Stalling For Time

Today I'm pretty well over my cold but I still feel like I'm in trouble because my camera problems haven't been resolved. It's a pretty important issue to me because I'm not really buying any souvenirs and so my poorly framed pictures and online rants are all that I'll have left at the end of the trip. I might have a few scars too, but none have surfaced so far so I can't count on it.

Yesterday I borrowed some small screw drivers from a computer repair shop and went back to try my hand at finding the issue. I saw some YouTube video of a guy finding a cat hair across his camera's CCD chip so I thought that could be my issue, though I've been avoiding cats since Dahab. After removing about 25 tiny screws and tearing the whole camera apart I got at the heart of the lens assembly and found that a small glass plate had broken in half and was probably the issue. I figured that it had something to do with color correction and after reassembling the camera I discovered that this guess was indeed correct. The fuzzy line is now resolved, but the colors are off and look kinda pinkish. I think it was better with the blurry line than it is now, but I can't go back now. Oh well, I guess I still need to replace the camera so no change really.

So last night after blogging and "fixing" my camera I went out on a walk with Jowen. We were stopped on the side of the street while I ate a shawarma when we ran into one of my friends from Damascus... one of the 3 Australians that I hung out with on Easter. His name is Morgan and he's already been out for like 6 months... I find that people who've been out a long time get a kind of blank stare when walking down the street like they've seen it all before and just aren't impressed. I think it's kind of cool. Here's a picture of Jowen posing with his dysentry medication (TP) and of Morgan.

Morgan's big plan these days is to reach Galipoli Turkey on the 25th, 2 weeks from now, to commemorate the failed invasion by the ANZAC (Australian New Zealand Assault Corp) forces in WWI. A lot of his countrymen died there and every year about 30000 more show up to mourn and to drink and party fopr 3 days. I guess it's just part of their culture, and I like it. We got an early start on that with several beers each at a pub in the Christian quarter of Lattakia and went off to bed.

The next morning Jowen and I set off to research busing to Turkey and more generally just to kill time. We walked around all day and found a small selection of cameras for sale but mostly overpriced. We saw a few Sonys for sale are pretty reasonable prices but this makes me even more suspicious after a conversation with my hotel manager last night. He was looking at my camera and wanted to know if it was a fake made in China. I insisted that it was made in Japan and he said that many of the cameras here are fake and that I should be careful.

This is a picture Jowen took of some hawks that were for sale on the sidewalk. They also sell baby chickens by the dozen as pet food. Jowen is taking the bus to Antakya Turkey tomorrow morning but I think that I'm going to take the bus back to Aleppo and then cross the border to Turkey from there. That border crossing has a duty free store and might maybe have decently priced digital cameras for sale. If not, I'm headed to a large city north of Aleppo that's got a million people and will probably have some sort of cameras for sale. The other option is to ride back to Damascus and shop there since they've got everything there but it's a pretty painful 5-6 hour ride from Aleppo and I really hate to backtrack. In the worst case I'll just have to suffer through pinkish pictures for a couple weeks. Another option is to buy a camera on Amazon and have my sister bring it out in a few weeks and that's the fallback plan if shopping at the border and in Turkey fail. It's good to have a plan, even if it leaves me with a questionable camera solution at the moment.

The long and uneventful afternoon left me a bit tired so we passed some time drinking some beers in an alleyway and doing a little people watching. Lattakia definitely has the most beautiful women in all of Syria, but maybe it's just that they dress more like westerners that appeals to me. The town also suffers from a lot of beggers... much more than anywhere else in the country. The real strike against this city is that it has no waterfront streets despite being on the sea. All of the waterfront is dominated by cargo cranes, deep water port, and a few gated resorts. To get the the beach you've got to take a cab 7km north of town. The cities to the south are supposed to be in similar situations but I was told that there's a smaller charming beach town called Baniyas but it's got lousy air due to a nearby oil refinery. I think that Syria is slowly losing it's charm and it's time to move on to Turkey.