Sick Day

The city of Aleppo is knows for it's food. From what I can tell they seem to be the same dishes but they're all a little better. In the day that I've been here I've had the kebabs which always are made of ground meat in this country and it's the first place that I've been given cooked onions and tomatoes. Also I've tried the shashlek which is more like what I'd consider a kebab, a skewer of meat chunks and veggies. I've had a shawarma, a rolled up sandwich of roast chicken, mayo, and pickles. Some other dishes were bought too but they were too weird to describe and didn't make a great impression on me. Even the flat bread here that's served with meals usually has some kind of sauce and veggies grilled onto one side of it unlike the plain type served everywhere else. The eateries of Aleppo also cook their rotisserie chicken better as here they season it while elsewhere it's always roasted plain.

Today I'm really suffering from a bad cold that's been setting in for the past 3 days. I've been taking some kind of pills that a pharmacy sold me a few days ago but I don't think they actually do anything useful. I didn't sleep too well either since some Germans were talking outside my room until 2 AM and then in the morning I was overcome with street noise. This is pretty normal for a hostel as far as I've seen and I guess that I ought to invest in some quality ear plugs. Apart from the sickness, I seem to be suffering from technical difficulties as well. My camera has some kind of impurity lodged inside it's many lenses and a blurry line is appearing in all of my pictures. I think that it needs to be disassembled to get at the issue but I haven't found any camera shops in Aleppo that can service it. The last time that I had a problem with this cheap point and shoot camera of mine I sent it into Cannon for service, and then I was told that there's a $100 minimum fee to fix it... but the thing is barely worth more than that. Maybe I'll have to get a new camera.

To start off this difficult day, Jowen and I set off to walk to the Citadel. It's a large castle in the center of town, built on a sizable man-made hill, and engineered to withstand the most determined sieges. It was a power base for the Arabs fighting the crusaders and I guess that it must have worked well enough. On the way there I had a breakfast of dates, cheese covered in paprika, bread, and trail mix... just stuff sold on the streets. The Citadel was fairy impressive. First we walked up a dangerously steep bridge to the gated entrance. The interior was mostly rubble that had been cleaned up enough to show off at least the walls even if there were no ceilings. The best thing there was the lavishly restored throne room with many chandeliers and carved wooden walls.

We spent about an hour wandering around and climbing over the ruined walls of the Citadel and did a little people watching. My favorite group was three young men dressed in jeans with black jackets. They were smoking, holding beers, playing techno on their cell phones, and one was wearing an 'I heart Jesus' hat. In this country the Christians are the minority and they have the privilege of drinking, using birth control, and generally are the bad asses around town. The community feels threatened by the Muslim majority and resists calls to conservatism and so called 'family values'. I think it's all pretty funny.

After the Citadel we walked into the town's main souq which is basically one long narrow hallway lined with shops and completely enclosed from the elements. It's about a mile long and very crowded... and occasionally a car will drive down the hall I'm including a picture of. We passed through areas dedicated to tourist junk, cloth and beads, butchers, shoes, coffee and tea, the entrances to several mosques, and Aleppo's famous olive oil soap shops. One of the mosques was the Grand Umayyad Mosque so we took the time to enter it at least. It's significant feature is a freestanding minaret dated from 1066, but mostly it's just a good place to sit with your shoes off and listen to the quiet hum of people without all the honking cars filling the rest of the city. Inside the mosque is a tomb said to contain the head of Zacharias who was the father of John the Baptist.

Later in the day as I was writing the material above I got a call from my friend David whom I haven't seen since Aquaba, Egypt. He checked into my hostel here in Aleppo and saw my ukulele case on my bed and knew that he had found me. We got some dinner together and caught up on each other's journeys. That night I also agreed to go on a tour the next day with some Belgians that I had dinner with the night before. It's kind of steep at $20 a person, but I've been living very cheaply and wanted to see some stuff far outside of the towns.

Before I got up Jowen checked out of the hostel to catch a 6:45 train to the coastal city of Latakkia. I got up shortly afterward and took a shower in out very dirty bathroom... the shower head comes out of the ceiling in the middle of the room and water falls on top of the toilet which has no seat. In usual Arab fashion there's no toilet paper either because locals use a combination of a hose and their left hand to get the job done. Unfortunately there is often no hand soap either so you have to be suspicious of anybody using their left hand to greet or eat. After getting some cheese and dates from a corner store I met up with Maryanne, Kris, and Gerome. Kris and Gerome are teachers and in my favorite discussion of the day, about math, they told me that they must be very careful about their language when teaching algebra becasue to 'subtract' is slang for masturbating. I told them about the derivative of acceleration being 'jerk' and we all shared a very nerdy laugh.

The first stop was a abandoned stone church, called Mouchabbak, in the very rocky countryside. In this area there are many old stone buildings scattered among the pastures and fields. They're part of what's called the Dead Cities and they are located all across northern Syria and I suspect southern Turkey as well. These cities were wealthy at one time, judging from the very fine stone churches and tombs, but were abandoned around the 5th century AD. Nobody knows exactly why they were abandoned but a decent guess would be that the predominant trading routes shifted to a different region and made them unprofitable to trade with or too remote for pilgrims to visit.

The next stop was simply more crumbling stone buildings amongst the olive orchards stretching as far as I could see. Also growing in the area were pears, apricots, almonds, pomegranates, and sheep.

On the back of Kris's guide book of Syria was a large color photo of our next stop, the Basilica of St. Simeon. It's also know as the Quaal'at Samaan. It was really huge and well made around the 4th century but it's large domed roof had long since collapsed. An important pilgrimage site in it's day, it had a baptismal font in the floor with two ways down into it so that the monks could herd large crowds through quickly. The basilica was built in the Byzantine style and has an unusual stripe carved into the stone that goes around all the doors and windows in an unbroken path until it connects to itself on the other side of the building. There's some symbolism there I suspect. Of course in reconstruction the line got a little busted up but we got the idea. We got in an out in around an hour and had to share it with many tour buses.

An old Assyrian temple built of black stones carved into sphinxes and lions was our next stop. It's about 3000 years old but not much is known about it. When I picture life 3000 years ago, I imagine that there were a hell of a lot of lions running around and that eventually there was a big battle scene and now they're rare in modern times. Sweet. Afterward we stopped for lunch and were crowded by curious kids getting out of school at noon to go back to work for their families.

I'm a little sick as I mentioned earlier and I've not got the patience to finish the day's events as they were pretty mundane. I got an email from Jowen detailing where he's staying in Latakkia and he says that he's got some pretty violent food poisoning. Makes me happy to just have a cold I guess. I'm pretty brave about eating and drinking pretty much everything so it'll happen eventually I guess. Many people that I'm with won't use a wet cup to drink from and won't eat salads since they're washed in tap water. They also won't brush their teeth in anything but bottled water but I'm fine with all of that... I just don't drink the stuff.