On My Own

Got sick of being dependant on everyone in the house to accompany me on such tasks as buying toilet paper and Diet Cokes and so I decided to take Friday (a day off here) to try and understand the city of Sanaa.

Navigating the city is challenging for a few reasons. The first is that everything looks the same. All the buildings have the general same architecture and when I look at it all I really notice is that it doesn’t look Samoan. Also, all the signs are in Arabic. I am not talking about the street signs (which don’t exist, another reason why it is hard to find your way around) but rather the store signs. Because I can’t read them I can’t use them as points of reference. Finally, a lot of the shops close for prayer and other events and a closed shop looks completely different from an open shop. The storefronts are basically garage doors and there are no windows. When you open you open the door and that becomes your entrance as well as your display. So on a Friday morning when everything is closed you can think that you are in a different city even if you’ve lived here for a year.

So I announced that I was going out by myself to check out the main shopping street, Hadda street (sort of the Ave for Sanaa). Cyanne decided to send me out on a scavenger hunt and buy various things from useful stores. Unfortunately these so-called Yemen experts forgot that everything is closed on Friday until about 4PM, so the hunt was pretty much a failure, but I still managed to find all the stores and confirm that they were in fact closed.

I wanted up to the old city, about an hour walk and decided to head in. I wouldn’t have tried it if it wasn’t for the fact that I left armed with my trusty GPS and the compass that Ram gave me as a goodbye present. I pulled out the GPS and stood there trying to look inconspicuous while I waited for it to calibrate. All day, by the way, I saw not one westerner. I was the only unveiled woman there, and I soon realized that I was standing there with a device in my hand that looked (with it’s little raised antenna and me glancing at it nervously every ten seconds or so) like a bomb trigger.

I marked the position of the front gate and headed in. The old city is huge and pretty much a maze. Everything looks EXACTLY the same, even to people who have lived there for a while, and all the streets will bend into subtle u-turns and dead ends without any warning. I didn’t have a hard time, however. I had a map of the old city which would have been useless if it wasn’t for the fact that all the mosques (about 20 in all) were marked. The mosques, with their huge towers, were easy to spot and I could sound out the Arabic well enough to figure out which one I was looking at. By hopping from mosque to mosque like a character in frogger I was able to get around without switching on my detonator-shaped GPS (I would still be there if it wasn’t for the compass, however).

(I decided not to bring my camera. Next time, I promise!)