Four Nights in Syria

We are currently comfortably lodged in the home of Mr. Muslim Remtulah in the town of Arusha, Tanzania. How did this happen? Well, when we were in Damascus, Syria we went out for a fabulous dinner with a very international group of people we met at the hotel. There were a dozen of us, from France, Australia, England, Russia, the U.S and one lovely woman from Tanzania who currently lives in Vancouver, B.C. In the generous way of travellers she instantly invited us to stay in her family's home when she found out that we were headed to Tanzania. We have been made to feel extremely welcome and have met well over a dozen cousins, uncles, and aunts.
As for Syria. . .
We arrived by taking a bus from Antakya (southwestern Turkey) across the border (no hassles at all) to Aleppo and then from there managed to find our way to the bus for Hama, where we spent one night. Hama is a smaller city which was actually subject to a horrible massacre (from it's own leader) in the 1980's (if I am remembering correctly from my reading of the fascinating book From Beirut to Jerusalem). Hama is know for it's immense wooden water wheels called norias which make a continuos moaning noise as they revolve. From there, we hired a taxi to go to an ancient crusader castle named Crac de Chevalier and then our taxi dropped us in the dismal town of Homs where we caught a bus (just by the skin of our teeth) on to Palmyra. There are fabulous ruins preserved in Palmyra which is on the ancient trading route of the Silk Road. Our bus ride to Palmyra was not without a little bit of excitement . . . the bus brokedown on the dusty desert road. This, in itself, was not a problem. A replacement bus was quickly sent, but as the new bus began to take of down the road, I said to Laurel, "Hmmm...I hope they transferred our baggage to the new bus." Of course they hadn't and it's a good thing Laurel ran up to ask the driver while we were still close enough to run back down the road and grab them from the broken down bus. The other passengers must have thought we were complete idiots. We were the only tourists on the whole bus. As foreign as Syria felt, and as much as people looked at us with curiousity, we certainly felt we recieved a warm welcome. In Turkey and Morocco when people came up to offer help, you always knew that they wanted something back (and usually they did, whether it was money, or they wanted you to visit their brother's carpet shop, or a date) but the Syrians came across as a bit more genuine. In Aleppo we had to find a different bus station from the one we arrived at, and we didn't walk more than a block before a man stopped to ask if he could help us. He then walked us the 4 blocks to the bus station and expected nothing in return. The fruitseller at the bus station gave us a big smile, a "Welcome! Welcome!" and a couple of pears. The most challenging task we faced in Syria (in Damascus) was mailing a package of souvenirs home. I like to call it "Arab efficiency". One person behind the counter reluctantly helps you while 3 or 4 others look on when they could be doing any number of things to speed the process. We must have spent close to an hour dealing with the post office even though there was no line. One young fellow there spoke some English and was helping - - he also wanted to use the video recording function on his cell phone (everyone has cell phones here and they all seem to be the newest ones with all the bells and whisltes) to record me speaking so that he could "use it to practice his English". Like and idiot I said yes. He began with benign questions and then came the inevitible "Do you like George Bush?" Of course I went with the "no, not really". Then came "Do you like Condoleeza Rice?" Again, I came back with a negative answer. "Do you like Sharon?" This is when my heart started to beat a bit faster and it seemed that the temperature rose from hot to hotter in the stuffy government building. "Who??", I stammered. "Ariel Sharon", he says. (Pound, pound, sweat, sweat.) I feign ignorance and say "Who is that?" and he responds with the answer as I continue to have no idea who Ariel Sharon might be. We manage to end the video session and finish our prolonged mailing process in a few more minutes and catch a taxi to Beirut. One of the women we had dinner with the night before was from Paris (ethnically Tunisian) and worked at the French embassy in Damascus. She had advised us to go ahead and say we were from Canada "just in case" because there are spies everywhere and had also refused to even say the word "Israel" in conversation, referring to it always as "The country that starts with an 'i' and ends with 'l'." So that added a bit to my post office panic.