Save Room for Falafel

Alright, it's time for the RPHDBD (Ranking of Public Health Disasters By Deliciousness):

1.) Public grazing stand at the golden trophy falafel stand in Aleppo.

These folks are geniuses in Aleppo, where the official passtime is snacksnacksnacking away the hours between official meals, judging by the near saturation point of ice cream cone per hand in the afternoon crowds. But you've been dutifully saving room for falafel. So you buy a falafel for about fiftten American cents and you get your watered down chilled salty yogurt drink (ayran), and amble to the back of the joint where about fifty men are crowded about a feeding station nursing a falafel in some state of jagged dismemberment in the left hand, while the right hand darts out onto a table replete with overflowing buckets of mint stalks, green hot peppers, diced carrots, pickled vegetables, cucumbers, extra tahini sauce, small bowls of salt, and bowls full of arugula, maybe some sliced radishes (varies by grazing stand) ... it's not uncommon to see a full grown man dribbling tahini down his chin and trailing a fullblown stalk of mint out the side of his mouth as he munches it steadily closer to down the hatch.

So nobody washes their hands and everybody picks out of the common feeding station ... that falafel and all those extras are so seductively tasty and satisfying to the human grazing instinct that this is easily the most delicious public health disaster in all of Syria.

2.) Orange Juice ('aseer bortakal) pretty much anywhere, but especially outside the big brother umayyad mosque in Damscus.

So the man doesn't wash his hands or cutting board or knife and pours sketchy tap water all over the squeezer ...but this stuff is pretty wholsome and very delicious and, bless those reassuring oranges, they come in their nifty protective peels.

3.) The bus ride from Palmyra to Damscus.

I didn't mind that the bus conducter had to physically remove a small child from a seat in order to present me with "the seat" I had just paid for (OK, it made me feel quite guilty), but then some other little kid vomited on the hot bus (a ripe odor, as I recall) and the conducter walked briskly up and down the aisle spraying liberal quantities of air freshener in an unventilated bus while we were stuck behind a large truck and were consequently already swimming in diesel fumes AND the bus driver was clamly chain smoking ... this was a decidedly undelicious public health disaster. So I stuck my nose under my shirt and got some giggles out of a pair of hijab-wearing young women who caught sight of this olfactorily besieged foreigner.

4.) The food at the bus station in Homs.

I didn't want to go to Homs. Kate and I made specific plans to stay in Hama instead of Homs, but there I was sitting for several hours one afternoon in the Homs bus station, getting whoosy from the thick cloud of tobacco smoke that had accumulated in the upper leverl where the only seats are located. So I took a walk to get some fresh air. Innocent enough. Then the shwarma man trapped me with his delicious-looking chain of pita sandwiches he was dolloping with something-or-other. So I bought a stale crusty one from a pile behind him, one he probably had dolloped yesterday morning, and I decided to get some of that fresh yogurt drink (ayran) I love so well to help wash the stuff down ... ayran is not supposed to taste vaguely of bad tahini. This food was not exactly delicious, but it was delcious in the context of being trapped in a bus station around meal time, and it was almost certainly the meal that had me bedridden for the past two days. Blech.


Unrated, to date:

- Everywhere from Aleppo to Damascus I've seen this smartly dressed chaps with large, elaborately wrought silver jugs strapped to their bellies. From observation, I've determined that they take a glass from a few they keep in holsters around their waist, open a spiggot on the jug, fill the glass with a black liquid, hand it to paying customers who gratefully quaff it down, then spray water from another spiggot, rinse out the glass, and replace it in the holster. Who knows how many people's lips a day touch those few glasses. Certainly a public health hazard. But, more important, who knows how delicious is that black liquid? Not I. Not yet. And some of these clever fellows bob blackberries in this mystery drink. Tantalizing.

- I've already mentioned how the sweat just wicks off the body here, but (and as I type this I'm about to get up and get some water from the cooler in the internet cafe) it really is remarkable how quickly body moisture disappears with each breeze, with each split second of direct sun exposure, with each breath. Now, I find it equally hard to convey just how many mosques there in Syria. One at every few steps. These pious, easy to find, some might even say blessed-by-God buildings, are aso kind enough, each and every one of them, to offer a public water faucet with a tin cup or bowl chained to the faucet. These water sources are always extremely close to a holy building and are almost certainly maintained by holy men, but how can anybody ever wash those cups when they're chained to the faucet, and where does that water come from? It might be unimaginably refreshing in spiritual as well as physical ways...


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Upcoming list: Funniest English language shirts for sale in Syria

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