Welcome to Syria

Ugh, not a great day to be on the road. I made a pretty late start out of Amman for my trip to Damascus because I just wanted to sleep in a little longer. I left the hostel and got on a bus around 10am and made a new friend on the bus. I forget his name but he's a med student that had just finished his schooling and a final exam in Jordan and was returning to Syria to become a GP. Apparently the test materials are all geared towards practicing medicine in the US so if a question asks you to identify the most common cause of some particular symptom you must answer carpel tunnel even though on a world wide basis the most common cause is rheumatoid arthritis. Naturally he hopes to come practice medicine in the US. I can't really recall all the other things we talked about... but US policy towards Syria was part of it. He felt that Syria was the most liberal, peace loving, and mistreated country in the region.

When I got off the bus in Damascus I could see that it was certainly more liberal. More than 50% of the women here don't wear headscarves though it did seem to be a pretty poor place. Damascus is a city of 4.2 million and is twice as large as Amman. I caught a cab over the the small part of town that all the backpacker hostels are located had some lunch and went hunting for the best price. The first place is described by my guide book as one of the best hostels in all of the middle east and they only had one mattress available on the rooftop for $7. I declined and went hunting for more dorms but after 15 minutes had found all 5 hostels totally full and I went back for that rooftop spot. It was taken so I looked at some alternatives and the best I could find was a room for $20 in some dreary hotel. That's more than I wanted to spend and not a great place to meet travelers so I made a last minute decision to leave town on the next bus to Palmyria, 3 hours away.

I got there at 8 and it rained the whole way over so I was more than thankful that I had not chosen the rooftop mattress. The dorms were all full here too but I got a nice double room with private bathroom for just $9 and was pretty happy about it. In the entry of the hotel a young guy was chatting with the manager and I sat to drink tea with them for a couple hours and just talked. He lives on the Mediterranean coast in the town of Tartus and he told me that if I made it out that way I could stay at his house and we'd go out to visit Syria's only island. I got his mobile # and maybe I'll head out that way some time. The next morning it was still raining but I got a picture of the local market and went in to a cafe to blog. Turns out that in Syria they filter the internet so I can't access Facebook directly and must use a proxy server like www.letsproxy.com to view it, but I can't seem to get through the captcha check so I don't know how the hell I'm gonna fix it. PayPal has issues too since Syria is under some kind of US sanctions. Lunch time!