And 'culture shock' I don't think quite nails it, for it's not the kind of thing that can just be ridden on out of by me, nor gussied up and repackaged by the thing itself. It's something deeper, more pervasive.

So what exactly am I getting at? I have not had a very good time thus far, but that don't matter. I am experiencing some very rich stuff, a good dose of authentic Islamic culture, of Arabic culture. There are some interesting turns of action happening soon: a stay at a bi-religious monastery in the mountains, a homestay with some Australian-Syrians in a place wonderfully off-the-map. I will write about these things, plus more. I think the open writing out of my thoughts might help positively shape my being here, because I sure am having a lot of thoughts, and not all of them favourable to the place hosting me. I don't want to be the ungrateful guest, the big imperialist ingrate. I am lucky, I am here. What you and I are about to experience is the western crescent of the Middle East as seen through the eyes of a naive Australian tourist, doing his best.

This place, it's not quite Kansas.