Restless Clouds

I’ve been in Nablus for a month and, until yesterday, had never gone downtown—to the Nablus that people mean when they talk about Nablus. But I had finally gotten my absentee ballot for the Virginia primary election filled out, witnessed, signed, and double-sealed. I had been planning to send it through the embassy, but for various reasons, it was looking simpler and possibly just as fast to mail it from the Nablus post office.

Google Maps helped me identify the location of the post office, but actually getting there from work was another matter. In my experience of old cities in this part of the world, what appears on your screen are only broad gestures of streetscape. Reality is more crowded, with fewer 90-degree angles, more alleys posing as streets and streets posing as staircases, and hundreds of people dodging a lost foreigner jamming up the sidewalk.

The logical choice would have been to take a taxi, but that’s a stressful prospect for me, with my lack of language skills and knowledge of fair fares. (No meters here—just an unspoken understanding about how much it costs to get to different parts of the city.) So I walked, which allowed me to see more of the city. Of course, I got lost, which also allowed me to see more.

Additionally, walking gives me the chance to choose whom I want to interact with, which is to say I can pick a friendly looking person to badger for directions in horrible Arabic. It only took three stops with two course corrections, during which I learned the word for “post office.” I had forgotten to look it up beforehand, but I thought the sight of my envelope with addresses on it would signal my intent. Alas, citizens of the 21^st century were mystified. Fortunately, I happened to know how to say “Center of Letter” (thanks, random vocabulary from Al-Kitaab Lesson 2 and 3!) and that got us all on the right track.

So I mailed my ballot and gave it a special little wish for speedy travels so it arrives by March 3. Maybe the leap day in February will make the difference. I’ll never know.

After I left the post office, the first taxi driver I flagged down didn’t want to take me where I wanted to go. I realized I needed to get a few streets over and pointed in the right direction. This gave me another opportunity to see more of the city, i.e., to get lost. I ended up wandering into the souk, which, for someone who doesn’t like shopping, isn’t as exciting as it sounds. Besides, I had found my way into the section that looked like Marshall’s, T J Maxx, Dollar Tree, and Radio Shack had all decided to have giant competing yard sales with their unsold stock from the last seven or eight years. Turning this way and that way, trying to follow a generally upward path toward sunlight, I found myself in a more interesting section, with candy, chicken (dead and alive), fish, nuts, vegetables, and gardening supplies and seedlings. By then I was footsore and tired of lugging my work bag and laptop. Finally, I came out on a street – right across from the post office.