February 4, 2010 -- Today I made a trip to the UNESCO-protected city of Old Sana’a. We entered through the Bab al-Yaman gate, amid a crowd of men with daggers in their belts, goods under their arms, and suit jackets over “skirts” of fabric wrapped around their waist. The sights, the smells, the architecture with brown mud bricks and white icing (actually mortar), and the constant sounds of bargaining and prayer calls – it’s a magical experience – walking around in some of the oldest, most artful streets, passing by a mosque built 1,400 years ago and still in use today…
Each shop is tiny, just big enough for one or two people to sit inside the doorway and work on some craft or sell some product. The Souk al-Milh is really a collection of souks or markets, each featuring one or another product line, like silver, or jambiras (daggers), or shoes, or spices, or windows, or door locks, or donkeys…well, you get the idea. It has to be the closest thing you can do to re-create the experience of walking though a city anywhere in the world a thousand years ago. Small, tight, crowded, often dark, sometimes lit by the sunlight, dusty but basically clean, cats scurrying here and there (no dogs seen!), and the most wonderful smells, especially in the spice market.
There are lots of men and boys, both as shoppers and as shopkeepers. As the morning wore on, we saw more women. Mostly they were in the entirely black abaya from head to foot, not even a shoe showing. All you see is the eyes, through a slit. Sometimes you notice wrinkles around the eyes, and sometimes the eyes look very young, but mostly you can’t tell much of anything about who is under the black abaya. In contrast to the men, who shout and gesture as the meet friends and negotiate deals, the women seem to be wordless. In fact, of course, they do speak to the merchants, although softly. So, often you sense a movement beside you, a soundless one, and a black shape floats by. I began to think of them as black ghosts, making no sound, but glancing about observantly.
We spent almost four hours there, and I could have stayed all day. For one thing, the views from the roof of some of the four and five story buildings is a spectacular view over the city, minarets rising over the mosques, wash hanging on some lines on building roof decks, and views down into the narrow streets below.