Yemen Today: TALES FROM THE OTHER SIDE: Destination … Sana’a

TALES FROM THE OTHER SIDE: Destination … Sana’a
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Mahwash Badar on 01/11/2009 06:28:00
 
We’ve all seen and fallen in love with Friends’ reruns. We all know Chandler
Bing’s habit of falling in and out of relationships, and I’m sure we all
remember the one time when he so wanted to escape his irritatingly nasal
girlfriend that he told her on a mere whim, “I can’t see you anymore. I’m
going to Yemen.”
So when I told my friends that I would be moving from my home country to Yemen,
most of them said,
“The same country Chandler said he’d go to hide from Janice?”
Well, yeah.
I really didn’t know much about what life would be like here, I didn’t even
Google it. I didn’t know many people (wait, make that zero people) who had
been here before me so I couldn’t talk about it to anyone the way you talk
about … I don’t know, New York? Zurich? Even Milan. Had anyone in my
friends’ list been to Yemen? None. Unless you counted an ex-colleague of mine
who spent a few days in Aden on a business trip. But that was it.
You tell people you’re going to Yemen – and the first question they ask you
is … why?
Why would anyone come to Yemen, I’d muse to myself later.
I came here because the firm my husband worked with provided consultancy to a
company here. He had been here for over two years but I couldn’t really make
out from our conversations before marriage what to expect from a country I know
so little about. I figured the best possible way was to take it as an adventure
and discover it the way you try a new food; eyes tightly shut and expecting the
worst.
So as I walked towards gate 263 at the Dubai airport I saw the waiting lounge to
be considerably small. Two kids were snoozing on their father’s lap and a
couple of white men and women seemed in a hurry to board the plane. They kept
checking their watches every two seconds.
Business trip, I told myself.
I wished I was in their place. A quick seven day tour of Sana’a and that was
it. But I knew that until my husband’s job location shifted, we were here for
good.
The plane boarded. My husband went to sleep and I turned around here and there
to see if I could talk to someone about the city. Get a little heads up.
Unfortunately it was six in the morning and most people preferred snoozing
rather than delivering lectures on life in Sana’a.
During our bus commute to the Sana’a airport, I sat next to a French woman who
befriended me out of mutual love for a toddler sitting between us. “First time
here?” she asked. Maybe she read the curiosity in my expression as I kept
looking out the window.
“Yeah. What’s the city like? What’s Yemen like?”
“Oh it’s beautiful.”
I raised my eyebrows, “No kidding?”
“Oh yeah,” she replied and began narrating tales of the many historical
sites Yemen offered. The Tomb of the Queen of Sheba. Cities thousands of years
old. Valleys thousands of years old.
“Oh,” was all I said in response. Did all that mean I was going to live in a
city where nothing new existed?
That day we were too tired to go sightseeing and even shopping for that matter.
But the one thing I noticed on my ride home from the airport and on the way to
lunch at a local restaurant … Yemenis had a distinct culture. In a world where
mass homogenization was creating cultural duplicates everywhere, where all girls
wanted to speak and look like Angelina Jolie and all boys wanted to be head
bangers and star rappers like Kanye West, Yemenis stood amidst the giant wave of
cultural globalization and remain singularly unique. Everything from their
clothes, to their food, to their taste in chewing Qat. They stood out because
they didn’t give in – as much as other countries in the Arab world have –
to the modern uniformity. They kept up to the times in their own way. They built
big shopping malls and value chain stores – but they wore the same clothes and
ate food the same way they did a hundred years ago. For them, cultural change
meant only to a limited degree.
Hmm. I thought as I stood at the gates of Bab al-Yemen the next week after I
came here.
“What a quaint, interesting old city,” I said to myself, as I walked past
shouting street vendors selling coats and perfumes and what appeared to be
digital cameras.
The peddlars and oil mills inside? The antique-styled jewelry, the three old
women selling apricots, raspberries and tomatoes, respectively? The Star of
David and the old mosque? The view of the old city on the right and the parallel
civilization of Land Cruisers and Prados on the left?
Well. There’s plenty more where that came from.