“I’m a Nigga Forever”

“I’m a nigga forever,” said Yasser, introducing himself. He looked more like a buff Arab in a homeboy costume: big jeans, Nike trainers, and a revolver in his back pocket. Yasser was incongruous with the provincial city of Rada, Yemen. Most people around him were scrawny men in the traditional chequered keffiyah, proudly wearing dangling jambiyaa knives as a crotch-level accessory.

Getting to this town had been a hassle. The last police checkpoint involved a 20-minute interrogation in Arabic, to which I replied with baffled shrugs. I don’t think they were supposed to let me through, but they didn’t really know how to send me back. Yemen is not used to independent travelers. When I arrived in town, I had nothing but a two-line description in my guidebook to go from, but heaved a sigh of relief when I found a local hotel. I was far from the relative comforts of the capital, Sana’a. My 20-word vocabulary in Arabic, consisting mostly of words like “hummus” and “kebab”, wasn’t getting me very far with the locals. It was nice to come across a local English-speaker at a local juice bar.

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Bulging Cheeks in Sana’a

Old Sana’a: bricks and gingerbread

Yemen’s capital is known for its dense streets of brick buildings with white icing. There’s nothing like it anywhere else. But there’s another curious and unique thing about Sana’a: all the men in town have bulging cheeks!

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Skyscrapers in the Desert

Shibam is certainly one of the most architecturally outstanding places in the world. This dense walled maze of five hundred mud-brick skyscrapers seems to grow right out of the Yemeni desert. Many of its buildings date back to the 1500s—the city is as impressive from a distance as it is inside the city walls.

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