A cat named Curt lives in our house.

He belongs to my housemate, Eva, but he seems to think the entire house belongs to him.

It's hard to believe such a little creature can get into so much trouble.

For example, last week he hid my passport, and I was really panicked for an entire day until I found it under the couch.

Two days ago, he was playing with the wires of my TV, and he succeeded in breaking my satellite receiver.

For an entire evening, I was only able to watch local TV, which was almost more than I could bear. It's like watching Fox News, but in Arabic. I'll just leave it at that.

Well, I'd better get back home -- before I find Curt has changed the locks.

Actually, he can be very sweet. He usually greets me by jumping into my lap and purring. Where else can I get such a warm reception from a man in my life?

To the few people who read my blog to stay in touch with me,

I can't access my AIM messenger service or my Hotmail account.

I expect to get the issue resolved in about a week.

Until then, you can reach me at Brookethenews@gmail.com.

Or, of course, you can comment on this blog.

Sorry for the inconvenience... What am I talking about? I'm living in a place where You-Tube, MySpace and countless other everyday sites are banned.

Every week or two, I get a "warden message" from the US embassy in Damascus.

These emails are usually meant to warn the American community in Syria about any potential dangers that could face us.

For example, they say something like, "There will be an anti-America protest in West Mezzeh today. We asking all Americans to avoid this area."

I do just the opposite. As a journalist, my first thought is to take a taxi to the spot of the actitivity.

After all, that's the closest thing I'll ever get to receiving a press release here.

The election party at the US embassy might have been canceled due to recent events, but that didn't keep people Damascus from celebrating on their own.

My housemates and I had a small party on the night of the elections. Less than 10 people showed up. We would have had more guests, but there were so many competing parties all over Damascus that evening.

My friends and I flipped back and forth between BCC and Al Jazeera, anxious to see any sort of results.

At about 1 a.m., we finally gave up, our guests went home, without even knowing if there was anything to celebrate.

My American friend, Rachel, slept over so that she could go straight to her Arabic classes the next morning.

Shortly after we woke up, Rachel turned on the TV. I could hear her from the living room exclaim, "Holy cow!"

I asked, "What's the matter?"

"It looks like Obama won by a landslide!" she yelled.

I jumped out of bed, and joined her in front of the TV.

We were sitting there with an unopened bottle of champagne on the coffee table from the previous night.

It was just 8 a.m., and I asked her, "Do you think it's too early to have champagne?"

"No," she said without hesitation.

After she left, I took the champagne bottle, and brought it to the internet cafe where one of our guests from the previous night works. A Syrian Muslim, he said, " This is my first time having champagne. It's pretty good."

More celebrating...

Last night, I was walking down the street, I ran into a Syrian TV/movie star, whom I know from interviewing him several times for news articles.

As it turned out, we were on our way to the same restaurant (which I use for its wifi).

I joined the actor and a group of his artist friends at a table of about ten people.

This time, the drinks were Lebanese wine and Syrian Arak. We kept on raising our glasses, "to health."

And finally, we all raised our glasses high, and clinked them together, the best reason to say cheers in 8 years: "To Obama!"

I just returned to Damascus from the Iraqi border, about an 8-hour bus ride.

I'm glad to be back because the whole experience was really weird.

Right now, I'm still trying to decide what was creepier:

-- The fact that I was accompanied by 5 intelligenced agents everywhere I went in Eastern Syria.

OR

-- When I got back to my hotel room and turned on the TV, the only station that couldn't get reception was Al Jazeera (Arabic station that the US Defense Department destests for its criticism of the Iraq War), and the station at the top of the menu was Al Hurra (American propaganda station in Arabic aimed at winning hearts and minds). Is it possible America is controlling the airwaves in Eastern Syria?

America killed 7 Syrian civilians Sunday.

I guess everyone has heard about the recent US incursion into Syria.

The whole thing makes me very sad, especially when I think about the children who were killed in the name of the "war on terror."

To me, that's just as sad as Muslims who blow themselves up in the name of religion. Why should regular people pay the price for someone else's ideology? -- be they American neocons or Muslim fundamentalists.

All I've been hearing are statements from politicians condemning the attack and the US saying this is a "warning to Syria."

I'm more interested in what the ordinary people living on the Iraqi border think. They're the ones who really matter in this tragic story. I'll try to go there and talk to them as soon as I get the chance.

On Friday, my housemates and I all fled home in the middle of the night.

The conditions under our landlord were becoming unbearable, and the final straw was when he hit my French housemate on Friday evening.

We had already talked about leaving because we’d figured out he was spying on us (and we were actually planning on looking at a new place that evening). But our landlord’s violent outburst made the decision much easier.

I wasn’t there to see the incident (I had stepped out to buy a blanket.) But there were plenty of witnesses.

As soon as I reached the walkway to the house, our landlord came up to me to tell me his side of the story. I guess he thought I’d join his team if I heard his story first.

When I entered the home, my housemates told me our landlord, while he was drunk as usual, had hit Bryce, a Parisian Arabic language student living with us.

Naturally, I believed my housemates.

Because Bryce is a beginner in Arabic, I accompanied him to the local police station to translate his complaint from French to Arabic.

We then returned to the house, along with three police officers.

By then, Eva, our German housemate from Nuremburg, had already moved out.

Our landlord, who works part time at his liquor store and full time as an informant, immediately offered the police some whiskey – which they didn’t accept.

At two points during the discussion, two of the police officers pulled me aside to ask me if I felt comfortable living with our landlord. No, definitely, no, I answered. Both times, my landlord followed us down the hall to try to listen to the conversation. Both times, the police waved him away.

After about 2 hours of sitting around the living room with the police and our landlord, the police finally asked Bryce what he wanted.

He responded, “I just want an apology.” No charges, no legal action, just an apology.

For our landlord, saying sorry was more painful than getting a visit from the police or having to return one month’s rent. He did apologize, but not genuinely.

Around midnight, after the police left, our landlord, in his obsessive record keeping, got out his notebook and started calling the intelligence. I could hear him giving them our names. But then when I heard him give my friends’ names, I couldn’t take it. (I was horrified to learn that he not only had files on us but also on our friends).

This scared me because a lot of my friends are Palestinians and Iraqis, minorities who don’t have the same rights as regular citizens.

I asked him to stop. But then he called another intelligence agent and asked for one of my friends to be interrogated.

The entire time, I was yelling at him and trying to get the phone out of his hand and pleading with him to stop.

I finally cornered him, and I said, “Just promise me, promise you won’t hurt my friends!”

He said, “You made me apologize like I was a child. You made a complaint about me. I’ll make a complaint about you.”

I responded, “What do you want? Do you want me to apologize?”

“No,” he said. “You can apologize to your friends when you’re all in the interrogation center.”

I kept on asking him, “What do you want from me?”

I asked, “Do you want to kill me?”

He said, “No. But now, wherever you travel in Syria, you’ll be followed (as if that’s not already the case), and your friends are going to prison.”

I continued pleading, “How much money will it take? I’ll give you anything, anything, whatever you want. Just don’t hurt my friends!”

He refused any offer of reconciliation.

As we were leaving, he promised I’d pay the price.

With the help of some friends, we were all able to get out of the house in one trip.

We went to the house we were going to look at that evening where one of our friends was living, we settled into some empty rooms, and we hoped the new landlord would accept us the next day.

We’d fled the Jewish Quarter Friday night, and Saturday morning we found ourselves to be living in a Palestinian neighborhood.

In the morning, Eva and I walked around the new neighborhood.

The Jewish Quarter, from where we’d fled, is largely empty and abandoned (gee, I wonder why, with such a nice neighbor as our landlord – a secular Christian who gives all faiths and all humans a bad name). By contrast, the Palestinian neighborhood (Al Amin Street) is lively and filled with open-air markets, craft shops and lots of foot traffic.

On Saturday evening, the manager of our new house came over (the actual owner lives in the Netherlands). He said we were welcome to stay in our new rooms, and he invited us to a party at his house, which is also in our new neighborhood.

He suggested, “We’ll start a new community.”

I like that idea.

On Thursday night, I brought two of my housemates to a Julia Butros concert at the Damascus Citadel.

All of the tickets were sold out, but I was told that if we hung out in front of the entrance we could buy tickets from scalpers.

When we got there, we found that no one was willing to sell their ($10) tickets.

I asked one of the guards if we could get in anyways.

To my surprise, he told me we could get in for free.

I waved for my friends to come over, and we got in, raising our fists in the air in victory.

They asked, "How did you do that?"

I responded, "I just asked."

When we got in, there were no seats available, so we climbed onto a media truck that was filming the show.

When that truck drove away, we climbed on top of a fire truck, and I think we had the best view in the house.

When Julia sang a fast song, I said, "I feel like dancing," so we danced on the fire truck.

After a few minutes, my German housemate Eva asked, "What did you say to the firemen to get us onto the truck?"

I shrugged and said, "I just asked if we could watch the show from their truck."

She responded, "I want to go everywhere with you from now on."

... That was the fun part of our evening... On the way to the concert, my French housemate informed me that our landlord has been spying on me, going through my belongings while I'm out during the day and bringing the secret police to my bedroom.

More to come...

I am a journalist living in Syria, but I have neither press accreditation nor residency.

Where do I begin?

When I first got here just over three months ago, I immediately registered at the Ministry of Information -- just as I'd promised I would when I applied for my visa.

There, they told me my press card would take several months to process, because the authorities have to do a "security study" on me. This means that all branches of the intelligence do interviews (interrogations) with me, cross check that information, then determine whether or not I'm a security risk.

My last press card application took a year and half to process. 

As far as I know, I'm the first non-Arab American to ever get a press card in Syria.

I'm also one of a very small minority of foreign journalists who entered the country as a journalist and not as a tourist.

I wanted to do things right, and now I'm starting to see how wrong that was.

Then there's my residency, a card that allows me to stay in Syria for an extended period.

Within about two weeks of being in Syria, I went to the immigration office and applied for an exit visa to go to Lebanon.

There, they told me I needed residency in order to get an exit visa.

When I tried to apply for residency, they told me I'd need a rental contract.

My landlady and I went all over Damascus trying to get an acceptable rental contract. In the end, we gave up, because it turned out we were living in an illegal settlement. The authorities don't grant residency to foreigners living outside of "official neighborhoods."

I then moved house, renting a room inside the walls of the Old City. I'm paying nearly double the rent, but at least I know I have a chance at residency.

My new landlord and I signed a new rental contract.

From there, I was told I had to get a letter from the US embassy confirming I am a resident in Damascus. So I went to the embassy, and I waited 2 hours and paid $30 for a stamped letter saying I live in Damascus.

From there, I was told to go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to get a document confirming I entered Syria. (I thought that's what my passport was for, but nevermind).

Once I got to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they told me I needed to get a letter from the Ministry of Information saying I'm here as a journalist.

I then took the bus all the way across town to the Ministry of Information. There, I learned that because my press card hasn't arrived yet (see above), I can't apply for residency as a journalist.

From there, I took the bus to the University of Damascus language center. I know they sponsor residencies.

What else can I do? I have to get residency somehow. I'll become an Arabic language student again.

Sure, it might take up 4 hours of my day every morning.

But it will sure beat spending the exact same amount of time going all over Damascus, trying to do everything correctly, in a place where honesty isn't rewarded.

Where would you go if you were about to die? Syria is the final vacation for man I met a few minutes ago.

Shortly after I sat down to file articles at my regular eatery and Wifi spot, an elderly Frenchman walked up to me, asked me if I spoke French and then asked if I could help him order food.

I translated a few items on the menu for him, and he ordered a variety of mezze platters.

He said, "This is my second time to Syria. I love the food here."

I responded, "It's like France. You can come here just to eat."

He then said that he had terminal cancer, and he wanted to take one last vacation, so he came here.

I managed not to cry upon hearing his news. Instead, we chatted over hummus, baba ghanoush and muttubal about places he'd enjoyed seeing in Syria.

After he left, I tried to savor the moment, the restaurant (Al Kaseda Al Demashkieh) in an old Damascene house where I come almost every night, where I eat some of my favorite food, that plays old French and Arab songs, that has wifi and lets me keep in touch with friends all over the world.

I guess that was part of my idea of coming back to Syria. Life is short, and it's important to be in the place you love, doing what you love. For me, that means writing articles from the Middle East.