Syria Gave Us The Bird

So I cleared it with my colleagues and clients that I would be leaving town for a few days to renew my visa. I had satisfied myself that we were on track with wedding plans and preparations to come back to the States. I was actually starting to look forward to our little romantic getaway in Aleppo (rather than stressing out that it was a time commitment I couldn’t afford to make).

The bus ride to the border was pleasant enough, if uneventful. Our troubles began on the Syrian side of the border. We had crossed through at Masnaa several times to go to Damascus so we figured the Arida border would be something similar. At Masnaa, sometimes you have to wait in line forever and usually it’s total mayhem, but there is never anything resembling a complication. This time crossing at Arida very much started to resemble a complication. We were asked many questions, including quite pointedly and several times what our professions were. We were told that there was a “new order” and that they had to wait for a “telegraph” from Damascus before they could issue our visas. Our fate was sealed when the bus driver made an improvised gesture to us that had an unmistakable meaning, “Do you have any bags on the bus?”, i.e.”We’re leaving you here.”

So I got our remaining bag and we settling into some reasonably comfortable chairs and watched some TV in one of the offices. I complained that we would have to pay a double bus-fare. Little did I know that that would be the least of our worries and that this would be as good as it got for several hours.

The new order seemed to apply to all nationalities at all the borders. We were told that we were the first foreigners to try to cross at Arida since the new order…what an ignominious distinction.

Shortly after settling in, a short man who seemed to have been given the job of dealing with us made a confusing gesture, circling his index finger around his watch. What he was trying to say was, “You are going to be waiting a while and you can’t wait here.” As is the way with many people in these parts, he was deferential and not at all insistent, so it took us a couple of embarrassing minutes to figure this out.

We secured some seats on the hard, white, wooden benches in the lobby. It was here that we would spend the next 10 hours. No, that’s not a typo, TEN HOURS. They were long hours and many of them were cold. After the sun went down, the temperature dropped to 45° or so Fahrenheit and it was barely warmer inside the building than outside. However, they were not entirely uneventful hours. At one point a bearded, long-haired man in some kind of big, baggy (and somewhat filthy) knit sweater wandered in. To my inexpert and somewhat politically incorrect eye, he looked like nothing so much as a homeless person you might see in Tompkins Square Park in NYC. It turned out that he was German and had ridden his bicycle all the way from Germany and was continuing through to Lebanon. Amy tried unsuccessfully to snap a photo of him as he peddled away on his one-speed cruiser with a handlebar basket.

As we were getting into maybe hour 4 or 5 and it was looking like we might be missing dinner at the hotel, I wandered across the road to buy some food from some fellows in a cinderblock shack. I bought a strange sandwich, which consisted of hard-boiled eggs in pita with salad-type stuff and some oils and spices of unknown origin. I was a convert, but Amy’s faith in more conventional sandwiches remained unshaken.

At another point, I thought I was hallucinating as I saw a solitary frog hop-hopping across the floor of the lobby. It was not a figment of my imagination, but a rather a real live Arab frog, no doubt also waiting for a telegraph from Damascus. Amy caught it and I took a photo. She then set it free outside, no doubt to get run over by a taxi or a semi-truck carrying 30 tons of rebar.

One of the men who worked at the Departures desk took pity on us and started periodically offering us coffee and tea and nuts and cigarettes and fruit. As we became a fixture there, the Departures staff were generally nicer to us than the Arrivals staff. Amy’s theory was that since they could do nothing to help us, they could afford to offer us kindness without subtext.

We started noticing people we had seen before coming back in the opposite direction. I saw one particular truck–notable for it’s unmistakable illuminated multiple-snowman motif on the roof–make a second trip back into Lebanon. We kept seeing truck-drivers that bore an uncanny resemblance to Buck Angel (google that at your own risk, ladies and gentlemen…seriously), but it was hard to tell if it was the same guy or several different guys.

We developed an intense (and as turned out later, entirely warranted) dislike for the man who had first told us about the “new order.” He was also the only person on staff who spoke any English and seemed to be in charge of things. He sequestered himself in the office we had to vacate and for hours upon hours we watched him on the other side of some poorly-functioning one-way glass as he did little else besides drink coffee, watch television, and read the newspaper. Our man with the Departures even went in to plead our case at one point, but the boss-man just shrugged. Our contempt became quite palpable.

As of hour eight, I had yet to go to the bathroom. I didn’t have to go, so it wasn’t a problem, but it disturbed me.

Sometime around then, one of the boys who worked at the shack across the street brought us tea. We suspect this was the work of the Departures staff.

We pondered our options. Would Lebanese immigration let us return to Lebanon with a new visa? While it was true we had an exit stamp, if this were possible we could have theoretically gotten our new visa right then without even leaving the building. If we were able to return without a visa and let it lapse, we would pay an indeterminate (but presumably hefty) fine upon leaving at the end of the month, and more importantly would probably not be allowed to enter the country again one we left. Despite all these heady considerations, I think the main thing that we were sad about, though, was that we were missing Aleppo. Amy had made us a reservation for a suite at a fancy hotel at a discount rate because she had met the owner during a previous visit. And the longer we waited, the more of an investment we’d made in holding out for the visa. Also, as a consequence of this “new order”, we probably would not attempt to go to Syria again.

An interesting side-note to all of this is that, while we were certainly nonplussed by the whole situation, we were never quite miserable. At times we even enjoyed ourselves. I can’t really think of anybody else that I could’ve really done something like this with without partially losing my mind. Just thinking about that made me happy.

Another contributing factor to keeping our spirits up was the realization that there are plenty of people who have to go through something like this every time they cross a border. Especially, people of Arab descent trying to go to Europe or the States post-September 11. I think about this every time someone bitches about being “treated like a terrorist” because they have to take off their shoes in the airport. I would suggest that until you’ve been questioned for 6 hours under threat of deportation, you have no idea what being “treated like a terrorist” really feels like. Now I’m not saying that we were being treated like terrorists, but rather just profoundly incovenienced. I’m just saying that as an American sometimes I find it easy to forget how easy I generally have it when travelling.

But I digress…

So finally at around half-past-midnight, we decided to cut bait. We asked for our passports back and the boss-man asked us a bunch of stupid questions which at this point we had no patience for.

Him: So, you will not return to Syria again?
Us: Not if it’s always going to be this difficult.

Him: I think that you should wait till the morning and the telegraph will come then.
Us: But we can’t sleep here.
Him: I know.

Him: So, I cannot decide for you whether you stay. It is your choice.
Us: Yes, we know. So give us our goddamn passports already.

We finally got our passports and started walking, out of the building and across the parking lot. Our Departure guy stopped us and asked for our passports and then led us back inside and talked to another guy. The other guy went into the office with boss-man. Part of me was thinking, Ah, finally someone is doing something about this situation and we’re going to be in our fancy suite by 3am. Another part of me was thinking, Shit, if this was all it took, I really wish that someone would’ve brought the noise about 7 hours ago. We had taken the tea mugs when we left, with the intention of returning them across the street, so I also thought, I wonder if they thought we were stealing those. But alas, noise was not brought, or at least not sufficiently so. They emerged from the office, handed us back our passports, and told us we were free to go.

We walked back to the border and waited where a Syrian soldier was inspecting a car ahead of us. In a final infuriating moment, the boss-man walked up behind us, pointed past the guard and said, “There is Lebanon. Go!”

It was kind of funny, walking across the bridge back into Lebanon, feeling disenfranchised. Syria had given us the bird. The flightless bird. Syria had given us the penguin, or perhaps the chicken.

The first two things I noticed was that the Lebanese immigration office was warmer and the young soldiers behind the partition spoke English. One of them had a sister in Austin, TX. True to form, they offered us seats and coffee and fruit. We waited there in relative comfort for a bus to arrive and other than the fellow at customs ripping us off changing money (absorbing a $6 overage), the wait was without incident. I noticed, not for the first time, the placard reading “Foreigners & Arabs.” This placard seems to be in all immigration offices in Lebanon and it makes we wonder why they make the distinction. If there was one queue for “Foreigners” and one for “Arabs”, I could imagine there might be some reasoning behind it. But here, it’s the same queue. The only thing I can think of is that it is a courtesy; travellers from Syria or Kuwait or Qatar do not want to be thought of as mere “Foreigners.”

We laughed with one of the soldiers about the German bicyclist who had been through 7 hours earlier. We were told that the German was actually going through Lebanon, back through Syria, through Jordan and Israel and eventually to Egypt. Wow.

At around 3:30am, a bus finally arrived. It was a ramshackle affair with busted seats and shocks dating back to the Carter administration, but we didn’t care. When I asked the driver how much was the fare to Beirut, he waved me off with a smile and some Arabic…something like “Salam Aleikum” but not quite. It was a bouncy, drafty 2+ hours but when we pulled into Charles Helou bus terminal as the sun was coming up, everything was all right. Amy asked again about payment upon exiting the bus and was waved off. I said goodbye to the bus driver and his “conductor”, but they stopped me, and simultaneously made a rubbing of fingers against their thumbs and said “money money money money.” Ha, I thought, that’s a new one. Act like it’s a favor when I’m in a position to negotiate and then insist on an inflated sum when I’m powerless to haggle. So, I paid $10 for the two of us when it should have been more like $6. Ok. Fine. I blame Syria for that.