Entering Syria, I felt like I drank two Coca Colas back-to-back and was all hyped up because my group got into a verbal and physical fight with a rude Dutch-Syrian couple about whose turn it was at the one window for foreigners entering Syria. Ironically we couldn’t escape these same people in Damascus, running into them at least 3 times in the souq (shopping corridor). As much as I would like to say that we just ignored them, I think some sneers were exchanged by both parties.
The majority of my time in Damascus was spent in the aforementioned souq. The souq ceiling is covered, but you can see light coming through the bullet holes created by French machine guns flying over during the nationalist rebellion in 1925. The first night, we listened to a storyteller at a café and despite being entirely in Arabic, it was a delight because he was so animated and the café had a great atmosphere. The courtyard of the Umayyad mosque proved quite picturesque, with its golden mosaics and shining marble floors. The girls paid 50 Syrian Pounds ($1) for the required hooded robes to enter the mosque grounds. I had an interesting time waiting for an old courtyard to open, miming with an old man sitting in the spice row about the operating hours. He invited me to sit with him and gave me some tea, which I watched him prepare with about one part tea to three parts sugar so of course it was delicious.
Prices in Syria are even better than in Macedonia and somehow being surrounded by salary-earning group members made me forget that I have volunteer wages, so I indulged in some souvenir shopping. I invested in some wonderful food as well, including the legendary Bakdash ice cream shop in the souq with salep-flavored ice cream rolled in pistachios. There were wonderful little pizzas for less than $1 and falafels for the same price.
From Damascus, we took a very fume-filled van to Palmyra. We drove within 100 miles of the Iraq border, which may be the closest that I ever want to get to Iraq, but it felt strange to see highway signs to Baghdad. The attraction in Palmyra is the ruins, which are the first that I’ve seen with dual language inscriptions, in Greek and the local Aramaic. There was also an interesting astrological carving in one of the temples. Katie Travel Tip #3: When traveling in the desert and around ruins, khaki pants hide dirt the best.
From Palmyra we took a tiny but better maintained van to Crac des Chevaliers (Fort of the Knights). The fort was originally a small Kurdish outpost but was expanded by the Crusaders, and eventually turned into living quarters for locals until the early 1900s. Our hotel was perched on a hillside directly across from the fort, so it was a tremendous view to wake up to.
From Crac des Chevaliers, it was back in the cramped van to the city of Aleppo. Luckily we were able to add two stops, seeing huge wooden water wheels in Hama and then a “dead city” called Sergilla. We arrived at Sergilla just at sunset, so the abandoned stone buildings had a beautiful hue. At our van driver’s advice, we went in the “back entrance” i.e. over a crumbling rock wall and paid the entrance fee on our way out. In the Sergilla parking lot, a local family was using the pizza oven, an intriguing process. Basically they rolled the dough, put sauce on it, and then used something akin to a catcher’s mitt to slap the dough against the oven wall. Once it was cooked, they would peel it off the oven wall. They gave us some to try and I liked it.
Our arrival in Aleppo was the night before the beginning of Eid al-Adha (Festival of Sacrifice, called Kurban Bajram in Macedonia), a three day Muslim holiday celebrating the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son, before God offered him a ram to sacrifice instead (at least that’s what Wikipedia says). Our hotel was directly in the souq and carrying our bags in was like salmon swimming upstream. Insanity is the word that comes to mind to describe the souq that night and the next couple days were carnage. Sheep carnage, that is, as sheep butchering in all its stages went on day and night. Coming and going from the hotel, we were forced to dodge piles of discarded sheep parts, rivers of blood, and the live sheep milling about before their demise. If you don't want to see such things, don't look at my photos on Picasa. Apparently all the women and girls were home cooking the sheep because the first day of the holiday, only men and boys were out. I felt like the last woman on the planet with all this testosterone surrounding me. Almost everything was closed for the holiday and the KFC that I searched out closed two months ago, so my main memory of Aleppo will be sheep.
Exiting Syria, our shuttle bus operator filled the empty seats (and let one guy sit on a drum in the aisle) and we slowly made our way through all the requisite fees and windows without any throwdowns. Overall Syria was great because there were very few tourists and it was inexpensive. I think it would be a difficult place to live though, with websites like Facebook and Blogger banned and the President’s picture splashed up everywhere. Now I’m in Turkey for the second time, heading towards more geological wonders and marketplaces.
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