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.
\nGrab 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?
\nNeed 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.
\nGrab 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.
\nReturn 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.
\nWash 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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