ma salama, ya damashq!

My last few days in Damascus were spent with friends and the intangible character of the city. On my final night, after enjoying my last sunset on the highest ledge of the Jebel, I joined my remaining Damascene friends at a restaurant that overlooked the Omayyad Mosque, smoking argileh and talking to amazing people, before heading off to dance to 80's music at Jackson's... as it should have been.

I've been asked a lot lately what I will miss most about Damascus. This has been 9 months of my life... there will be a lot to miss. Honestly though, number one is the people. Damascus weeds out most of the narrow-minded ones... the ex-pat community here is so special.

And then I will miss the city itself. When I came back to Damascus in January, I had a few days of complete uncertainty with my choice to return, bordering on regret. My brief stay in America had left me wanting more, and the two people I was closest to in Damascus had just left. Then one day I was walking down the main road from my Sharia Qassa house to Bab Touma. As the road leads into the square, a string of brightly colored flags hangs above the traffic. I remember looking around and fully taking in this perfect Damascene evening for the first time since my return. A billboard of Arabic script, the swarms of people, the houses scattered down the side of mountain in the background. Women dressed in nakabs, in red heels, in shirts that say “Another break fast with you?” and other meaningless, slightly sexual English phrases. Groups of shabab with gelled hair, men selling grilled corn on the sides of streets. The sound of the call-to-prayer. I remember watching the orange sun set behind a simple blue-roofed mosque and its neighboring minaret. After that, I did not regret, even for a second, my decision to come back to Damascus.

I often think that reverse culture-shock is exaggerated. Whenever I go “home” to anywhere, it only takes me a few hours to feel like I never left. But I know that when I buy something from a store or order something at a restaurant, my instinctual response will be “Shokran kateer” not “Thank you.” I am sure that at first I will be taken aback by all of the girls wearing shorts. When I say “Israel,” I will probably lower my voice, if I use its name at all. The clean streets, the lack of habibi music, the fact that I don't stand out at all... this will take a little while to wrap my mind around again.

But tonight I am staying on a couch in the living room of a hostel in Beirut, mere feet away from an awkward Tunisian teenager. It is my last day in the Middle East, probably for a long time to come. After walking again through the hills of the city, past the most spectacular mosque I have ever seen, past army guards, past Hezbollah flags, I am sitting in a cafe with what will hopefully be my last Turkish coffee for a while. An Enrique Iglesias song is playing. And I wouldn't have it any other way.