Ready For Action

The last few days have been pretty confusing but I think that I'm now ready to move on to Turkey and to new adventure. The plan when I last wrote (I think) was to return to Aleppo and then to head into Turkey. The next morning I arrived in Aleppo after a 3.5 hour bus ride and set to work checking into a cheap hotel and looking at cameras. While fruitlessly shopping I ran into a couple backpackers who just came from Turkey and they claimed that the duty free store had no electronics. That was disappointing but when I went to the bus station to see when they leave the next day I was more shocked when I was quoted $40 for the direct bus to Antakya Turkey. I remembered that it could be done for $3 from Lattakia where Jowen crossed and I immediately decided to take the bus back to where I started the day. What a pain.

When I got back to the hotel that I had checked into 3 hours earlier, the wrinkled old man at the front desk was not keen on the idea of letting me check out for free. He spoke no English but using the calculator on his desk, and the word police, he made it clear that he wanted the full $10 for the room and I charitably offered him $2. So began our 20 minute stand off. He stood between me and the door and every time that I put on my backpack he pushed me, so I pushed him several times too and we just scowled at each other. He was even better at staring contests than me and I thought I might break. Finally a 3rd party came in and talked him into accepting my offer of $2. You should have seen thew look on his face when I had him break my $20 bill!

When I returned to Lattakia that night I met up with my friend, David, who had spotted my uke at a hostel several days earlier. I checked into his hotel which was managed by an enthusiastic TinTin fan who had posters up everywhere. We tried to negotiate a lower price for putting me in their room, but he would not budge. I mentioned that I'd read several TinTin books, could name them, and he gave me a secret discount. The picture is of the Lattakian waterfront, as seen from the hotel room the next morning.

The next morning I could have set off for Turkey but instead I went to a nearby castle with David and our new friend from the hostel, a Swede named Matt. This castle is called Qala'at Saladin and it's not in as good repair as Crac des Chevaliers but it's got a lot more atmosphere and a lot fewer screaming schoolchildren. The author TE Lawrence write, "It was I think the most sensational thing in castle building I have seen". It was built by the crusaders on a heavily wooded and steep mountain ridge and it's defenses are rather unique. A great chasm was carved deep through the ridge to separate the castle from the rest of the mountain and a tall sliver of stone was left to support a drawbridge.

The rest of the castle is a mixture of crumbling walls overgrown with blackberry vine and wildflowers, and still standing stone towers with walls up to 15' thick. They've even got nameplates on several of the buildings identifying the 'Tower of Leadership' and the 'Tower of the Daughters'. Very romantic. All this was not enough to stop Saladin who took it after just 2 days by firing catapults from an adjacent ridge, breaching the lower walls, and storming the undermanned fortress. Being there it's possible to picture it exactly as it happened and that's what made the castle so memorable. We hitchhiked back to the nearby town, as we had done to reach the castle, and before we caught the bus to Lattakia we plundered an unwatched orange grove. Actually we got caught but the family seemed more amused than upset. I tore through 4 oranges and made a huge mess of myself.

Next morning I was prepared to go to Turkey but I found out that Damascus was just 4 hours away and I decided that because the castle pictures looked so terrible in pink that I would go and get a camera immediatly in a place that I knew would have a good selection. When I arrived in Damascus I checked into a hotel that was slightly cheaper than my old paradise but the new hotel sucked royally. After much searching, comparing, and haggling I bought a small Cannon camera (IXUS 100IS), almost the same as my broken one, but a couple model years newer. I'm pretty happy with it, but I can't see how it's any better than my old one, other than 12mp instead of 7mp.

Later that night I ran into my friend Matt, who was studying Arabic and staying at my old hostel. We used to see each other every day when I was staying in Damascus before and it was good to hear some updates. The party that Rafy was throwing, and I skipped town before, ended up not happening so I guess that I left at the right time after all. Next morning I got the waist belt of my backpack repaired where some of the stitching was coming loose, and I took the next bus back to Lattakia.

This is the third time that I've arrived in Lattakia and I'm sure that this must be the last. Next time I'll be writing from Turkey. My plan is to take a minibus to a town near the border, and walk 2km to the crossing. Then I'll wait there a few hours or until I run into a backpacker coming south out of Turkey so that I can buy their guidebook, or trade it for my own. After that it's a 1 hour bus ride to town. I've not much of a plan after that, but getting the guide book will surely help me to form one.

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.

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.

On the Road Again

Leaving Damascus wasn't as easy as just making a plan to meet Jowen in Hama on Thursday night. On Tuesday night Rafy and Matt were working on me to try and get me to stay the weekend. Rafy's friend Alan has a cabin in the mountains and they were planning a big party with maybe 20 people and a bunch of girls (mostly with boyfriends) and it was to last a couple nights... like Thursday through Friday Nights and everyone would sleep there since apparently it's got a ton of beds. This doesn't much surprise me that Alan's got this crazy cabin because all of Rafi's friends drive cars, decent ones, but Syria's got a 200% tax on cars so you have to be loaded to own one at all. Great public transportation makes up for this crippling tax I guess. I was feeling a general fatigue and had been drinking too much lately so I decided that I'd just go to Hama on Thursday and skip all that nonsense.

On Wednesday I took it easy and hung out around the hostel most of the day practicing a new song (Hey There Delilah) and finishing up the second season of Twin Peaks on my iPod. I've just got to watch the movie now and I'm really looking forward to the conclusion. My friends in LA are pretty obsessed with this show and I just had to know why. I'm still only starting to understand however. In the afternoon I had all the hostel's hot water for my shower and went out for a haircut and shave. The guy used an old fashioned straight razor and I love it so much I may never shave myself again on this trip. Especially since it costs $1 to have them do it. In the evening I went out to dinner with Braden from the other day and he and his friends talked me into doing a trip with them in the morning to a town on the border of Israel.

The next morning we met our cab driver who is supposedly part of the secret police but I saw no evidence of this. He took us to a government building in Damascus to get special permits to visit this town. It's called Quneitra and it has a very unhappy history. It's in the Golan Heights, a piece of land that Israel seized in the 6 days war in 1967. Later in 73, after the Yom Kipur War, Henry Kissinger negotiated a fragile peace deal between Syria and Israel and saw Israel return a small slice of the Golan Heights to Syria. The town of Quneitra was part of this returned land but before Israel returned it they evacuated all of the residents (Arabs), removed everything that could be moved, unscrewed, or ripped out, and leveled all the buildings with tractors. What was handed back to Syria was a ravaged wasteland filled with landmines. Classy. Syria never rebuilt it but instead left it as a reminder of the senseless aggression (from Syria's perspective) of their enemy. Today the border is patrolled by UN troops and is a pretty dreary looking area.

After waiting an hour and a half for our permits and for our passports to be returned by the police, we set off for the border. Our driver was told by the police that he should not take us there (they don't like him for some reason) so he hired a private van to take us there and to return us to him. We drove for an hour to get there and after showing our permit and passports to half a dozen check points we finally got inside and a border guard rode in with us to make sure that we didn't do anything dumb like walk on the land mined grassy areas. First he showed us the hospital, one of the few standing buildings, and it looked like it had taken a hell of a beating. All the walls were covered in bullet holes and it looked like a movie set. From the roof we got a good view of the town. Behind me and the Syrian flag you can see a UN building and in the distance a watch tower on top on a hill that was the scene of several very bloody skirmishes between Syria and Israel.

After that we drove around the town for 30+ minutes looking at the flat buildings, a graffiti filled church, the barb wired border, and a mosque. I tried to climb the minaret but the guard claimed that there were vipers in the trash strewn stairwell so I steered clear. Finally we went home and I caught the first bus to Hama to meet Jowen. I was making pretty decent time but 45 minutes into the drive I felt a thump and the bus skidded to a halt on the side of the highway. I got off the bus like everyone else and saw that the back left wheels were missing. A little ways up the road you could see them resting with part of the axle attached. At least no one was hurt. In the 3 hours that it took to get another bus to take me to Hama I befriended a man named Muhammad who invited me to attend his engagement party the next day in a tiny town outside of Hama and off my map and I was promised there would be folk dancing, food, and live music.

When I got to Hama I realized that I was sick with a cold so I got some medicine, met up with Jowen, and got some dinner. Later that night I called Muhammad to say that we would indeed attend but then he told me that his mother informed him that the party was too small and that there was no room for us. A couple days later he called me again to tell me that he was sorry still and that I was invited to attend the wedding in 3 months.

The next morning (Friday) everything was closed as Jowen and I explored Hama. This town is famous for it's water wheels which are used not to power machinery but rather to lift the water to various aqueducts. There are 1000+ year old mosaics portraying the wheels, the largest over15 meters in Diameter. At some point there were 31 of them, but today just 15 are remaining and first we walked a couple kilometers upstream to see 4 of the nicest ones and then we walked a few kilometers downstream to see the largest. The wheels emit a constant creaking and groaning of wood rubbing on wood that I thought sounded like a loud chainsaw. Hama is also somewhat famous within Syria as the site of a government sanctioned massacre in 1982 or so. The city was at the time full of opposition members belonging to the Islamic Brotherhood organization (a branch of which has killed tourists in Egypt). First the Syrian government shelled the city and then went in and shot 10-25 thousand people and leveled half the city. It's rebuilt since then and is pretty quite nowadays. We were shortly bored and since everything was closed I decided it was time to call Van, the man that I met in Bosra. He lives near the famous castle, Crac de Chevaliers, a couple hours away. He picked up and said that Jowen and I could come out to see him so we cause a couple minibuses and were there 2 hours later. An hour after that, Van and his wife Fabien were there to pick us up from the side of the road.

Van works for a German big-box store (called Metro?) and helps manage their suppliers that use the port at the nearby city of Tartus. His wife teaches French and English at a nearby private college and they met while they were both vacationing in Romania. She was actually teaching English there and has lived in many different places while avoiding her home country of France. Van is an Afrikaner from Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and has a big chip on his shoulder about the terrible things that went down there for his people. Basically in the 60s the blacks got the vote, some things happened, and all the whites had to flee the country lest they be murdered/raped/both. I don't understand it completely but I hear it sucked. Now the two of them live together in Syria while they save up enough money to buy a 55' sailing boat in France that he can charter. They seem like happy people.

First they gave Jowen and I a tour of the Crac de Chevaliers. This castle was built by the crusaders in the middle of the 12th century and guarded the only good route from the coast to central Syria. It withstood many sieges, including one by Saladin, but finally in 1271 it was under siege again, was the final outpost of the crusaders, had supplies for 5 years, and was garrisoned by 200 men when it was designed for 2000. The crusaders negotiated a surrender and retreated to the coast and went home. Van and Fabien showed us around and balked at the many rooms that were currently filled with plywood and hieroglyphics for a movie being shot that was supposed to take place in Egypt. It was an awesome castle, but we rather ran through it and then met up with their friend Sophia for lunch. She teaches German at the college and is the only other foreigner living in town. Sophia mentioned that when most students learn that she is German they profess their respect for Hitler and his work with the Jews. Apparently the second best selling book in the middle east is 'Mein Kamf' but most people don't understand that his antisemitism includes Arabs. I guess that everyone only sees what they want to see. She's tired of hearing about it all.

The town that they live in, Marmarita, is Christian and it was explained to me that the many Christian towns in the area are very prosperous because of their good soil, mild climate good for holiday makers and government officials, and because the non-christian (Arab) towns are overpopulated because families have an average of 7 children compared to the Christian 2. The President, Bashar, is from a minority community called Alawite and identifies with the other minority groups like Christians who hold out against the Sunni majority. Van feels that Syria's dictatorship is the only viable form of government for this and most Arab states (including Iraq) because he doesn't respect the responsibility of Syria majority in a governing capacity. His history in Rhodesia surely colors this opinion but maybe he's right too. America's foreign policy holds that Democracy is always the best solution but that doesn't always end up with the best results when the people in this land are so obsessed with ethnic grudges. I hope things in Iraq disprove this rule.

Finally that night we went back to their home where they had some guest beds for us to use. Fabien showed us how to make raw fava bean salad with lemon, fava beans, olive oil, and salt. I absolutely loved it and will prepare it in the future, though peeling the beans is a tedious process. She also made crepes and we drank vodka and schnapps late into the night. From my bed I could hear wild jackals howling in the distance as I drifted into sleep.

This morning when we got up Jowen and I did the dishes, Fabien made us some eggs, Van drove us to Homs on his way to work, and we caught a bus to the city of Aleppo far in the North of the country. We watched a Jackie Chan movie on the bus and the bus driver spent most of the ride with his eyes on the TV as well. Jowen is Canadian but of Chinese heritage and many many locals call him Jackie Chan. Not much else to do today but sleep, and tomorrow we will tour the city's citadel and then maybe head on to the coastal city of Lattakia in the afternoon.

Damascus Forever

I've been in Damascus for a long time now, and I'm having a blast mind you, but the days are starting to blend together in my memory. I think that I'm missing the feeling of the wind at my back so I'm moving on in a couple more days... but until then the Damascus scene that I've been loving will keep on pulling me in.

Friday the 2nd was Easter in Syria (not on a Sunday) as this is the traditional holy day when nobody works. The mosques played their prayer calls extra loud as Jesus is a prophet of the Muslims as well, they just dispute his divinity. I recall that in the Umayyad Mosque there was a tower named the Minaret of Jesus where the big man is supposed to appear on Judgment Day. It's as good a place as any I suppose. Of course, there was a huge celebration in the Christian quarter of the Old City. I was over there with some Australians that I met at the hostel and we saw a school band drumming and trumpeting away in front of a church on the main drag and the streets were totally mobbed. When we tried to get into the a bar I ran into Matt and Raffie again and we eventually headed over to the discotheque. It was packed tonight unlike many of the other nights and we got to bypass the cover charge ($20) because it's cool to have foreigners in a club. Reverse racism rocks.

The next day was marked by a deep and lasting hangover that sapped any energy and will that I had built up to do a day trip out of town. I spent almost the entire day hanging out in the hostel's beautiful courtyard and finally got around to taking a picture of it. I read a book, practiced fervently on my uke, and generally lamented my pitiful fortitude. This night I went to bed at a reasonable hour and got up early the next day.

Sunday is the first day of the work week here and the tourist hotspots are slightly less packed with locals so I went out to see the town of Bosra. It was the capitol of the Roman province of Arabia, and had many great buildings erected over the years, but it's reverted into a small backwater over the centuries and today is a dusty town built around the generally small block of ruins. The most notable building is the ampitheater which is rather unusual for being freestanding and not built into a hillside. It was built in the 2nd century but over the next 900 years it had additional walls and rooms added to the outside turning it into a fortress with great live entertainment. Because of these improvements the place stands in great condition and miraculously weathered the many earthquakes that must have hit the vicinity. The other buildings in the area did not fare so well and are mostly a collection of ruined walls and columns. The columns at least are striking for their fine craftsmanship and the hard black bassalt stone that they were chiseled from. The elaborate corinthian column heads were the best that I've seen yet and looked like new.

I was there with one of the Australians from the other night but struck up a conversation with a man and his mother who were scolding the school kids tearing around the ampitheater. The guy was named Van and he used to be a game programmer a decade ago and he invited me to visit his home near Hama when I go to see the castle Crac de Chevaliers in the next week. He can see the castle from his balcony! After that we got some lunch from a rather poor tourist trap of a restaurant and caught the long bus home.

Later that night I was hanging out in the hostel chatting with some of my usual company when I noticed a familiar face, Laura from Palmyria. I remember that I had a very nice afternoon hiking the ruins with her and she and I went on a walk around downtown Damascus while her friends were still en rote from the Lebanese border. They are American citizens and she's not so they had to wait an extra six hours at the border to get fresh visas to enter the country. While walking we ran into my friend Jowen that I traveled with in Egypt and we areed to meet up the next day. After that Laura and I shared a sheesha and some tea and listened to some traveling musitians play kurdish songs on a greek guitar. Being close to the hostel, I ran off and returned with my ukulele to add some more flavor to the mix. I've got a great video of it, but I'm not prepared to add any youtube vids just yet... maybe when I get my laptop.

The next day Jowen and I went out to visit the scenic town of Maalula, an hours drive from Damascus. It's a charming-ish small town built in a steep canyon that happens to have a good spring and is known as one of the few places on earth where the people speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus and of the movie Passion of the Christ. There's also a convent there dedicated to St Thecla who was an early female convert to Christianity and was saved from persecution by an unlikely series of miracles. Jowen told me about another traveler that we had spent some time with, Brandy, and she apparently left Syria in a huff after being spit upon by a local reacting to her shorts. Men will get some strange looks for wearing shorts but it's nothing short of scandal for a woman to wear them. In some countries (Iran) the western women can't even have their hair uncovered and men can't wear short sleeved shirts. There are some claims that long sleeves and pants somehow make you cooler in the heat by holding in the sweat but I don't follow. There were some nice views but not much else of interest and we rode back to meet up with Laura, Lauren, Saadia, and Adam (most of the Palmyria bunch) for dinner. We also took along another Canadian, Braiden, and two Palestinian guys the girls knew.

Dinner was a real treat! We were led through the seriously twisted alleys of old town to a huge restaurant inside an enclosed courtyard willed with fruiting orange trees, flowers, and a languid fountain. The food was fantastic and I spent an extravagent fortune at $10. The conversations were as good as the food and we all shared some strange tavel stories about awful local dance styles, tasteless sales pitches, hygene problems, and some bizare stuff from back home. Afterwards we found a stand making chocolate waffles a-la-mode and then we moved towards the bars to finish up the night right. Actually we spent a couple hours drinking in the street as that's cheaper and less crowded than the bar right next to us. As we passed the time I won a beer chugging contest, Jowen got into a lighthearted scuffle with a little kid in a leather jacket, and we talked to a man who drives around town in a Jeep with a live parrot and we got his business card. It had a Jeep and a parrot on it. Once we were ready we moved onto a club across the street playing some swing music and we had the place to ourselves. There were 7 of us so that's enough for a decent crowd on the dance floor. I did a little swing and everybody showed off some great moves. I thought that Laura in particular was a great dancer but I hate to choose favorites. Finally the night was over and Adam and the girls caught a cab to the airport so as to return to school and the rest of us went home.

Ok, one more day on this giant posting. Today Jowen left to visit Palmyria and I'm supposed to meet up with him at a hostel in Hama in a couple days. Finally I have a deadline for leaving Damascus. I met up with Braiden from last night and we wandered all over the Old City looking at the markets, looking for decent sandals (a failure), and eventually we settled down at a cafe in the shade for cokes and sheesha. We talked of our trips... mine an escape and his an exploratory venture during the university years, and we talked of life. He's interested in political activism and wants to be an idealistic professor at a Canadian university. Sounds great! He also taught me how to play backgammon and I think that I like the game a lot. It's a great blend of skill and luck at the dice and always a good way to pass the afternoon. Finally we wrapped it up with some shawarma sandwiches and a trip to an internet cafe. Maybe we'll go out tonight once more. After all, I just can't say no to Damascus.