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Authors: Elisabeth Eaves
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shone with admiration; we were trumped in our adventurism only by a trio who planned to spend their winter break in northern Sudan. To the Egyptian and other Arab students, our act seemed senseless, like planning a trip to Appalachia when we could have gone to Paris. To our parents we emphasized that this was an extension of our geopolitical studies.
We went to the Yemenia airline office on Talaat Harb Street, where, dismayed at the price of the CairoâSanaa run, we haggled over cups of tea with the general manager, who gave us a generous discount. Monaâs uncle sent her the only known extant English-language guidebook to Yemen, an out-of-date Lonely Planet. She didnât have time to read it, so she handed it over to me. I packed my bag and crammed on the plane.
chapter eight
ON BEING AN ALIEN
T he taxi deposited us at dusk in front of the millennium-old Bab al-Yemen, the gate to the old city, as merchants were closing up their stalls. A swirl of people was hurrying away. Beyond the wall rose stone towers seven or eight stories high, each one decorated with patterns made of white plaster. White arches surrounded the windows, and as darkness fell, the white zigzags painted along the rooflines appeared to glow.
The people around us were mostly men. Young and old, every one of them wore a patterned sarong, a Western-style sport coat, a cloth head wrap, and a large curved dagger sheathed at his waist. A few women traveled in pairs, their human forms invisible, but their cloth tents riotously colored in a radiating pattern of red, blue, yellow, and green.
We stood and watched, and began to feel that everyone else was staring back at us. A little pocket of space formed around us as though we were a disturbance in the current. We shouldered our backpacks, walked toward the gate, and stepped in.
On a plaza just inside, we found a dark, smoke-filled teahouse. The door was low, which made me feel overgrown, but once inside I thought I might have shrunk. The water pipes created a hallucination: They were more than double the height of the sheesha pipes in
Egypt, topped with enormous clay bowls big enough to serve soup. The effect was as strange as if chairs had suddenly doubled in height. Because Yemenis are short, the pipes looked even more outsize, towering over their seated and reclining users. When the proprietor offered us tea, we pointed at one of the pipes.
â Midaq? â he asked. We nodded uncertainly. â Midaq! â he cried across the dim room, and someone else repeated the cry, and it went back toward some invisible tobacco-preparation area. The proprietor directed us to a cot against the wall, and our pipe was procured: a brass tank the size and shape of a pineapple, topped with a four-foottall wooden stem, painted black and decorated with tiny white dots. We leaned back on our cot. From here I felt I could finally recede and watch without being watched; at least a man stepping into the teahouse might not immediately notice the two foreign girls in the corner. Most of the patrons had one cheek swollen, as though it contained a tennis ball. Branches of glossy green leaves, like laurels, were piled everywhere. The leaves were the national intoxicant, qat, and several neighbors offered us some from their stash. Still grappling with the long coil of our pipe, though, and conscious that the task of finding a hotel bed lay ahead, we decided new drugs were a step too far.
It was soon clear that the delicate pipes and honey-soaked tobaccos of Cairo had not prepared me for Yemeni shag. The waiter piled dried brown hunks that resembled slabs of evergreen bark into our bowl, then seared them with coals. After a few inhalations my mind unfastened itself and floated toward the top of the room. I was first giddy, then nauseated. âIâm just not going to move until we leave,â I said, and passed Mona the mouthpiece. Time slowed down. Other patrons asked us questions, green spittle flecking their
We went to the Yemenia airline office on Talaat Harb Street, where, dismayed at the price of the CairoâSanaa run, we haggled over cups of tea with the general manager, who gave us a generous discount. Monaâs uncle sent her the only known extant English-language guidebook to Yemen, an out-of-date Lonely Planet. She didnât have time to read it, so she handed it over to me. I packed my bag and crammed on the plane.
chapter eight
ON BEING AN ALIEN
T he taxi deposited us at dusk in front of the millennium-old Bab al-Yemen, the gate to the old city, as merchants were closing up their stalls. A swirl of people was hurrying away. Beyond the wall rose stone towers seven or eight stories high, each one decorated with patterns made of white plaster. White arches surrounded the windows, and as darkness fell, the white zigzags painted along the rooflines appeared to glow.
The people around us were mostly men. Young and old, every one of them wore a patterned sarong, a Western-style sport coat, a cloth head wrap, and a large curved dagger sheathed at his waist. A few women traveled in pairs, their human forms invisible, but their cloth tents riotously colored in a radiating pattern of red, blue, yellow, and green.
We stood and watched, and began to feel that everyone else was staring back at us. A little pocket of space formed around us as though we were a disturbance in the current. We shouldered our backpacks, walked toward the gate, and stepped in.
On a plaza just inside, we found a dark, smoke-filled teahouse. The door was low, which made me feel overgrown, but once inside I thought I might have shrunk. The water pipes created a hallucination: They were more than double the height of the sheesha pipes in
Egypt, topped with enormous clay bowls big enough to serve soup. The effect was as strange as if chairs had suddenly doubled in height. Because Yemenis are short, the pipes looked even more outsize, towering over their seated and reclining users. When the proprietor offered us tea, we pointed at one of the pipes.
â Midaq? â he asked. We nodded uncertainly. â Midaq! â he cried across the dim room, and someone else repeated the cry, and it went back toward some invisible tobacco-preparation area. The proprietor directed us to a cot against the wall, and our pipe was procured: a brass tank the size and shape of a pineapple, topped with a four-foottall wooden stem, painted black and decorated with tiny white dots. We leaned back on our cot. From here I felt I could finally recede and watch without being watched; at least a man stepping into the teahouse might not immediately notice the two foreign girls in the corner. Most of the patrons had one cheek swollen, as though it contained a tennis ball. Branches of glossy green leaves, like laurels, were piled everywhere. The leaves were the national intoxicant, qat, and several neighbors offered us some from their stash. Still grappling with the long coil of our pipe, though, and conscious that the task of finding a hotel bed lay ahead, we decided new drugs were a step too far.
It was soon clear that the delicate pipes and honey-soaked tobaccos of Cairo had not prepared me for Yemeni shag. The waiter piled dried brown hunks that resembled slabs of evergreen bark into our bowl, then seared them with coals. After a few inhalations my mind unfastened itself and floated toward the top of the room. I was first giddy, then nauseated. âIâm just not going to move until we leave,â I said, and passed Mona the mouthpiece. Time slowed down. Other patrons asked us questions, green spittle flecking their
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