Damascus

To walk around the world’s oldest, continuously inhabited city gives such a unique feeling. I just came back from my short visit to Damascus, Syria last night. It was a great trip. I went with some friends from the language center (Andrea from Germany, her friend Maite from Spain, Houston and Jennifer) and we ended up running into a few others at the hotel.

DAY 1
We got to the Abdulli bus/taxi station and had difficulty finding a taxi going to Damascus…either because it was the first day of Eid or because it was 7:30am. When we found one that agreed to take us to the border the group consensus was to take it and hope we’d find something at the border. Fawwaz was concerned and ended up speaking to the driver on the phone and told him how it wasn’t right (possibly not even legal) to just leave us at the border; the guy later got a service taxi returning from Syria to take us the rest of the way. The border crossing was not fun, as expected. Everyone but us American’s got our Visas quickly. It took about 4 hours. I’m pretty confident they weren’t doing anything with the passports for most of that time. In fact, on our way home we noticed a stack of US Passports sitting unattended on the counter for some time. This is the unfortunate consequence of having basically no relations with a country. We got to our hotel (Al-Rabie), which was a small and simple but nice hotel about a 10 minute walk from Old Damascus. Afterward we walked the old city’s streets and had dinner at a small restaurant. I went out to have a cup of coffee with Andrea’s friends from Spain as they smoked hookah.

DAY 2
A day full of walking around, we worked our way through the busy Souk Hamidiyah (a closed air, walk through market with countless merchants trying to sell their wares), the Umayyad mosque (one of the largest and oldest mosques worldwide, which some say contains the head of John the Baptist within its shrine as well as the head of Hussein, the son of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, a major figure in Shi’a Islam) and more of the streets of the old city. While walking through the Souk we stopped to get some of the infamous Pistachio ice cream, which was very refreshing. In the evening we went to a café to listen to a traditional story teller, which was entertaining despite our very rudimentary Arabic skills. Afterward we went to dinner where we had a nice feast and had a live band play while a whirling dervish whirled in his long white robe (a now popular tourist attraction, but historically symbolic dance of the mystic Sufi sect of Islam).

DAY 3
We visited the old palace in the Old City and shopped a little throughout the Souks more before heading back to Jordan. The return trip was a lot easier, with little hassle. It felt good to get back to Amman, where I actually had the slight sensation of returning home…although there is nothing that can ever replace the REAL home.


Some pictures: