Syria Day three

i remember this day very well. as i woke up on this day and asked myself how long i already had been in syria it felt like weeks. do you know this feeling? you get to a new place, a new location or region and shortly after you arrived there it already feels like you have been there for ages. the strange thing is that this does happen for the better and the worse. sometimes you get to a place you've never been to and you hate it and the second day already feels like you have been there for way to long. but sometimes, the better times you get to a place and you love it. gladly for me it was the second scenario. i woke up with a smile on my face. if you know me you will know that i am somebody who smiles a lot and seems happy most of the time. but to be honest it is hard for me to smile right after i got up. i am not sure why but i am not really a morning person. but throughout my time in syria i seemed to smile every morning even on the hard ones.

day three was also the day that i realised that something with the light was different in syria. and i am not talking about the light inside the houses, no i mean the sun light. i found it to be really hard to open my eyes in the mornings. it almost felt like they had weights attached. the sun in syria or lets say in the near east gets so high in the sky that it is much brighter than in europe. the new location, the new smells, the new sounds, the new light, the new food all this made me really tired. but never the less i loved every second of it.

one thing that i got to love almost immediately were the muslim prayer times. there is just nothing more amazing than having somebody reminding you to pray. for me these times were always special. often i would sit on the balcony studying arabic and trying to get this complex language into my brain and as i am somebody who learns much easier with music i would listen to some music. but as soon as the prayers would start i stopped all i did, listened and prayed. these calles reminded me each day to pray for our cousines and to pray for my friends. i miss these prayers now and i wish i would have recorded some of them just for me to listen to them again.

it also was on the third day that i was introduced to petra (name is changed) who became my arabic teacher. a lovely widowed woman with a beautiful young daugther totally on fire for the language. she managed it to teach me incredible amounts of vocabulary and grammar in a really short time. sadly as i am now not faced with all these almost alien like looking signs i am not used to it anymore. i do remember some of the normal phrases but all in all i lost the sense of the language, sadly.

ok enough for today.
in the post tomorrow: two crazy taxi rides, alone and the blessing of local friends

be blessed and be a blessing
sebi

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