Sounds: The clang of our metal compound gate shutting, the strange mechanized whir of the power transformer reacting to its constant diet of irregular city voltage, and the click of our keyboards as we compute to kill the time while pictures slowly upload at 50.6K to the faraway land of Acmeme in America.
If you start in Haddah near Al Jandouls supermarket, turn near the guy who sells chickens (they're still alive but you can come back in an hour), wind past some yellow-and-black painted cement barriers, turn up a dirt road, get back on pavement near the armored truck with a soviet 50 caliber machine gun mounted on it, and wander up a few more twists and turns, you'll arrive at our house, or rather the wall around our house. It doesn't have an address, and our street doesn't have a name. There are no maps you can buy that will inform you where we live. Apparently in Sana'a, population 1.7 million, they don't think regularized addresses are a critical part of civilization yet.
The lack of road names, road signs, and addresses has been one of the most mindblowing realizations in our first month of attempting to grasp this country called Yemen. We call for taxis and tell them landmarks to find us (or rather, our guard tells them in Arabic). Sometimes they get lost and one time they never made it, even though we're five minutes away from one of the major intersections. Roads often have names, but no one knows them, or calls them something else, like "60 meter road", "45 meter road", and "50 meter road", all because of their width.
There's also "70 meter road" which is, in fact, the old airport's airplane runway. Once the city expanded out that direction they decided to use the runway for cars. It is mindblowingly wide, with four marked lanes and a double yellow line down the middle, all of which everyone ignores. I've never seen more than a few cars parallel to each other on it, so it becomes a sort of slalom-course of random vehicle vectors, all braiding around each other.
Sana'a driving is organized around one simple principle: drive as you would in your hometown of 40 relatives, even though you're in a 1,747,627 person city. The creativity of the Yemeni driver in countermanding civic attempts at order is admirable. My favorite is this one: raised center medians along some streets have been built to organize traffic, display plants, and give pedestrians a safe stopping place on the way to the other side. However, they cut off a driver exiting one store from the store a ways to his left. This is remedied by driving the wrong way down the street, sometimes for a great distance, at high speed, in spite of oncoming traffic.
The best way I can describe navigating Sana'a roads is "Go Karts." At any moment, a driver on any side (including the front) of your vehicle might lurch into your vehicle's perimeter, and your attention must be marshalled to react. Lanes do not exist. Stop signs do not exist. Stop lights are suggestions, even when police sit in the center island waiting to ticket. Turn lanes become three cars wide mid-intersection. Car inspections do not exist. Headlights and mirrors are accessories. Trucks do not feel the need to secure loads. Goats and sheep are herded erratically along major highways. Pavement is randomly erased from good streets at the whim of some central authority. To add to the challenge, more than half the Yemenis driving alongside you are intoxicated on khat to one degree or another, sometimes grinning vacuously at the swearing driver they just nearly sideswiped, and they are mirrorred by a similarly high portion of high pedestrians. Even erstwhile sober pedestrians wander out into the street without a glance in the direction of traffic (or rather, most of the traffic).
All of this is to say, I love it here.
Ringed by towering, rocky, jagged mountains, Sana'a emerges from the crumbly boulders as if she has shaken only /most/ of the dusty rocks off her body as she rises. Homes four stories high are elaborately built of stacked sea-green stone and creamy marble. Little shacks of cinder bloc stack up from mountain outcroppings. The clear blue of mountain sky burns to fire at sunset, as the evening call to prayer casts its brassy hypnosis.
Sana'a is a ludicrously lovable town. I hope, over time, that I can paint a portrait of this new home of ours, and walk the all-important line between sour cynic and sweet syrup.
Much love from Arabia Felix,
SusanarguS