Wake up to the first call to prayer at 5 am, mournfully wailing across the city from the half dozen mosque minarets. Still dark out, but already the honk of a thousand car horns begins two stories below. Fall back asleep, slightly chilly under my cotton sleeping sheet. 7am crawl out of bed with the stirring of two Japanese students, who’ve been on the road for almost two years, and share the 5 dollar CAN per night dormitory with me. Brush my teeth with bottled water and then squat over the intense aroma of the hole-in-the-floor toilet with a hose for wiping, or for tourists, a basket nearby for your used TP, but to no avail. Days of constipation followed by days of the complete opposite.
Grab my shoulder bag with its guidebook, notepad, camera and TP and head down the crowded and filthy street with sellers of TV remotes, used power tools, whole racks of goat, cell phones as far as the eye can see (though a bank machine is still a thing of the future), in search of a decent street stand with breakfast felafel wraps, some turkish coffee, some shai. Go by one of the many hole-in-the-wall bakeries making flat bread in a fire kilm and buy a kilo worth and some ayran, or yogurt drink. Pass a fruit market area, with bananas, peaches, apples, and endless dates spread on dirty blankets across the broken pavement, next to donkeys hauling potatoes and small children, and women either covered from head to toe, or showing only their face. Greeted with “welcome!” by every second Arab man to join him on a plastic chair in the street for shai with copius sugar served in glasses that haven’t seen a washing in weeks. Practice a few new Arabic words and answer the usual questions: where from? What you think of Syria? What you think of George Bush?
Need to find the passport office to extend my 14 day visa and get invited by a tailor for shai and even a free felafel, then jump on the back of his friend’s motorbike for a free lift to the immigration station, where my visa won’t be extended till it expires in two days. Make my way back across the numerous roundabouts and unlighted intersections, dodging 1950’s Mercedes taxis, three-wheeled, riquity but coloufull mini sheds with shot suspension driven by teenagers, and the beating sun.
Grab the first of a hundred service taxis careening down the block by pointing to it and hope the Arabic sign said the area you want to go to. They are Toyota vans (just like my old Butter Bean) that squish in twelve people and let you out whenever you want by slowing down a bit. Hand the driver 10 pounds (33 cents) and take the twenty minute ride across town to the budget bus station. Hop on heavily decorated old Mercedes bus with no AC but wicked old pirated Hong Kong Kung-fu films blasting from the onboard TV. Head out to some 2000-year-old Roman ruins in the desert, hike around with maybe half a dozen other tourists in sight. Politley turn down the endless pressure sellers of postcards or carpets. Return to the city for the sunset over the usual Crusader castle on the hill in the middle of town. Grab another 33 cent felafel or even a hamburger with fries inside (but there is not one McDonalds in Syria!), a 5 cent icecream, and find a cafe with a water pipe full of apple-sweetened tabaco and smoke myself dizzy for two hours lounging on persian cushions with elderly Arab men. Perhaps have to politley turn down a homosexual encounter with a young waiter, or explain why I’m not married yet, or get a tour around town by a group of enthusiastic university English majors who want to practice their conversation skills and put on Syria’s best hospitality, second to none in the world I gather.
Return to hotel to find a pack of French backpackers in the lobby and swap prices we’ve paid and places we’ve been in stilted English. So long since I’ve had a decent conversation, like with the middle-aged Toronto guy who was pedaling a beater across Turkey to Iran, or the Calgarian nurse working alone in Saudi Arabia for two years.
Wash my cheesy-smelling socks in the sink with water from a basin (because the gov’t turns of the taps from 5pm to 5am) and a bar of soap wearing my headlamp because the light is out, or kill two birds with one stone and do laundry the next morning during my shower (which is also in the water closet above the squat). Hang socks to dry on the roof with my make-shift clothesline. Make an entry into my log book in superfine script to save paper then pass out and dream of cereal for breakfast and Eileen.
My typical Syrian day
Comments
5 Responses to “My typical Syrian day”
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It sounds pretty bad – why would you want to extend your visa? (I am in Syria too and wondering why)
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Wow, you’re there right now, nice.
Getting a Visa was a hassle, but I wanted to extend it so I could stay in Syria longer. I think I got my initial Visa in Istanbul,and didn’t get into Syria until about a week had lapsed on it. Since it expired in 14 days, and I was worried that if I attempted to leave Syria with an expired Visa, I would get in trouble.
BTW, while you’re in country, it’s worth it to go to Hama and take a tour of the castles through the lush mountains near the coast. -
Interesting. My Syrian friend said that it’s safe for us (a woman and my daughter) to travel to Syria. I do need to know about the country before our adventure. After all, Syria seems to be a country under surveillance by its government over its people.
Any input is welcome. -
This note, like most of the others on your 2003 travels, suggests that you were travelling on a budget that didn’t allow you the level of comfort that you would like. I too have travelled trying to spend as little as possible, but I didn’t confuse the cheap rooms and dirty toilets that I decided to settle for with what the country had to offer. In all countries with poorer people there will be facilities and options that cater to their needs. That you choose to travel this way means that your experiences will differ, from the type of people who serve you, to the type of people who go there.
If you cannot afford to visit or experience something more upscale, don’t assume that it doesn’t exist. There are plenty of educated, cultured and sophisticated people in Syria, Egypt and Jordan. Tourists, especially backpackers almost never meet them. It was Hemingway, talking about Fitzgeralds dislike of the French, who remarked that it was no wonder that Fitzgerald had a poor impression of them since the only people he met were the hotel, restaurant and railway staff, people whose job it was to serve others for low wages.
I visited Syria in 1989 as a backpacker and stayed in some of the cheapest places I could find. Sure the toilets were crappy (excuse the pun). Now, in 2005, my wife and I will try get a visa for Syria. This time, like we have been doing in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Jordan, we will not be staying at rock-bottom hotels but rather at places that give us the minimum comfort and cleanliness that we require. We may have to pay a little more but we think it is worth it. But we never let the type of accomodation we choose colour the impression we have of the town, or the country.
If we are lucky enough to be invited to stay in someone’s home, as we were in Tripoli, Libya, or to share some beers on the balcony of someone’s apartment in Cairo, we know we are experiencing an “insider” look at the country, albeit from the socio-economic perspective of the particular family.
All the countries we have been in on this trip had lots of wonderful things to see, despite what others had to say about it. In the same way I am looking forward to revisiting Syria, as is my wife. Your posting makes it appear as if the sights in Syria are commonplace, mundane and ordinary. It was T.E Lawrence who thought the crusader castle near Aleppo was one of the finest he had seen. The Umayyid Mosque in Damascus has some of the finest mosaics you will ever see in a mosque (it was bought from the Christians back in the 7th century). Salahuddin’s simple tomb is just outside the compound wall of the mosque, together with a marble tomb given by Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany who thought that Salahuddin deserved a more ornate tomb. There are the ruins of Palmyra out in the oasis of Tadmor where Queen Zenobia revolted against the Roman Empire. Aleppo has an impressive looking citadel/fort dominating the town as well as one of the most exotic bazaars I have seen (I hope it is still that way for my wife’s sake). And there is plenty more too, some of the best ice cream you wil ever have, hand-made and sticky, almost like taffy (we found this Syrian-style ice cream in Alexandria but for some reason not in Cairo). And if you ever get a chance to have home-made food, not the run-of-the-mill fast-food that most backpackers (including us) live off, consider yourselves lucky.
Travel is not about bargains, or finding the cheapest of everything. Think of your country if you judged it by the cheapest burger, the poorest coffee (even bad turkish coffee is better than any Tim Horton, Second Cup or Starbucks–the least best of the three probably because it is American), the crappiest no-name beer, the cheapest accommodation you could find in downtown Vancouver, and put it together with the people you would meet at these places, on both sides of the counter.
Forgive me if I sound like I am lecturing but my wife and I have been travelling in the off-season and we don’t have guidebooks. As a result we don’t see many tourists either in the hotels we end up staying in nor at the tourist sites. Well, the day we visited the Giza plateau to see the Pyramids and the Sphinx, my wife and I stood in amazement watching the tour buses empty their load of tourists. Most of them looked like they were dressed for the beach. Men with open shirts or singlets, women with skimpy clothing, some with what appeared to be bathing attire, their buttocks half exposed. One lady, she was Polish I think, was wearing a see-through dress with a yellow string-bikini underneath. This is in Egypt. You can’t help but wonder if these people care one bit about the people who live there. Its their holiday, they paid for it, and they can do whatever they want, after all, how they do things is the acceptable way and others should learn to accept it. Meanwhile the French have passed a law banning women from wearing headscarves. I guess it is up to these people to accept the ways and mores of the places they go to.
Sorry for the long-winded posting, and I don’t mean to imply that you hold the views that I have been critical of, but I just wanted to remind people that they shouldn’t forget that when they choose to travel a certain way they must remember that their choice precludes certain other experiences. When travelling a visitor ought to try to see and experience all facets of the country, and that their experiences may not define all that there is in a place.
All the best….. -
Mahmoud, thanks so much for your insightful comments.
I agree with your overall advice for travellers, “that their experiences may not define all that there is in a place.” My perceptions likely fell into that trap as I certainly only experienced the tip of the iceberg (and only the on-a-budget iceberg) during my trip. And your advice makes me want to have a more rounded experience next time around.
Of course there were a number of Middle East experiences I haven’t written about (hanging out with university students, staying at people’s homes, being cared for when I was ill). I’m actually in the process of posting photos and descriptions from my trip ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeffwerner/sets/133172/ ) in an attempt to give a slightly broader overview.
The only thing I must contest in your comment is that my “posting makes it appear as if the sights in Syria are commonplace, mundane and ordinary.” I must concede this fault to my own writing, but I was in fact trying to express the exact opposite!
Jeff
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