Hadramout
Who knew so much could happen in four days?
To save you sanity, I'll put the major points in their own little sections, but for non-high-speeders, again, this might make the page slow to load.
Weather
It's hard to say exactly how hot it gets in the Hadramout. On Thursday, our first full day in Sa'yun, roommate Jessica's digital alarm (of all-purpose goodness) read 110* Fahrenheit--43*, for any metric-users--at noon. This is just before the really hot part of the day/siesta, so no one knows how hot it actually got. At night, things cooled down to a temperate 90*, and believe me, after a few days of those high temps, ninety feels downright pleasant.
However, because of this, everything in Sa'yun was hot. The walls of buildings were hot to the touch, the ground is hot, the trees are hot, the air is hot, the floor of our third-floor room was hot, even the cold water tap was lukewarm. In retrospect, the hotel would have been really wonderful in the winter--leaving one's towel on the rack for the duration of a shower made it seem like it had been heated, and the floors were always nice and warm anyway, but it was just really weird to get used to the idea that even stonework could be hot.
So hot that I made a post about it. (Like I said, you know you're in trouble when even the Yemenis tell you a place is hot.) Actually, I'm really appreciating the cold front that's coming through Sana'a right now more than I ever thought possible. (Seventy-five, how cool and wonderful!)
Dramatis Personae
Jessica D: roommate for good and for the trip; a sweet Georgian girl with a sassy attitude on feminism and a tendency to never suffer fools lightly.
Victoria: classmate from Boston and an avid ballroom dancer; bus-buddy for the trip with whom I got squished, and temporary roommate as well.
James and Ian: two big dudes who shared the back seat of the bus with us. Both are over six feet tall, making the four of us cramped on the ride no matter how we tried to re-arrange.
Bernard: a Catholic theologian from Germany who also happens to be specialized in archaeology; he sat in the row in front of us and swapped travelling stories, and was a fascinating demi-prof when we visited some of the ruins later in the trip.
Elke: likewise a German; an truly elegant but very hospitable woman who sat with Bernard and shared her candy with we back-seat folks.
Rumi and Ayesha: an American couple who have both studied some classical Islamic sciences in Tarim and other places; fun-loving and more than a little mischievous, a few well-placed cracks from each of them kept the mood light on the ride out.
Piyali, Mariel, and Max: likewise classmates who made sure we took plenty of photos to bring back to our profs.
Abdullah: bus driver of our group with a serious qat addiction and a tendency to lay on the horn a little more than is strictly necessary, even in Yemen.
Ibrahim: bus driver for the other group who insisted on getting his photo taken with everyone and a serious thing about being the first one to arrive at any given destination.
Ramsey, Abdul-aziz, "Big" Jessica, Sergio, and Muhammad: Profs or representatives of the YLC who more or less tried to keep us in line.
a full compendium of assorted YLC students, local children, beggars, cab drivers, shop keepers, and military personnel.
In terms of socialization, the bus ride was really nice because we got a chance to meet and hang out with people outside of bayt Sabrii and outside of our classes, who we might not have gotten to know otherwise.
The Trip
Pile twenty people onto a vehicle halfway between a VW minibus and a coach. Pack their bags in around them. Add at least three language barriers, a DVD player that doesn't have a pause button, and a brief stop for a check-in with the army guard stations ever 20 kilometres . Bake at temps of 100 plus for about ten hours, and watch everyone stop wanting to get along.
Well, I exaggerate a bit. The bus ride was really long and cramped and hot, but somehow no one killed each other. We had plenty of stops and saw some really cool stuff. Here are some highlights:
-Noah's Ark: All things told, it's the top of the sandstone cliffs about an hour outside of Sana'a, but local legend has it that the clifftops here are the spot where Noah's Ark ran aground after the flood was over, and that it couldn't be moved from that spot, so it slowly became stone over the years. A cool legend, for sure, but I do have to admit that the formation in question really does look like an enormous boat.
-Dam ruins in Ma'rib: this is pretty straight-forward. In the city of Ma'rib (which I will write on again later), there used to be a huge dam that spanned something like 670 metres (a little less than a half-mile) across what is now a valley floor. The neat architechture here is the remains of sluice gates--big hunks of bedrock on the valley floor with holes drilled into them or other interesting shapes.
-New dam: again, just like what it says. The new dam is a little less dramatic, but built in much the same way the old one was. However, the rights to the dam water are being disputed by three local tribes, so right now no one is using any of it. Yemen is facing a really serious water crisis right now, so leaving millions of gallons of water to evaporate into the air is mind-bogglingly wasteful. (Nevemind that this particular site had so many parasites in the water that they told us not even to touch it.)
-Ramlat as-Sab'atayn Desert: on the map, directly between the cities of Ma'rib and Shabwan.
I've never seen a real desert before, so this was kind of cool for a stretch. It was definitely a real desert, with naught but sand dunes as far as the eye can see for miles in any direction. Not a plant, creature, or even a rock to break these huge crests of sand. There are two things about the Ramlat as-Sab'atayn that I noticed from the bus:
1-The sunsets here are utterly unreal. Rather than truly setting, the sun sinks into the haze of dust and sand over the horizon, so there are no warm, glowing colors. Instead, the sun looks like a massive, blazing silver disk hanging in the sky like something out of a 3-D movie before it disappears into the haze. (If you recall the scene in Star Wars where Luke is staring moodily out into the sunset before he leaves his family, it's kind of the same thing, only without the same sense of the sun being close by and in the atmosphere.) I think it might go a long way to explaining why people thought the sun revolved around the Earth--it really looks like that in the desert.
2-Mirages. The mirages in this desert are even weird in the oldest sense of the word. The sand reflects the light in such a way that rather than seeing phantom puddles in the distance, the dunes about fifty yards out seem to blend in with the horizon and create the illusion that the sky is coming down like a curtain around you. It seems as if you could walk to the edge of the Earth and peak out of the atmosphere to see what else is going on, and it is a weird sensation.
Contrariwise, at night, you can see for scores of miles, so any small wayside towns with fluorescently lit gas stations stand out like beacons. I can't help but wonder if travel is really so different now than from the caravan days--especially considering that we got an armed escort through part of the desert. (Parentals, please don't jump to conclusions; I'm fairly sure the escort was as much to keep us from interfering with refinery traffic as it was for travellers' benefits.)
That's a mouthful, and a very full day of travel. Time from departure to hotel was 14.5 hours.
Day Two
We spent the first half of the day in the Sultan's Palace/Museum in Say'un. It was pretty standard museum fare here, for the most part--a few really great historical photos from all over Yemen were the highlights of the collection--but the building itself was absolutely fascinating. For now, suffice it to say that it was huge and white and dramatic, and afforded and excellent view of the city and surrounding cliffs, but photos will have to speak for the rest later. (They'll also testify to the giant cricket we saw hanging out happily on the museum steps.)
After lunch and our siesta--and I will not change my opinion that a truly civilized country has a siesta midday--we visited the nearby city of Tarim, which has been a center of Islamic study for several centuries (and gained a certain amount of influence among the Wahhabists during a long and convuluted history which I shall save for later). We briefly visited the library there, which had manuscripts on everything from 3-D geometry to law and the study of Muhammad's life, which were all available for check-out or were on display--several of them were 800 years old. That's not even the best part, or the most interesting, though.
The best part is that Rumi and Ayesha arranged to have the whole group pay a visit to the school where they studied a few years ago. Called Dar al-Mustafa (check them out), it's an Islamic school/university where people from all over the world come to study a wide range of topics that are considered "Islamic Sciences." The area that this school is strongest in, though, is the study of Muhammad's life. Because of this, they hold a special "sermon" on Thursday nights, which tells Muhammad's story through prose and through song. We were invited to attend this sermon, and so got a glimpse at what goes on in a Muslim service in addition to the actual sermon itself.
This is how it works:
The men and women of our group split up and went to the separate houses where men and women live and study. Our group was greeted in the courtyard of the women's house, where we met and shook hands with our hostesses and had a brief chance to chat with them before the prayers started. During prayers, we sat in the courtyard outside the mosque area proper with the menstruating women (who are considered by men to be 'unclean' during this part of their cycle and many of whom consider themselves to be getting a break from five daily prayers instead) and young children, and drank Tang--no kidding--and talked a little more. Even the prayers there were full of singing--not the raucous, exhuberant singing that we associate with Christian revivals or the impassioned shouting that we hear from the muezzins in Sana'a, but a more gentle, lullaby-esque kind of singing which was really beautiful and didn't interfere with understanding.
After prayers, we were allowed to come into the mosque, which was only partially finished, to listen to the story/sermon part of the evening's ceremony. As we entered, one woman offered everyone a small dab of sandalwood(?) perfume for their hands--a real luxury when you've got sixty people crowded into a third of the ultimate mosque-space--and another handed out song books to anyone who wanted one. (Hymnals? I don't want to draw any unfair parallels, but that's really what they were.) Then we sat on the floor and listened to the sermon, which was being delivered in the men's house and broadcast via microphone and speakers to our room.
I can't really give much insight to the content of the story--I understood maybe a third of it, but they talked about Muhammad's call to ... Prophethood and his trials during the first few years of Islam. Again, the story was full of singing and was very beautiful in spite of language barriers, and because it's not actually a prayer proper, everyone could get up if needed or whisper some quiet words of etiquette advice to her neighbors.
Afterwards, we adjourned to the courtyard and got a chance to really talk with our hostesses. This school is a feminist's dream come true--there were women of all ages, marital statii, parental statii, from countries all across the world and every race in them, speaking some twenty different native languages plus Arabic. I was sitting next to Ragna (whose name I've surely misspelled--she's a YLC student from Scandinavia) and a Turkish woman named Nass who gave us little nudges about etiquette during the sermon and invited us to her dorm for tea afterwards; many other girls also got invited to stay and chat or drink tea later. Unfortunately, we all had to decline on the basist that we still needed to bus back to Say'un for supper, but it was hard to leave a group that was so welcoming and happy to talk to us all. True, there were a few girls who expressed wishes that we would become Muslims (even Nass made a joke that since Sara is a "Muslim" name, I wouldn't have to change it if I converted), most of them were really concerned that we Westerners and especially the Americans would see their religion as a practice of love and peace. For the most part, I think they conveyed that really well.
Two other interesting items of some relevance:
-The director of the women's school was a slight, older woman of Somali or possibly Ethiopian descent, who had a bemused demeanor and an easy smile. Those readers who ever met Teijo-san of the Minneapolis Zen Center will appreciate what I mean when I say there was a remarkable similarity between the two despite differences in faith and race.
-Fulla is the name of the popular girls' doll in the Arab world, and is a lot like Barbie in that her logo is her name written in swirly pink letters (a Saudi creation, but I won't go there). Like Barbie, she too has a whole line of products for small girls, including the black women's robes (baltou) and hijaab, though she wears neither of these things herself. Two of the very small girls at al-Mustafa where wearing these, which was so ridiculously ironic that I could barely deal with it: Fulla after all is not a very studious character, and was not super popular in the madrasa.
This was without question the most enlightening experience I had in Hadramout, and I think it was for the other girls on the trip as well. I can't gauge what the boys did, since I can only get the info second-hand, but it seems that they received a similar welcome.
What to do on a Friday Afternoon?
On Friday, we visited a small town called al-Hajjarain which is built in an impossible way on top of and into the side of some of the sandstone cliffs about two hours west-northwest of Say'un, and is famous for the honey produced by local bees. Because it was Friday, there was nothing going on at all in this town, so rather than get our honey right away and have it sit on the bus, most of the students wandered around the city for a bit. Turns out, most of our bus ended up playing with a bunch of local kids for a good long while--it was a weird cross between pickle-in-the-middle and real soccer, with everyone on everyone else's team against everyone else. We were playing next to one of the ubiquitous corner shops, so we were free to get "ice cream" throughout, and since it was so cheap, shared with our little friends. (Apparently Hadraami ice cream is a frozen mixture of fruit juice and Fanta stuck onto a popsicle stick, but extremely delicious in hot weather.)
Here's the thing with al-Hajjarain honey: It is made from the flowers of thorn trees (which supposedly are the same things out of which the Romans made Christ's crown of thorns, but that's a whole other tale), which only flower for a week or so each year. Therefore, a)it's hard to get because it comes in limited supply, and b)it is sweet like nothing I've ever tasted.
After al-Hajjarain, we stopped at a restaurant that served camel meat for lunch, which was really more novel than anything else. The texture of the stuff is not unlike that of corned beef, but the taste is nothing like beef at all. A bit closer to venison, maybe, but not really enough to make a solid comparison.
Rock Climbing
After lunch, and an especially long siesta, and then we took the bus west the short trip to the city of Shibaam (go on, say it out loud), which is really famous for its old mud-brick houses. The shortest of them is five stories tall, with many seven or eight stories tall, and they're all built on extra-narrow streets, so the city looks really dense.
It was here that we went on our evening hike/climb to an outlook on the cliffs above the "new" city. The idea was to hike up the first level of sandstone, which had eroded to mostly sand with a few convenient chunks of solid rock sticking out here and there, and then do a steep hike/short climb up to the top of the second level. (The rocks are, according to our local guides, very loose and dangerous above that.) Fortunately, I'd decided to wear pants and a wrap-around skirt that day, so I had a really easy time adjusting for a full-motion activity, but most of the girls were in just skirts, so they had a tougher time. On top of that, Sabrii told us that we'd be just walking around ruins and museums, rather than doing serious hiking, so 90% of the group was in sandals or flip-flops. (Last time I ever listen to advice that says "don't bring practical footwear.") Once you got around all that though, it was a lot of fun--there was a tiny little 5-foot tall chimney that we had to negotiate and tons of bouldering all around.
Shibaam itself had tons of tiny antique shops and smelled strongly of goats, so was really a lot cooler from the aerial view than from in the city. With the sunset, it was actually really beautiful.
The Way Back
We got up extra early to come back, and Victoria and I wisely switched buses so we'd not be smushed in between our James and Ian again. It actually worked out for the best--they had few people in the back because other folks wanted to switch on or off of the DVD bus, and we shared with some much smaller guys on the way home.
On the way, we stopped again in Ma'rib to check out some more ruins, which had some worldwide historical importance. Ma'rib used to be the capitol of the Sabaean Kingdom, which we know in the Bible as Sheba. The temple of the Sun-God is called arsh bilquis by the locals and (as the name translates) is supposedly the throne of the Queen of Sheba. I can't testify to the truth of that, but Bernard suggested that it might have been built during her reign (which is based on guesswork of biblical archaeologists about when that reign was, and his educated guess on how old the temple is). He also told us that this particular site is built on a completely different floor plan than any of the other temple sites he saw when he studied in Jerusalem, which was really interesting. The site itself has bricks covered in pre-Arabic script and various other small bits of carved art, and it extends to several smaller compounds next to the temple. The ground between them is littered with stone tools, bits of carvings, pottery shards, human and animal bones... everything you can imagine that would go in such a place.
A short drive brought us to the Moon-God's temple, which contained some similarly massive pillars and carved stones, but was largely restored to its former glory. It maybe lacked the mystery of the other temple, but it was cool to see.
The final stop was the ruins of Old Ma'rib, another city of mud-brick skyscrapers, but one which had been more or less destroyed by time and desertion. There were things like gypsum pillars lying half-buried in the sand and a something that looks for all the world like an ancient version of the clock-tower on Library Mall and was standing on its own just outside the old city. There was also another line of pillars that were almost completely buried, and which looked suspiciously like the pillars in both of the temples that we visited, but no excavation going on anywhere. (A shame, too--I really wonder what amazing things might be buried under old Ma'rib.)
All in all, the drive home seemed to go much faster than the trip there.
The thing that detracted the most from the whole trip was a handful of experiences with our fellow students, which have given me a whole new perspective on the phrase "ugly Americans." Just a handful of guys acting like four-year-olds was all it took to start getting on everyone's nerves, so now I understand how our whole nation a bad rep among the rest of the world. These guys just did stupid stuff like hurling stones off mountains and cliff-tops at people ("Hey, I bet you can't throw that rock all the way to that path over there"), or taking stuff from the dig sites, or going around trying to pick up chunks of pillar and dropping them on the ground when they were done, like their mothers never taught these kids to be good guests in someone else's home. I just can't get over how rude these guys were. (To be fair, I'm sure there were girls doing terrible things too, but the guys were just being more obvious about it.)
It kind of drove home that no matter how good the rest of us are, no matter how many girls and guys try to get along with the Yemenis and integrate with their culture, or even just try to be polite travellers, a few jerks like these will continue to act like this and make things tough for the rest of us.
Very ugly, indeed.
To save you sanity, I'll put the major points in their own little sections, but for non-high-speeders, again, this might make the page slow to load.
Weather
It's hard to say exactly how hot it gets in the Hadramout. On Thursday, our first full day in Sa'yun, roommate Jessica's digital alarm (of all-purpose goodness) read 110* Fahrenheit--43*, for any metric-users--at noon. This is just before the really hot part of the day/siesta, so no one knows how hot it actually got. At night, things cooled down to a temperate 90*, and believe me, after a few days of those high temps, ninety feels downright pleasant.
However, because of this, everything in Sa'yun was hot. The walls of buildings were hot to the touch, the ground is hot, the trees are hot, the air is hot, the floor of our third-floor room was hot, even the cold water tap was lukewarm. In retrospect, the hotel would have been really wonderful in the winter--leaving one's towel on the rack for the duration of a shower made it seem like it had been heated, and the floors were always nice and warm anyway, but it was just really weird to get used to the idea that even stonework could be hot.
So hot that I made a post about it. (Like I said, you know you're in trouble when even the Yemenis tell you a place is hot.) Actually, I'm really appreciating the cold front that's coming through Sana'a right now more than I ever thought possible. (Seventy-five, how cool and wonderful!)
Dramatis Personae
Jessica D: roommate for good and for the trip; a sweet Georgian girl with a sassy attitude on feminism and a tendency to never suffer fools lightly.
Victoria: classmate from Boston and an avid ballroom dancer; bus-buddy for the trip with whom I got squished, and temporary roommate as well.
James and Ian: two big dudes who shared the back seat of the bus with us. Both are over six feet tall, making the four of us cramped on the ride no matter how we tried to re-arrange.
Bernard: a Catholic theologian from Germany who also happens to be specialized in archaeology; he sat in the row in front of us and swapped travelling stories, and was a fascinating demi-prof when we visited some of the ruins later in the trip.
Elke: likewise a German; an truly elegant but very hospitable woman who sat with Bernard and shared her candy with we back-seat folks.
Rumi and Ayesha: an American couple who have both studied some classical Islamic sciences in Tarim and other places; fun-loving and more than a little mischievous, a few well-placed cracks from each of them kept the mood light on the ride out.
Piyali, Mariel, and Max: likewise classmates who made sure we took plenty of photos to bring back to our profs.
Abdullah: bus driver of our group with a serious qat addiction and a tendency to lay on the horn a little more than is strictly necessary, even in Yemen.
Ibrahim: bus driver for the other group who insisted on getting his photo taken with everyone and a serious thing about being the first one to arrive at any given destination.
Ramsey, Abdul-aziz, "Big" Jessica, Sergio, and Muhammad: Profs or representatives of the YLC who more or less tried to keep us in line.
a full compendium of assorted YLC students, local children, beggars, cab drivers, shop keepers, and military personnel.
In terms of socialization, the bus ride was really nice because we got a chance to meet and hang out with people outside of bayt Sabrii and outside of our classes, who we might not have gotten to know otherwise.
The Trip
Pile twenty people onto a vehicle halfway between a VW minibus and a coach. Pack their bags in around them. Add at least three language barriers, a DVD player that doesn't have a pause button, and a brief stop for a check-in with the army guard stations ever 20 kilometres . Bake at temps of 100 plus for about ten hours, and watch everyone stop wanting to get along.
Well, I exaggerate a bit. The bus ride was really long and cramped and hot, but somehow no one killed each other. We had plenty of stops and saw some really cool stuff. Here are some highlights:
-Noah's Ark: All things told, it's the top of the sandstone cliffs about an hour outside of Sana'a, but local legend has it that the clifftops here are the spot where Noah's Ark ran aground after the flood was over, and that it couldn't be moved from that spot, so it slowly became stone over the years. A cool legend, for sure, but I do have to admit that the formation in question really does look like an enormous boat.
-Dam ruins in Ma'rib: this is pretty straight-forward. In the city of Ma'rib (which I will write on again later), there used to be a huge dam that spanned something like 670 metres (a little less than a half-mile) across what is now a valley floor. The neat architechture here is the remains of sluice gates--big hunks of bedrock on the valley floor with holes drilled into them or other interesting shapes.
-New dam: again, just like what it says. The new dam is a little less dramatic, but built in much the same way the old one was. However, the rights to the dam water are being disputed by three local tribes, so right now no one is using any of it. Yemen is facing a really serious water crisis right now, so leaving millions of gallons of water to evaporate into the air is mind-bogglingly wasteful. (Nevemind that this particular site had so many parasites in the water that they told us not even to touch it.)
-Ramlat as-Sab'atayn Desert: on the map, directly between the cities of Ma'rib and Shabwan.
I've never seen a real desert before, so this was kind of cool for a stretch. It was definitely a real desert, with naught but sand dunes as far as the eye can see for miles in any direction. Not a plant, creature, or even a rock to break these huge crests of sand. There are two things about the Ramlat as-Sab'atayn that I noticed from the bus:
1-The sunsets here are utterly unreal. Rather than truly setting, the sun sinks into the haze of dust and sand over the horizon, so there are no warm, glowing colors. Instead, the sun looks like a massive, blazing silver disk hanging in the sky like something out of a 3-D movie before it disappears into the haze. (If you recall the scene in Star Wars where Luke is staring moodily out into the sunset before he leaves his family, it's kind of the same thing, only without the same sense of the sun being close by and in the atmosphere.) I think it might go a long way to explaining why people thought the sun revolved around the Earth--it really looks like that in the desert.
2-Mirages. The mirages in this desert are even weird in the oldest sense of the word. The sand reflects the light in such a way that rather than seeing phantom puddles in the distance, the dunes about fifty yards out seem to blend in with the horizon and create the illusion that the sky is coming down like a curtain around you. It seems as if you could walk to the edge of the Earth and peak out of the atmosphere to see what else is going on, and it is a weird sensation.
Contrariwise, at night, you can see for scores of miles, so any small wayside towns with fluorescently lit gas stations stand out like beacons. I can't help but wonder if travel is really so different now than from the caravan days--especially considering that we got an armed escort through part of the desert. (Parentals, please don't jump to conclusions; I'm fairly sure the escort was as much to keep us from interfering with refinery traffic as it was for travellers' benefits.)
That's a mouthful, and a very full day of travel. Time from departure to hotel was 14.5 hours.
Day Two
We spent the first half of the day in the Sultan's Palace/Museum in Say'un. It was pretty standard museum fare here, for the most part--a few really great historical photos from all over Yemen were the highlights of the collection--but the building itself was absolutely fascinating. For now, suffice it to say that it was huge and white and dramatic, and afforded and excellent view of the city and surrounding cliffs, but photos will have to speak for the rest later. (They'll also testify to the giant cricket we saw hanging out happily on the museum steps.)
After lunch and our siesta--and I will not change my opinion that a truly civilized country has a siesta midday--we visited the nearby city of Tarim, which has been a center of Islamic study for several centuries (and gained a certain amount of influence among the Wahhabists during a long and convuluted history which I shall save for later). We briefly visited the library there, which had manuscripts on everything from 3-D geometry to law and the study of Muhammad's life, which were all available for check-out or were on display--several of them were 800 years old. That's not even the best part, or the most interesting, though.
The best part is that Rumi and Ayesha arranged to have the whole group pay a visit to the school where they studied a few years ago. Called Dar al-Mustafa (check them out), it's an Islamic school/university where people from all over the world come to study a wide range of topics that are considered "Islamic Sciences." The area that this school is strongest in, though, is the study of Muhammad's life. Because of this, they hold a special "sermon" on Thursday nights, which tells Muhammad's story through prose and through song. We were invited to attend this sermon, and so got a glimpse at what goes on in a Muslim service in addition to the actual sermon itself.
This is how it works:
The men and women of our group split up and went to the separate houses where men and women live and study. Our group was greeted in the courtyard of the women's house, where we met and shook hands with our hostesses and had a brief chance to chat with them before the prayers started. During prayers, we sat in the courtyard outside the mosque area proper with the menstruating women (who are considered by men to be 'unclean' during this part of their cycle and many of whom consider themselves to be getting a break from five daily prayers instead) and young children, and drank Tang--no kidding--and talked a little more. Even the prayers there were full of singing--not the raucous, exhuberant singing that we associate with Christian revivals or the impassioned shouting that we hear from the muezzins in Sana'a, but a more gentle, lullaby-esque kind of singing which was really beautiful and didn't interfere with understanding.
After prayers, we were allowed to come into the mosque, which was only partially finished, to listen to the story/sermon part of the evening's ceremony. As we entered, one woman offered everyone a small dab of sandalwood(?) perfume for their hands--a real luxury when you've got sixty people crowded into a third of the ultimate mosque-space--and another handed out song books to anyone who wanted one. (Hymnals? I don't want to draw any unfair parallels, but that's really what they were.) Then we sat on the floor and listened to the sermon, which was being delivered in the men's house and broadcast via microphone and speakers to our room.
I can't really give much insight to the content of the story--I understood maybe a third of it, but they talked about Muhammad's call to ... Prophethood and his trials during the first few years of Islam. Again, the story was full of singing and was very beautiful in spite of language barriers, and because it's not actually a prayer proper, everyone could get up if needed or whisper some quiet words of etiquette advice to her neighbors.
Afterwards, we adjourned to the courtyard and got a chance to really talk with our hostesses. This school is a feminist's dream come true--there were women of all ages, marital statii, parental statii, from countries all across the world and every race in them, speaking some twenty different native languages plus Arabic. I was sitting next to Ragna (whose name I've surely misspelled--she's a YLC student from Scandinavia) and a Turkish woman named Nass who gave us little nudges about etiquette during the sermon and invited us to her dorm for tea afterwards; many other girls also got invited to stay and chat or drink tea later. Unfortunately, we all had to decline on the basist that we still needed to bus back to Say'un for supper, but it was hard to leave a group that was so welcoming and happy to talk to us all. True, there were a few girls who expressed wishes that we would become Muslims (even Nass made a joke that since Sara is a "Muslim" name, I wouldn't have to change it if I converted), most of them were really concerned that we Westerners and especially the Americans would see their religion as a practice of love and peace. For the most part, I think they conveyed that really well.
Two other interesting items of some relevance:
-The director of the women's school was a slight, older woman of Somali or possibly Ethiopian descent, who had a bemused demeanor and an easy smile. Those readers who ever met Teijo-san of the Minneapolis Zen Center will appreciate what I mean when I say there was a remarkable similarity between the two despite differences in faith and race.
-Fulla is the name of the popular girls' doll in the Arab world, and is a lot like Barbie in that her logo is her name written in swirly pink letters (a Saudi creation, but I won't go there). Like Barbie, she too has a whole line of products for small girls, including the black women's robes (baltou) and hijaab, though she wears neither of these things herself. Two of the very small girls at al-Mustafa where wearing these, which was so ridiculously ironic that I could barely deal with it: Fulla after all is not a very studious character, and was not super popular in the madrasa.
This was without question the most enlightening experience I had in Hadramout, and I think it was for the other girls on the trip as well. I can't gauge what the boys did, since I can only get the info second-hand, but it seems that they received a similar welcome.
What to do on a Friday Afternoon?
On Friday, we visited a small town called al-Hajjarain which is built in an impossible way on top of and into the side of some of the sandstone cliffs about two hours west-northwest of Say'un, and is famous for the honey produced by local bees. Because it was Friday, there was nothing going on at all in this town, so rather than get our honey right away and have it sit on the bus, most of the students wandered around the city for a bit. Turns out, most of our bus ended up playing with a bunch of local kids for a good long while--it was a weird cross between pickle-in-the-middle and real soccer, with everyone on everyone else's team against everyone else. We were playing next to one of the ubiquitous corner shops, so we were free to get "ice cream" throughout, and since it was so cheap, shared with our little friends. (Apparently Hadraami ice cream is a frozen mixture of fruit juice and Fanta stuck onto a popsicle stick, but extremely delicious in hot weather.)
Here's the thing with al-Hajjarain honey: It is made from the flowers of thorn trees (which supposedly are the same things out of which the Romans made Christ's crown of thorns, but that's a whole other tale), which only flower for a week or so each year. Therefore, a)it's hard to get because it comes in limited supply, and b)it is sweet like nothing I've ever tasted.
After al-Hajjarain, we stopped at a restaurant that served camel meat for lunch, which was really more novel than anything else. The texture of the stuff is not unlike that of corned beef, but the taste is nothing like beef at all. A bit closer to venison, maybe, but not really enough to make a solid comparison.
Rock Climbing
After lunch, and an especially long siesta, and then we took the bus west the short trip to the city of Shibaam (go on, say it out loud), which is really famous for its old mud-brick houses. The shortest of them is five stories tall, with many seven or eight stories tall, and they're all built on extra-narrow streets, so the city looks really dense.
It was here that we went on our evening hike/climb to an outlook on the cliffs above the "new" city. The idea was to hike up the first level of sandstone, which had eroded to mostly sand with a few convenient chunks of solid rock sticking out here and there, and then do a steep hike/short climb up to the top of the second level. (The rocks are, according to our local guides, very loose and dangerous above that.) Fortunately, I'd decided to wear pants and a wrap-around skirt that day, so I had a really easy time adjusting for a full-motion activity, but most of the girls were in just skirts, so they had a tougher time. On top of that, Sabrii told us that we'd be just walking around ruins and museums, rather than doing serious hiking, so 90% of the group was in sandals or flip-flops. (Last time I ever listen to advice that says "don't bring practical footwear.") Once you got around all that though, it was a lot of fun--there was a tiny little 5-foot tall chimney that we had to negotiate and tons of bouldering all around.
Shibaam itself had tons of tiny antique shops and smelled strongly of goats, so was really a lot cooler from the aerial view than from in the city. With the sunset, it was actually really beautiful.
The Way Back
We got up extra early to come back, and Victoria and I wisely switched buses so we'd not be smushed in between our James and Ian again. It actually worked out for the best--they had few people in the back because other folks wanted to switch on or off of the DVD bus, and we shared with some much smaller guys on the way home.
On the way, we stopped again in Ma'rib to check out some more ruins, which had some worldwide historical importance. Ma'rib used to be the capitol of the Sabaean Kingdom, which we know in the Bible as Sheba. The temple of the Sun-God is called arsh bilquis by the locals and (as the name translates) is supposedly the throne of the Queen of Sheba. I can't testify to the truth of that, but Bernard suggested that it might have been built during her reign (which is based on guesswork of biblical archaeologists about when that reign was, and his educated guess on how old the temple is). He also told us that this particular site is built on a completely different floor plan than any of the other temple sites he saw when he studied in Jerusalem, which was really interesting. The site itself has bricks covered in pre-Arabic script and various other small bits of carved art, and it extends to several smaller compounds next to the temple. The ground between them is littered with stone tools, bits of carvings, pottery shards, human and animal bones... everything you can imagine that would go in such a place.
A short drive brought us to the Moon-God's temple, which contained some similarly massive pillars and carved stones, but was largely restored to its former glory. It maybe lacked the mystery of the other temple, but it was cool to see.
The final stop was the ruins of Old Ma'rib, another city of mud-brick skyscrapers, but one which had been more or less destroyed by time and desertion. There were things like gypsum pillars lying half-buried in the sand and a something that looks for all the world like an ancient version of the clock-tower on Library Mall and was standing on its own just outside the old city. There was also another line of pillars that were almost completely buried, and which looked suspiciously like the pillars in both of the temples that we visited, but no excavation going on anywhere. (A shame, too--I really wonder what amazing things might be buried under old Ma'rib.)
All in all, the drive home seemed to go much faster than the trip there.
The thing that detracted the most from the whole trip was a handful of experiences with our fellow students, which have given me a whole new perspective on the phrase "ugly Americans." Just a handful of guys acting like four-year-olds was all it took to start getting on everyone's nerves, so now I understand how our whole nation a bad rep among the rest of the world. These guys just did stupid stuff like hurling stones off mountains and cliff-tops at people ("Hey, I bet you can't throw that rock all the way to that path over there"), or taking stuff from the dig sites, or going around trying to pick up chunks of pillar and dropping them on the ground when they were done, like their mothers never taught these kids to be good guests in someone else's home. I just can't get over how rude these guys were. (To be fair, I'm sure there were girls doing terrible things too, but the guys were just being more obvious about it.)
It kind of drove home that no matter how good the rest of us are, no matter how many girls and guys try to get along with the Yemenis and integrate with their culture, or even just try to be polite travellers, a few jerks like these will continue to act like this and make things tough for the rest of us.
Very ugly, indeed.