Day 316 - The Souq

  

Tehran Bazaar
by  kamshots 

I didn't always enjoy shopping in the middle east. In Iran, I made my way through the bazaar often, but I didn't enjoy anything more than looking because in Iran bargaining usually involved trading insults. Bargaining went something like this in Tehran bazaars:

Prospective buyer says, "You want how much for that? You must be joking. It isn't worth half that."

In reply, the seller says, "Your offer is an insult! I wouldn't accept twice that amount. You clearly don't appreciate quality."

Or the salesperson simply grabbed the item out of my hands and put it back on the shelf.

Then there was the fact that my explanations for why I didn't want something were never accepted. "It's too small," I would say to explain why further discussion was not necessary, at which point the seller would lower the price. It took me far too long to realize that pointing out the flaws in the item was a buyer's strategy to get a lower price. I thought it was telling the truth.

But when I got to the other side of the Gulf that has two names, I noticed a different pattern. On the southern side of the Gulf, bargaining was a conversation among friends.  Prospective buyers and sellers got to know one another, usually over a cup of tea or soft drinks, before discussion of prices came up. This was a much more pleasant way to shop.

I enjoyed shopping in the souqs in Doha, Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Dubai, Sharjah, Muscat, and Amman before I arrived in Sanaa. But I have never enjoyed shopping in the souqs more than in Yemen.

The souq in Sanaa's Old City is not like anywhere else, although Cairo's Khan el Khalili was impressive, too. The Old City is not just a marketplace. People live in the buildings there. It is a city within a city where getting lost was likely, but always a pleasant adventure.

Badeehi-style pendant

Bowsani-style pendant

Bowsani-style bracelet

Each person who went with me into the souq introduced me to a different aspect of it. Howard brought Alex and me into the souq from a direction it took me months to rediscover. The part of the souq he introduced me to would forever be Howard's souq to me. The public affairs officer, Chris, brought several of us on an tour of the souq in my first week there and introduced us to World Friend, one of the shops where the owner, Kamal Rubaih, made stunning modern jewelry from bits and pieces of traditional jewelry as well as pieces in the style of the traditional Jewish Yemeni silversmiths. I made many trips back to his shop where he also had museum quality pieces of art from pre-Islamic times hidden away in his attic. He brought a couple of them down for me to see once I had shopped there several times. The regional personnel officer from Bahrain, Gilder (who was also in Barbados while we were there) made one of her regional visits and introduced me to several shops in the central area of the souq where some of the shopkeepers pointed out the various styles of Bedouin jewelry - Bowsani, Badeehi, and Mansouri.

Necklace using Hadramaut design elements
by Kamal Rubaih

Necklace of grapes design by Kamal Rubaih

And then Kathy, who had been in Sanaa on TDY when Alex and I visited in 1999 and came back to help out while the financial management officer was in Aden, introduced me to Mohammed whose shop was just off the main alley and who made it possible for Kathy and me to sit in his shop to study Arabic and try out what we learned with him. I told Mohammed how much I enjoyed dancing as I drove down the street in my car. Three years later when I was able to travel again to Yemen, I stopped in Mohammed's shop and he asked me if I was still dancing as I drove. He also insisted that I have lunch at his home with his family. I let him lead the dance with the car as we traveled from his shop in the souq to his home.

  by  dietmut 

Gilder also introduced me to the Kashmiri Shawl shop which was stocked from ceiling to floor with the most colorful of designs, but hid an even more impressive treasure behind a door that didn't look like a door and was so low we had to duck down to get through. Behind it was a smaller room with every possible color and pattern of Pashmina shawls. I started out with basic black. But then I needed one that I could wear with my Yemeni-style evening dress for the Marine Ball. And who could stop there? I needed a red one. Then a black one with a border. Then a black and brown one with alternating squares of intricate patterns. Then a gray one with turquoise in the pattern that was reversible as a turquoise one with a gray pattern.

I spent more time in the souq than in any other place in Sanaa except my house and my office. I never felt threatened or in danger. Wherever I went, I was surrounded by children who asked me for a pen or to take their picture. They offered to carry my bags and when we reached my car, they would go through the motions that they had seen over and over, presumably without realizing what it meant: they would walk around the car, leaning down and looking under it and in the wheel wells, precautions we took whenever we had left our vehicles unattended in a public area to ensure nothing had been planted. One day during Ramadan when I foolishly entered the souq in my car, not thinking about the fact that the alleys would be packed with shoppers since the fast had just been broken, two men walking alongside my car got my attention as they indicated they would fold my side-view mirrors against the car to reduce the width I needed to get through and then they directed other cars and pedestrians to move out of my way so that I could get through. I knew my guardian angel was on duty, and she had lots of help.

Day 157 - Disneyland

Disneyland image by photographerglen, via Flickr.com

From the day we kids learned about Disneyland, we began planning for our family trip there. Mom got a big piggy bank for us to put our pennies, nickels, and perhaps a dime or two into as we began saving for that trip. In the years we continued our planning even after we moved from one house on Dudrey Court to another across the street, still on Dudrey Court. The coins kept accumulating, but over time, I grew up and thought myself too old to go to Disneyland.

By the time Mom, Dad, and the younger four of my siblings made it to Disneyland, I was through college, married, and living in northern California, closer to Disneyland than ever before, but still too far away to consider a trip there. Years passed until I finally realized that I hadn't outgrown Disneyland. I had just put the dream aside for awhile.

In December of 1972, I put the few things I owned that were too big to fit into my VW bug into the attic of the church in Berkeley where I had worked for the past three years and packed the rest, along with my cat, into the car and headed south to Los Angeles where I planned to spend Christmas with Dad's sister Irene. It was a round-about way to get back to Minnesota before I moved to San Francisco to begin again as a student, this time in graduate school at California State University at San Francisco, but it made sense to head south first because I then planned to head for Phoenix to spend a few days with Mom's parents where Mom and Dad, Joan, Roger, Bruce, and Brian were spending Christmas. I expected to leave two or three days after Christmas for Phoenix, spend a few days there with the family, and then have Joan join me in my car for the rest of the trip to Moorhead. Because I would be so close to Disneyland, I decided to go there the day after Christmas - fulfilling that childhood dream.

Old City of Sana'a by kgbbristol, via Flickr.com

But Dad had other plans. He knew I would be in Los Angeles, and he knew that I had always wanted to go to Disneyland. But he wasn't sure I would make the trip to Disneyland by myself. So Mom and Dad and my four siblings made the trip from Phoenix to Los Angeles the day after Christmas to make sure that I got to Disneyland. We had a wonderful day.

Disneyland has remained a symbol of a dream for me. There is always something in me that can't wait until I finally get to Disneyland. It's as though the real place was just a hint of what Disneyland is meant to be.

image of Yemeni men by eesti,
via Flickr.com

When I was in Doha, Qatar, I recall a conversation with one of my colleagues, Martin, who mentioned a group of people who were planning to travel from Disneyland to Doha. Martin seemed concerned about the trip, giving me the impression that he thought a trip from Disneyland would be dangerous. It was a curious conversation until Martin finally figured out that I wasn't understanding him at all. He was using Disneyland as a code word for a completely different place, a place that we didn't speak of when in most Middle Eastern countries, certainly not over a telephone line. The group of people Martin spoke of were planning a trip to Doha after a stop in Israel. Such a routing meant complications because an entry stamp indicating a stop in Israel in a passport could mean no entry would be permitted into Qatar. Disneyland was used as a symbol of a forbidden place, a curious twist on my thoughts about Disneyland.

image of Yemeni women by
carpetblogger via Flickr.com

The image of Disneyland was very much on my mind much of the time I spent in Sana'a, Yemen. The old city of Sana'a, with its six-story tall adobe buildings complete with gingerbread icing around the doors, windows, and roof lines, conjured up images of Fantasy Land castles. The people walking in the streets of Sana'a seemed very much like fairy tale characters. The men wore the unlikely combination of skirts, sport coats, wide belts with knives tucked in front, and scarves both around their shoulders and on their heads. Many of the women wore very colorful cloths covering them from head to toe with one type of cloth looking like a tie-dyed mask often topped with a straw hat and a tin tray heaped with bags of rice, flour, sugar, or other foodstuffs. In another part of Yemen, the women wore straw hats with enormously tall and pointed crowns, very much like a traditional witch's hat. Living in Yemen was even better than visiting the Disneyland of Anaheim where all the people being visited were only in costumes, not every day clothing, and were paid for performing, not living side by side with those of us visitors.

image of Yemeni woman and child by IRNI,
via Flickr.com

More than 30 years ago, I left Iran, but brought nightmares of the place with me. It took years before those nightmares stopped and were finally replaced by occasional dreams. Less than 15 years ago, I left Yemen, bringing with me dreams of the place that I didn't want to end. In my dreams, I returned to Sana'a Old City's souq where I enjoyed the fragrance of all the spices, along with a few more earthy scents, where I heard the music from the homes above the shops, the chanting of the muezzin in the mosques, where I saw the bright colors of the Kashmir shawls, the coral, amber, turquoise, gold, and silver of the jewelry merchants. Each night as I dreamed of those sights, sounds, and smells, I worried as the quantities of them shrank, reflecting the distance between the real thing and my memories.

Disneyland remains the symbol of a dream for me. I am fortunate to have experienced such varied experiences that seem part of that dream. And I can't wait until I finally get to Disneyland for real.