Entitled Canadian Dancers
“Aarrgghh. Again?! How hard is it to know the different between scrambled and fried eggs?” It was day five of morning room service in the Vendome Hotel in Damascus. My little dance troupe of four dancers called the Canadan Band (yes, the “i” was missing) had finished three weeks performing at the Marriott Hotel in Amman, Jordan in 1988. We were now in Syria. Five days ago, we drove through the desert and crossed the border in Daraa in the middle of the night. The girls loved to tease our manager Faisal the whole four-hour journey. By hour three his delight in their humour had changed to irritation. They thought they had learned some Arabic and were trying it out on him. Eventually, he turned around from the front passenger seat to say “will you stop calling me a donkey!” They giggled, then finally quieted and were asleep when we entered Damascus.
While in Amman, we kept asking Faisal to take us to visit Bedouins and stay overnight in the desert. He kept putting it off. One day, he finally said “Okay, I have appointment to visit a Bedouin family. They will feed us a meal and we can sleep over night in their tents, but it is very rude if you do not eat everything they offer to you.” The girls shrugged in agreement. He continued “That includes sheep’s eyes and brains. Sheep’s eyes are considered a delicacy which you can not refuse. You could be killed for a such a demonstration of disrespect.”* Well that was the end of that adventure.
In Jordan, the hotel staff all spoke English and our service was first class. However, Syria was different. That fifth morning we were exacerbated and frustrated. We had tried a new way of ordering each morning and our orders only got worse, so we stormed down to the manager, Sleiman Nasr El Din’s office. We went on a lengthy tirade and he listened with a grin and the odd puff on his very large cigar. We explained how we received cheese instead of bacon or flatbread instead of a croissant or received a runny fried egg instead scrambled eggs.
He looked scary in his dark office, with a comb-over and mafia don demeanor, but when he spoke, his voice was always soothing. He asked “Do you speak French?” We all shook our heads. We knew we should as Canadians. “Do you speak Arabic?” Laughing, we replied “Of course not!” Sleiman Nasr El Din took a long slow puff of his cigar, a sip of his tea, and said “Well…you are in Syria. The language in this country is Arabic and some people speak French as a second language. When Arabs come to your country, do they order their food in Arabic?…Maybe, when you call room service, you need to make your orders in a language the staff can understand.”
He then instructed his secretary, Fadia, to teach us how to order eggs in Arabic. As a back-up, we tried to remember and teach each other the French we learned in grade school. Our eggs were perfect everyday after that.
*Note: Bedouins are known for being generous and would be insulted if not accepting their gift of food, however, they are not known for killing people who do not eat what is on their plate. Faisal just wanted a reason not to have to take us.
Photo taken by the fourth dancer - before cellphones and selfies - waiting to go on Jordanian TV