dispatches from here

Its been a total whirlwind and I’m pretty pooped, so you’ll all have to wait for pictures until the next post. A few days ago I was in Luxor (Egypt) and had a busy travel day: taxi to the airport, flight to Sharm el Sheikh, bus to Dahab, another bus to Nuweiba, bought ferry tickets, another bus to the ferry, a 4 hour ferry ride from Egypt to Aqaba, Jordan, and another bus to the hotel.  No joke.  I managed to make it all happen, in a single day, in the middle east, where nobody knew when anything arrives or leaves.

Aqaba is the southernmost port in Jordan and is uninspiring, but from the beach you can look west and see Israel (about 6 km away!), and then beyond that you can see Egypt (maybe 15km away?).  Then you look east and see Saudi Arabia.  Pretty cool.

Spent the next day off roading in the Jordanian desert (Wadi Rum) with a Bedoiun guide, and now resting in Amman.  Will be heading to London wednesday, and then back to SF.  home sweet home.

I’m pretty behind on posting actual media, so I apologize.  I have 110 gigabytes of photos and 120 gigabytes of video. for real. I’ll bore you with all soon enough.

Just catching up, and I may not get a good post in until I get back home.  The next few days entail more ruins/temples in Luxor, a relaxing felucca ride down the Nile, then a hectic taxi+plane+bus+ferry that will hopefully get me into southern Jordan.

Some photos from Giza….pretty unreal overall.  Going inside the Great Pyramid was a little bit underwhelming, but at least now I’ve been inside the Great Pyramid of Giza.  The area around Cairo is littered with pyramids, with lots more to see…hopefully I’ll have a chance to update!

Check out this NY Times story about an ambush on a group of Lebanese soldiers that happened this morning.  Four of them were killed when their truck was attacked with rocket propelled grenades and machine guns by drug traffickers.  The craziest thing about it is this happened in Rayak, in the northern part of the Bekaa Valley.  I was there, 6 days ago in Zahle and Ksara hanging out in the mountains and wine tasting.  These beautiful, calm, serene towns are only 6 miles away from Rayak!  Six days and six miles is far too close for comfort.

The most bizarre thing about Lebanon is how totally at peace with the situation all of the locals seem.  So comfortable and able to go on living their lives.  I guess you get used to instability after 15 years of civil war.  Reading that bit of news makes me even more excited to be in Egypt.

A two day trip up the Lebanese coast to Tripoli followed by a quick hop inland for some wine tasting in Zahle. Tripoli is an ancient Phoenician city dating to before the 7th century BCE.  Since then, its been ruled by the Persians, Seleucids, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mamluks, and Ottomans.  And it is currently Lebanese, despite Hezbollah attempts to take it over.  In May, 2007 there was fighting between the Lebanese Internal Security Forces and Fatah al-Islam, a jihadist militia focused on the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp just outside the town.  This resulted in the deaths of 170 soldiers, 290 militants, and nearly 50 civilians, along with the destruction of the refugee camp. And in 2008, Tripoli was the epicenter for a fierce battle between Sunnis loyal to the current government and Alawites (a Shia sect) loyal to Hezbollah.  The Lebanese Army intervened a few days later to put an end to the fighting, but tensions picked up again in July and over 30 people died in the combined clashes. Check out this map of hte city breakdown.

But for now, in a period of relative peace (despite heavy military presence), Tripoli is a quiet, mellow escape from the glitz of Beirut.

The coastal town of Tripoli, contested but beautiful.

In the evenings, the corniche (aka boardwalk) is packed with families and young folks eating cotton candy, and riding bikes. In the background, young guys drive cruise by in tricked out cars blasting hip hop.

Barrels of Lebanese wine being aged in the caves at the Ksara winery, which was established in 1857 by Christian priests.

Cars and carts selling all sorts of goodies line the corniche.

Never too young for some hookah/sheesha/nargela

The view from my balcony. And I'm not sure who that laundry belongs to.

The Lebanese coast...beautiful, with some limited access in parts.

Lebanon is so radically different from anywhere else in the Middle East and pretty surreal.  A small country with only 4 million people, it continues to trudge on despite a 17 year civil war (1975 – 1992), war with Israel in 2006, and tensions with Hezbollah (most recently leading to armed conflict in the north in 2007).  So what does that mean?  A strong military presence, remnants of the civil war, and every Western luxury you could imagine.

After spending 6 weeks in Syria (in a refugee camp no less!), arriving in Beirut feels like I’m in a different universe.  How different is it from Syria?

• Replace all of the donkeys in the streets of Damascus (there are a lot!)  with Ferraris.
• Replace hijabs and chadors with Prada and Gucci.
• Replace mud covered shoes with shiny high heels.
• Replace sputtering 1975 Fiat taxis with shiny new Mercedes taxis.
• Replace the rust stains on the walls with bullet holes, which decorate any building over 20 years old.
• Replace pictures of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, with Hezbollah billboards and pictures of Hassan Nasrallah.
• Replace warm, undrinkable local beers with microbrews and $20 cocktails.
• Replace all of the shawerma with….well, shawerma.  Its still a Middle Eastern country, after all.

A beautiful sunset over the Mediterranean from a balcony in Beirut.

The Lebanese military maintains a heavy presence in the city, with tanks and machine guns on most corners. Its a really bizarre sight seeing a woman walk past a row of tanks into a Chanel store. This is the best shot I could get before being stopped by the soldiers.

Bullet holes in blown out buildings surround the new expensive apartment buildings.

Bullet holes in concrete walls, a constant reminder of the painful civil war that tore Beirut apart for 17 years.

Abandoned buildings converted into an urban canvas.

One of the thousands of armed checkpoints all across the city. Almost as many as Syria.

The southern suburbs of Beirut are essentially controlled by Hezbollah, with yellow and green flags and billboards on every corner and the streets in these poor suburbs are lined with pictures of dead Hezbollah militants.

In the southern Hezbollah controlled suburbs, there are more soldiers/paramilitary forces than civilians it feels.

Remnants of civil war.

The Holiday Inn, which during the civil war was the site of a major battle between Christian and Muslim forces. The blown out shell of this 20+ story building stands right next brand new multimillion dollar condos, modern steel and glass skyscrapers with fancy one word names.

Beirut is surrounded by water on two sides, and the Corniche, a wide pleasant boardwalk provides a hangout place for young Beirutis.

The Mohammad Al-Amin mosque, built next to the burial site of Rafik Harriri, was built in 2008. Ita huge, shiny, new, clean, and feels like it descended from another world. It feels so magical and out of place, almost like a Disney mosque.

Downtown Beirut is all glitz and glam, and Ferraris are a dime a dozen. I almost got run over by one twice! Porsches, Lamborghinis, Bentleys line the narrow streets of the trendiest neighborhoods as moneyed Beirutis drink and party at bars that rival NYC in exclusivity, with overpriced cocktails, hip sounding names like "Copper" and "Rehab", and lines around the block.

The American University of Beirut (AUB) is one of the most prestigious universities in the Middle East.  Established by American missionaries in 1866, this place is completely awesome and feels like any US college campus.  Note to any college students reading this: do a semester abroad here.  All of the classes are taught in English and you hear English and French chatter all over campus.

Modern buildings, spotlessly clean campus, water fountains, the works.

Gorgeous athletic fields overlooking the Mediterranean Sea

Inside the Bechtel Engineering Building...we have a Bechtel building at Cal as well, but its not as nice as this one.

Amazing! It seems like 95% of the Middle East consists of chain smokers. Impressive to have a smoke free campus.

I'd definitely want to do a semester here!

Part of the campus square, with students constantly milling about. The whole campus feels so alive and really indistinguishable from a college campus in the US.

A beautiful mix of ultra modern and classic brick buildings.

Falling a little behind on the blog because life has been moving pretty quickly, bouncing around between countries, and working on the documentary project. But fortunately, I’ve continued the journal, which is really starting to look and feel awesome.

Great party, celebrating, singing and dancing in the hills of Eastern Syria on a gorgeous day.  Exactly what Kha B’Nisan should be about. It definitely felt a little magical to be able to celebrate it here in Syria, especially because my undergrad honors thesis was about the development of the New Year’s Festival (Akitu) throughout Mesopotamia.

As usual, I’ve fallen behind.  But Adam has picked up the slack and posted some photos from Assyrian New Year (Kha B’Nisan) and the villages around Hasaka.

Check out his post!

I’ll be putting up some New Year’s pictures soon too.

So after an awesome week bouncing around Lebanon, Adam and I were sitting in a cafe in Beirut and decided to head to Egypt! A little bit of a whim and no real plans.  Ten minutes ago, we booked a one-way flight to Cairo that leaves in 4 hours!  Talk about last minute travel.

Its been a pretty amazing 2 months so far. Imagine waking up in the morning and thinking to yourself, “Hmm…I wonder what country I want to be in tonight?” Now THAT is a liberating feeling!

A motorcycle ride from the Syrian Security Forces...Read on for more details!

I’ve been getting a little bit of flak for not updating the blog in the past week or so, and I apologize.  But it wasn’t my fault, blame it on Bashar al-Assad.  And this (long) post is being written from the relative safety of Beirut!

A little bit of background.  Syria is a police state, but not a very good one.  Everything here is logged and asked about.  Want to get a hotel room? Passport please.  Want to use the internet? Passport please.  Want to get on a long distance bus?  Passport, occupation, father’s name, and mother’s name, please.  Arriving in Dier-Az Zur? Passport please.  Come this way, have a seat, get comfortable and answer these 10 questions.  At first it’s a bit scary, but it very quickly becomes annoying and time consuming.

And where does all this information go?  In dusty beat up binders in piles on the floor.  They aren’t indexed or organized in any particular fashion, and each time my info is jotted down in the officer’s sloppy Arabic handwriting, they spell name differently.  They have to transliterate from English and each person has their own way of doing.  And I don’t understand how it makes anyone safer or my less threatening if they know my father’s name…I could make up a different one each time and they’d never be able to figure it out.

Imagine this: someone decides to find me or where I’ve been. They have to call all of the thousands of police checkpoints across the country and have them look through their piles of binders for some guy whose name they spell differently each time. This is supposed to scare me? In America, while not a police state (yet), we’re tracked much better and more accurately.  If someone wanted to, they could figure out where I’ve been for every  second of every day for the past 10 years just based on my cell phone and credit card charges.

(continue reading…)

The satellite view of the Eastern Syrian Desert. There's basically lots and lots of sand and rocks, and the green strip bisecting it is the Euphrates river. Seen from above, you can really appreciate how important it has been throughout antiquity and how it was able to sustain civilization for thousands of years.

On our way to the eastern Syrian town of Hassake, we stopped over in a small town on the Euphrates River called Dier as-Zur for the night.  This has got to be one of the dustiest places I have ever been, with a fresh daily 3mm coat of dust on everything in sight once the sun sets and the winds pick up. It actually hurts to breathe in the evenings and visibility is minimal.

During the day we wandered down to the banks of the Euphrates River and had a chance to see one of the two rivers that defined Mesopotamia and gave birth to the ‘fertile crescent’ and the first civilizations of the ancient Near East.

I came across a group of local kids swimming in the river and couldn’t pass up an opportunity for a baptism in the Euphrates.  Relatively clean water, cool and crisp, wide and slow moving.  A swim in the Euphrates is definitely an unforgettable experience.

The Euphrates at Dier Az Zur. This used to be an old Assyrian village many generations ago (the name means 'Small Church'), but there aren't any left there now. In the 1990's it turned in a boom town when oil was found nearby. Local kids were jumping off the bridge into the river, a temptation I was able to avoid. Those splashed in the river are me...swimming against the slow current.

Swimming with the local kids in the Euphrates!

Bedouin tents and families are sparsely scattered across the Syrian desert.  Although no longer living as traders and nomads, their homes and dress haven’t changed much and you’ll still see an occasional camel.

Bedouin tent in the desert, just off the side of the ruins in Palmyra

After a week and half of non-stop interviewing, filming, photographing, editing and translating, the project is nearly complete. In addition to the photodocumentary project I came here to do, I’ve joined forces with Adam Teale to wrap the photos in a short documentary film format. With the bulk of the work behind us, a first draft of the video completed and reviewed, we decided to leave Damascus and continue exploring Syria. Damascus definitely has a different feel and atmosphere from the rest of Syria. It’s a harsh, mean city where everything you try to do is a serious chafe and it seems everyone is out to get you. It didn’t help that I was living in the refugee camp, which is even worse than the rest of Damascus. After my fourth week there, I’m pretty excited to get out.

I’ve been pretty busy in Damascus with project related work. Aside from the refugee health project, I’ve also been working on my MD thesis, which is the physician workforce distribution and health policy research I did in the year between my third and fourth years of med school. The refugee health project is nearly complete, I just submitted the final version of my thesis (from Damascus and before the deadline!), and now I feel hugely relieved and free to travel.

Our first stop was Palmyra, about 4 hours by bus from Damascus and one of the most impressive archaeological sites in Syria. Although its mentioned in Assyrian texts from Mari dating to the 2nd millennium BCE, it was incorporated into the Seleucid Empire in the second century AD, and later grew in prosperity under Roman rule.

Riding through four hours of flat, barren desert to Palmyra. Eastern Syria really looks like the photos that the Mars Rovers send back.

Sunset in the desert

The Temple of Bel! The god after whom I was named...I wasn't sure if I should pray here, or wait and be prayed to...so I just took pictures instead.