Image: Exotic or simply sophisticated?

Image: Beit Jabri, Damascus. May 09.

Watching this Syrian university student take a seat at a table in a Damascene courtyard restaurant, watching her interact with waiters with supreme confidence and coolness (aloofness perhaps), I felt she had a sophistication more likely to be found in Paris or Manhattan than Damascus or Melbourne.

But 'exotic'? If only I could speak some Arabic, she would not appear exotic. I would be able to 'read' her. But I would risk appearing a stumbling, mumbling middle-aged simpleton. Language is everything.