Simon in the Middle East: Old Sana'a

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here; this is mostly because nothing has happened in the last month due to a combination of Ramadan, the Eid holiday and terrorist threats. The first two are by far the most damaging to the Yemen economy, as output in every office dries to a trickle. Terrorist threats are tiresome in that they mostly lead to a lot of time spent locked in your house. My housemate and I broke records for tea consumption, and became adept at telling the difference between drones and observation planes by sound alone.

I returned from a trip to the UK with a suitcase full of pork products, which were recently put to good use by feeding a houseful of people. I learnt that under Yemeni law possession of pork is still technically punishable by death, so I’m glad we ate the evidence. A friend of mine used to hide bottles of booze in her suitcase by wrapping them in bacon, which is like confessing to a murder to act as an alibi for a robbery.

Other than brunch the main event going on in Yemen is the National Dialogue, which started on 18th March and is supposed to run for six months but will presumably go on for far longer. The UN and other well-wishers are funding 565 Yemenis with some vague association with politics to the tune of $100-200 each per day to do a bit of head-scratching and write such minutiae as a constitution, a legal framework and a system of government. The process began with the splitting of the 565 into nine divisions, and these divisions were split into groups and then sub-groups. This took the first week. I am not optimistic for the outcome.

Since I don't have much to say, here are some photos of Sana'a's Old City, which has a claim to being the oldest continually inhabited city on earth. It is also the only part of Sana'a where westerners are supposed to be safe from kidnapping, as making a fast getaway through its labyrinthine streets would be too hard to be worth bothering with.