barfing in Dubai, lost luggage in Jordan

Hard day.
We checked out of the hotel at 8:45, took a cab to the airport and then had a really great flight rep help us with our check-in. I was really worried that since we we flying back to Beirut to complete our roundtrip (cheaper to buy) and then tacked on a one-way to our final destination – Amman, Jordan – on a different airline, that we would encounter problems with luggage in Beirut. And if we had to go through customs to retrieve our backpacks from baggage claim, then we’d have to wait in numerous lines and pay to “enter” Lebanon again when we weren’t even leaving the airport, all this on a 2 hour layover. I didn’t think that we’d be able to handle it. But the nice lady at Qatar Airlines in Dubai reassured us that she’d add the final leg of our trip to our baggage claim check and that the bags should check all the way through to Amman – Thank Goodness!! Our flight from Dubai to Doha, Qatar is only 40 minutes, but we have a hideous 5 hour layover. The airport is nice, but not that nice… especially when you are sick. So we alternately sat and walked for 5 hours, boarded the next flight (3 hours) to Beirut and were able to transfer within the customs without having to enter the country. Other than a 30 minute wait to get someone to the transfer desk to get us our boarding passes, the trick worked nicely. Then our 10pm flight to Amman, almost there. The flight ran late, lots of people, it’s only a 45 minute flight and we get off proceed through visa and customs, our 2nd entry visa to Jordan and go to baggage claim, and wait, and wait and wait. They lost our luggage!!! We have to report it and fill out the forms, but it’s a sticky situation since we do not have a home address. It’s after midnight, we have a brief night in a hotel in Madaba, then we get a rental car in the morning and drive 4 hours south to the desert where we have a jeep tour and overnight stay in Wadi Rum (going to be excellent!). So, a half night in a hotel, then one night in a tent in the desert, not conducive for luggage delivery, and then 3 nights down on the Red Sea in Aqaba, Jordan. Please, dear God let them be able to catch us with our bags, we only have 5 more days, but 5 days in the same clothes without shampoo and a change of underwear is going to totally suck.

We got our luggage today, in Aqaba. The desert trip was wonderful - unfortunately, no camel ride, but we saw lots of camels - they make me smile. We arrived later than we thought, we are driving and rented a car and we took a wrong turn, but nothing bad. So our host and Bedouin guide greeted us at his home, and drove to the "Meditation Camp" It's 4 bedouin tents up against a rock formation, beautiful. Lex and I were assigned our own tent, but it's encouraged that you carry your bed frame and mattress out and sleep outside, which we did and loved it. They make a traditional dinner in a firepit for several hours, we shared the experience with a couple from Chile, a gentleman from Jordan somewhere and this enormous family of 13 showed up just for dinner and we got to have some great conversations. Zidane (our guide, about 45-50 with dozens of children and at least 2 wives), called the airline and reamed them out huge in Arabic for us about our lack of luggage, he was shocked that they wouldn't immediately deliver it to the desert camp and asked to talk to a manager, and then screamed at him to get our luggage to us TODAY!! Anyway, they sent it special on a bus to Aqaba, so that when we drove through town on Friday, we stopped at the bus station and claimed our backpacks. YAY toast! We have a change of underwear now! 3 days in the same clothes is plenty. But it kinda brought us closer, we shared my deoderant and toothbrush and toothpaste, a couple of pantiliners and water bottles. But the desert was really cool, I kept on thinking that this is a Randy Place. Then this morning we rode through sanddunes at full speed crashing around on the benches in an old Toyota truck bed. I'll send pictures.

Well, the stress is off, we have 3 nights here on the Red Sea in Aqaba, all paid for, and we have a car, all paid for. And then on Monday we just drive back to Amman, pay for a cheap hotel and turn the car in. Then in the morning, we take a taxi to the airport and we fly forever and get home. I cannot wait!

The Beirut days, onto Dubai

Saturday in Beirut
We went to this resort-y, swimming pool-y, sunshine place yesterday, I'll send photos. It's really the perfect place, all about tourists, but that's not always bad. It's on the ocean, but they've built this gigantic "Water World" out into the ocean, lots of cement, but in a good way. I'll send photos.
We found it yesterday morning while trying to find a beach. We still haven't found a real beach. There's a place next to the resort thingy that the locals use, but it's tiny, really rocky and there's no sand. The beach would be fun for families with children since there's alot of flat rocks that come out of the water, but you definitely need water shoes, or you'd cut your feet up. I have my Tevas cuz I'm not some dummy that only packs flipflops and high heels.... gosh wonder who I'd be talking about?? But because I am so completely retarded fashion-wise, I get brownie points taken away too. Anyway, WaterWorld is not at all like our WaterWorld, but it's the easiest thing to call it. I think that the real name is Sadeer. It's got concrete terraces at different heights, each one has some sort of swimming pool, none are deep, they are made for hanging out and getting sunshine. There's a swim-up bar, and then other bars strategically placed on the different areas. They have little pavilion things where you could bring your group of 5-15 and have cushion areas to lounge. There are cushioned single lounge chairs by the thousands in rows, they have fantastic terry cloth covers so that you don't necessarily have to dry off before sitting down. At the last end is the section for families, this is the only pool that children are allowed. There's a couple of flowing, large hot tubs, but who's cold?? Not in this heat and humidity. We saw it from the sidewalk on our exploration but it has barriers so that outsiders cannot see in, so we didn't know what it was, just looked like it had a bar and outside seating. It turns out that you have to cross the 4-lane road that goes along the ocean and then come in through the hotel on the other side, underneath the road in the passage and it opens up. US$20 per day/ per person. Which is LP30,000, Lebanese pounds. We found it on Saturday morning, we both had swimming suits on but Lexie decided that we should come back in the evening and hang out when it was cooler and maybe eat dinner and then go to the nightclub - I was hoping for a little sunshine and I desperately wanted to get in some water cuz I'm melting, but she had her say. We dinked away the afternoon shopping, had a quick University tour and hung out at the internet café.
We went back to Sadeer at 5pm, Lexie bought a new dress that is fantastic on her, and these roman strappy gold sandals and she's all decked out for the nightclub, so she doesn't want to get her hair wet, so she daintily dips, all posed, draped across the edge of the pool.

Good Lord, it's exhausting being around her. The men are instantly drawn and gawking and trying to figure out how to get me out of the way. I wanted to swim in the ocean, and they have this interior water way that is the ocean and has an deep ocean bottom, I jump in and THANK goodness!!! It was heaven, not too cold, but blessedly cool, I swam laps for awhile, went all the way around the wierd little island thing and got out to find Lexie. She's already attracted some Arab guy who is sitting in my lounge chair, I stood standing above him with my intimidating stance until he moves and she introduces me. He tries to be charming to me, but I don't care, I don't want to talk. Lexie shooes him away and we sit in the afternoon sunshine for a couple of hours. It was too late to get a tan, but it was a terrific way to keep cool in comfort.
We go to the seafood restaurant and sit out on the patio and watch the fishermen and the waves. It juts out into the ocean and is by the light house and they have cases of fresh fish, and actually the fishermen are out there fishing with these really long poles, like 20 feet long, and they don't really cast, they stand on the pylons in the ocean and swing the hook out and stand there for awhile.And it seems that Beirut International Airport is just up the coast, cuz about every 30 minutes a big airliner, usually Emirates Airline, sweeps down awfully close. Lexie orders the fresh Barracuda, I order fried Eggplant. We watch the sun set, and the people at the restaurant do their icky Shisha thing – the water pipe smoking is EVERYWHERE. I guess that it’s better than having someone blow cigarette smoke in your face, but not much. The guest picks some flavor for their water pipe, things like strawberry or mint or banana flavors – odd. And then they puff on the mouthpiece, a lot of women, even the fully burka’d women are smoking Shishas. Smoking is very prevalent here, it’s hard to remember a time in Colorado when there were smokers in restaurants and cars and stuff. Even in the airports, they are smoking at the gates, but not on the airplane itself.

Another tidbit, soda cans, aluminum cans have the full pull tab, like we used to have as children. I had to show Lexie how to do it. It’s the one piece thing that comes all of the way off and you set it on the table until you finish your can and then put it in the empty can. Not sure why.

Sunday, Beirut
Lexie is going to the mountains and Byblos with a girl that she met at Starbucks, I’m trying not to be overprotective, but I went to introduce myself and made sure that I had contact information. I’m spending the morning at Sadeer getting a suntan, yay. Nothing major planned until tomorrow, we fly to Dubai, via Doha, Qatar…. Just a layover.

Monday
Fairly uneventful, except that Lexie drank water from the tap at her house party and is barfing all day through 2 airports. Not so much fun. We are in Dubai now, it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s almost like Vegas in that things are organized around having fun. I booked our hotel through hotels.com and actually cheaped out a little bit, but OMG, the hotel is totally premium!! We were greeted at the cab from the airport by 2 bellboys, they whisked our backpacks away and they were already in our room when we walked up. While we were standing at the counter with our passports, another guy brought us each a glass of fresh squeezed watermelon juice to enjoy. We got upgraded from a plain old room to a room with an ocean view, 2 double beds with tons of bedding and 4 pillows each!! We feel like royalty, especially after a week in hostels. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of our hostels, but they certainly did not have Crabtree & Evelyn products for free, in fact just having a washcloth seems like the height of luxury.

YAY, tomorrow the beach, (our hotel is right on the beach), and directly opposite the first of the cool man-made islands that look like palm trees from space. We can see the Atlantis from our balcony. Flying in we see this crazy haze, you cannot see the ground even though we are close to landing. The gentleman next to me on the plane explains that it’s a fine sand that kicks up in a rare way only a couple times per year, they call it “Toze” (don’t know the spelling, but “toes” looks weird). I've stuck in a picture of the Toze, it's one of the sun, but you can look right at it, kinda looks like the moon should, but it's the sun. But it’s still 110` F out there, imagine how hot it’ll be tomorrow without haze?

So we’ll get some sand and sun time and then spend the rest of the day in the airconditioned mega-mall.
Forgive me, I totally sold out. Lexie is getting some much needed sleep at the hotel, so I’m on my own for dinner and there is every American chain restaurant along the strip by the hotel. I don’t submit to Starbucks, I don’t submit to Ruby Tuesday, but I’m in On the Border cuz I’ve been craving tacos for months. They didn’t have Mexican in Brazil either and I just need some. It’s yummy.
Oh, and $US1 = 3.67 AED (dinhars). Keeps me on my calculating toes.

It's Beirut, yay Krispy Kreme

Friday, going to Beirut
So, we get up bright and early and get ready. We are a little apprehensive because we have to enter Lebanon, and unlike our land crossing from Jordan to Syria, we don’t have our visa for Lebanon. Unlike Syria, it’s supposed to be easily available from the border (Syria’s is not, therefore we applied back in May through their embassy in Washington DC). And since we’ll be on a bus with the locals, we don’t want to tick them off by forcing the whole bus to wait through our ordeal. We grab our packs and walk to the main road and try to hail a cab, but there’s not a lot of traffic and it seems that the cabs all already have passengers. Eventually we get one and we are on our way. When we pull into the parking lot of the bus/service taxi station, literally 10 guys run up to the doors and we are surprised. We get out and they want to know where we are going, we say, “Beirut” and they all say that they’ll take us. They are service taxi drivers or the people who hustle for them. We say that we want to take a bus, they lie and say, “all of the busses have left”, but we can see a handful of busses behind them. Then one honest guy says, “the busses are over there, just go find one.” SO we walk over and a nicer young guy asks where we are going, and points to the first bus in line, and says 10 o’clock. That’s perfect, 20 minutes away, we ask where to get tickets and he walks us up to the window and talks to the guy. It’s really cheap, just S400 each, so we paid for 2 on a bus the same amount as we’d pay for one in a service taxi. We drop off the packs and go to load on the bus, it’s almost the same as the others that we have been on, but at least not at this moment, there is no air conditioning, we hope that when they get rolling is when they’ll turn it on. We watch a little kid lick his way across a plastic sign, gross. Then we load up and hmmm, no air conditioning. Darn it!! It’s not so bad once the bus is moving, they leave the front door wide open while driving and there’s a vent in the middle of the bus roof, just above us and it’s pleasant as long as everyone keeps their curtains closed. The family with the little boy who was licking the billboard is sitting in front of us. I feel sorry for the mom, there are 3 little boys under 4, and the toddler isn’t 2 yet. She has a slightly older boy, 6/7 that seems self sufficient and then a much older boy (17?), not sure how he is related, but she won’t speak to any man, so the older boy does all of her bidding and communicating. She’s in full burka, even the veil thing that ties around your head and covers the eye opening, and black gloves. She focuses her attention on the toddler and the older boy sorta monitors the other three that are shoved into the 2 seats across the aisle, but they are kinda on their own. And OMG, these boys are filthy!! Dirty faces, black, grimy hands, it makes me cringe as a mom. And I’ll cut them some slack. With 4 boys under 8 years old, it must be murder to keep them clean, but at no time during the trip did anyone make any attempt to wash faces or pull out a Kleenex and do the spit thing. And the toddler was obviously the favorite and his face was disgusting. The youngest of the group of 3 on the other side of the aisle has a huge personality, but after spending a day observing, it seems like he’s also the one that takes the most abuse, so maybe his personality is directly reflected by being a little neglected? I’ll call him Badger since I have a lot to say and it makes more sense with a name. The boy slightly older than Badger sits and bites him for a good 10 minutes, up the arms and on the neck, and Badger is being tough and just laughing for most of it until it hurts and he squawks. The oldest boy and mom don’t give a darn. Then the 3rd boy on that side of the aisle, not really involved in the wrestling, gets comfortable against the window and falls asleep, and the biting boy wants to get comfortable so he shoves badger onto the floor between seats, and then the oldest boy (with mom) grabs Badger up off of the floor and shoves him into the seat behind his brothers, which wouldn’t normally be a problem, but there’s someone sitting there. It’s a nice looking 20-ish man, but it’s not fair for him to have to now babysit someone else’s child. Luckily Badger is tired too and curls up awkwardly on the seat and falls asleep. His upper leg kept slipping off of his lower leg and his head was at a strange angle with no real support, so the nice gentleman eventually straightens him out and rest his little head against the stranger’s side. What a nice man, I think that I’ll take him home. I smile to show him that I noticed his generosity.
There’s another westerner on the bus, which is a relief, cuz we have one more person to be hissed at if our visas take forever at the border. He’s tall and attractive and has a yellow shirt. He’s sitting 3 rows in front of us and reading a Lonely Planet Syria/Lebanon books, that’s encouraging.
We are at the Syrian border in a heartbeat, even though the bus is really bad about pulling up the hills and mountains, slow as molasses. The first stop is to pay our exit tax SYP500 apiece, fill out the paper, then pull forward and disembark again to stand in lines. Holy cow these people are horrible at lines. There’s even fixed posts in the ground and they are right up against our backs, with their hands coming up over our shoulders, trying to muscle their way before us or at least hand their passports and paperwork before we get to. Lexie complains that the little woman behind her was so close that they were spooning. We have the extraordinary bus attendant with the puppy eyes taking care of us, he shoves UK boy- I’m really sorry that I wasn’t listening when I asked his name- into one line and then me and Lexie into the next one, so we are encompassing both of the foreigner-only lines. UK-boy knows to push forward, and he’s tall enough to fend off the crush behind him. And I’m trying to be a fullback in my line with Lexie, I’m tall enough that they aren’t getting anything over my shoulder or head, but Lexie is more susceptible to the pushing. The two women in front of us take decades to process, they each have a handful of papers with children’s photos stapled to them, so I guess that they are processing multiple kiddos. The bus attendant appears again and hands our passports to UK-boy, cuz it looks like he may get to the head of the line faster because he doesn’t have the slow women in front of him, he’s trying, but his window isn’t grabbing new passports at all. Then finally our line clears, 4 sets of hands shoot forward between me and Lexie and over our shoulders, I nudge them aside and tell UK-boy, “over here!!” and he hands back the set of 3 passports and we get them in the window before anyone else. YAY for teamwork!!!!! They process fairly fast, due to the crazy currency exchange, we have to pay LB25,000 to enter Lebanon, US$1=LB1500. It’s done, we get our passports stamped and it didn’t take too long. Our bus attendant, he is so sweet, is there to escort us back to the bus. All of the locals processed faster, wouldn’t you know it, but they aren’t angry. All in all, it took about 20 minutes to get it done. And we are off.
Oh, back to Badger stories. So, little guys have to wake up when we exit Syria and they have a passenger change, the dad was waiting at the border and the oldest boy disappears. The parents buy snacks and sodas for the kids and they enjoy them, but the wrestling and smacking starts again and the parents ignore it. At one point the next oldest boy tries to tear off Badgers ear and he cries silently for 10 minutes and then falls asleep again.
Again, this part of Syria/Lebanon is really mountainous. They have ski resorts and are known for their beauty. So we climb mountains, go through some towns and then clear the last mountains and see the Mediterranean Sea. Cool! It’s like coming back into Denver from the mountains and coming down Genessee, only it’s not a freeway, it’s a 2 lane road, and there are homes and businesses on either side of it and we zigzag all of the way down.

We are in Beirut. It’s really hot and incredibly humid, but beautiful and it’s great to be back in a “westernized” city. We see women dressed in dresses and shorts and tanktops, hollah. Our hotel is near the water, right across from this beautiful college campus, the American University of Beirut, created by missionaries in 1867 (?) to train Doctors for the hospital. Lebanon used to be part of Syria and they both used to be French colonies, so Arabic is the first language, most people speak French and then most people also speak at least some English. It’s very cosmopolitan.

Thursday in Damascus

We woke up on the roof, it was quite pleasant.
We missed the mosque last night because we ran so late and got caught up with all of the men dragging us into their stores, “just to look”. Uck. So, we are going to head over to the Old City again and go directly to the mosque.

So we walk over, it’s already hot (of course) and melty, we walk through the whole souk, it goes on and on. And we come out in the screaming sun in front of the gates of the mosque, which is huge. We watch for a few minutes to see what the etiquette is, Lexie has been wearing her headscarf all morning, and I have to remedially put mine on just wrapped like crazy. And we have to take off our shoes before stepping over the entrance, so we do AND… get turned away. The guy says that we have to buy a ticket to get in. That’s kinda odd, just us have to buy a ticket?? There are thousands of people walking in the gate without a ticket. I think that they are profiling. So we walk down the wall until we see the sign that says something to the effect of “clothes changing room” and we walk in to buy our tickets to the mosque. There is a man behind the desk, he says that it’s 50 pounds per person, so Lexie (our money person in Damascus) blesses this outlay. When we pay, he gives us a ticket and then tells us to get 2 burkas, one off of the #1 rack for Lexie and one off of the #4 rack for me. Interesting. We pull these hideous robes with Velcro and hoods off of the racks as we are told and put them over our clothing. They are an ugly greige color (combo of gray and beige). And then we walk back to the gate looking totally stupid. They may as well as had us wear blinking signs on our heads that say, “Caution tourist, not muslim!!” We take off of our shoes and enter and show our tickets. The inside court is entirely outside with a cover porch around the entire outside. It looks like the faithful come and sit with their favorite Imam teacher. There are muslim holy men stationed around with groups of people sitting on the marble at their feet listening, both men and women. They are on the shaded side of the courtyard. Even in the center, which is under complete sun, the white marble floor keeps it cooler on your feet. There’s an elevated room on stilts, towards one end, I don’t know the purpose, and in the center is a pavilion with water spigots and people washing their feet and hands. We walk a little outside and then go back to the gate to go inside the mosque itself to one side. We walk in, and there’s a sort of “coat check” where you can leave your shoes and belongings, we choose to hang onto ours, and we swing wide around a barrier of posts and chain draped between 4’ high movable posts. The kind that you see to form lines at a bank. And then we realize that only women are on one side and men on the other. And then in a little slice down the center are more muslim teachers and singers, so that they can speak to both the women and men at the same time. They each have a gathering at their feet. Down at the end is a ornate little room completely inside the bigger building with green windows – the women’s chain barrier jigs away from the center to allow the women to get near this building and touch it, which they are doing. We took a photo (photos are completely allowed) and asked our hotel guy what that building is and he said that’s where the prophets are. I’m not entirely sure what that means. We want a photo with both me and Lex is our hideous outfits, but don’t want to bother the faithful, so we walk up to a single woman in the same get-up. She gladly takes our pic and then asks if we would take hers too, she’s alone and wants a photo. We head out, and are able to remove our robes at the gate and put them in the dirty clothes basket (??). Then we dink around the enormous souk, re-visit Lexie’s carpet friend, Noor, and I buy another wrap. Yesterday he wanted to give Lexie a free rug, but not so me. I should have had her bargain, he wants to rip me off. We get back and our room STILL is not ready, they tell us to wait for cleaning, even though it’s been a couple of hours. I glance in and it’s a HUGE room, 4 beds and our own bathroom – gawl.


Lexie wanted to go back to the Art Café that we’d found that first night after ditching Sam. We were going to have a little lunch and read/type. We LOVE the art café and they love us. I ordered the most fantastic Lentil soup, and Lexie had the Art Soup, which was a lamb, tomato and veggie soup. Fantastic! And she drank Turkish coffee her fave. My tummy is pretty woozy, so soup and 7-up are good enough for me. Then I plug in the computer and type for awhile. The owner notices us and wants to buy our drinks and we insist on paying, so later he sends over a sensational nutella and chocolate crepe – it’s beautiful and decadently yummy. Like pick up the plate and lick it yummy! We stay for a couple of hours and then tip big and head out.
It's a slow day, with no travel, so I won't bore you with insignificant stuff. We are in Beirut now, and it's fantastic!!!! Most of Lebanon is mountainous and they go right down to the Mediterranean Sea and there's Beirut, I'll tell you more tomorrow. But I might be able to upload some photos and we'll be able to see Facebook.

I'm a lieutenant, Wednesday

We leave today back to Damascus. Lexie heard just last night that there’s supposedly a Starbucks in the Christian quarter of Aleppo, so she wants to run out and see if they have the mugs that she collects. She pops our early by herself before I’m fully awake, and has an issue with a man harassing her. But I’m proud, she slapped him with her map and found a policeman, then took a cab back to the hotel – still, it’s worrying and she didn’t get her mug.
Oh!! I’m a lieutenant. If feels like a million years ago, but it was the night that I flew out of JFK airport, our flight was so delayed that several of us hung around at the gate and watched other flights come and go at our gate. There were 2 ladies, one in a burka and maybe her sister, not robed who sat down and got comfortable together, ladies about my mom’s age – 50-60? When the flight before ours was called to go to Abu Dhabi, they looked alarmed and the one woman stood up and went up to the gate to ask a question, but they didn’t answer it. So she returned and tried to speak to the woman and family sitting next to me, but she has almost no English and my neighbor couldn’t answer her question. Then my neighbor says that she is going to India through Abu Dhabi, and the burka woman is startled. She ran over and got her sister and starting packing up their carry-ons, so I thought that I knew what they were worried about so I walked over and said, “Amman??” and they look at me oddly, and said, “Amman.” And I wave my hands around while I try to say that they are at the right gate, but our flight doesn’t leave until 2am (2 fingers), they must have gotten it, because they put their things back down. But we had a special bond now, so for the next 4 hours, we’d smile at each other as we’d be walking in the terminal or passing by. And then 8 hours into the flight we met by the lavatory on the plane, and the burka lady asked me, “Amman?” And I nodded yes. She asked, “Jordan first time?” and I said yes, and she said, “tourist?” and I nodded yes, and then “Welcome”. The lady next to her in the bulkhead, never met her before, said something to my burka lady in arabic and they kinda giggled. It was obviously about me, so I asked, “I’m tall?” (hand on my head and upward) and they nodded. Dr. Yassar, my seatmate was also standing there, so he translated. He said that they thought that I looked like a lieutenant. I’m assuming because of my height and my haircut? Then they quickly said something to Dr. Yassar and he said, “they meant it in a good way” and I smiled and said that I was complimented by it.
So, now Lexie calls me her lieutenant and doesn’t want to go out and around by herself. Maybe the people of Syria think that I’m her bodyguard? We haven’t had any problems thus far with harassment. I mean, we get noticed because of the way we dress and how pretty Lexie is. There’s a lot of ogling, but never any touching. They have been somewhat surprised to find out that I’m her mom. I wish that I was packin’ -like a cool shoulder holster and a walkie talkie in my sleeve, and dark glasses. I could say, “cssssshh (static sound), package has been delivered. On the move, CSHHHHH.”
OK, the regular routine now, we are experts at this bus thing. Ask Aleppo Ahmed to write the name of the bus station down in Arabic, and ask how much we should reasonably pay for a taxi to get there, and he adds his favorite bus company, because there are at least 15 companies that have all sorts of busses running between Aleppo and Damascus. We hitch on the backpacks and walk to the end of the street to the major street and hail a cab. Lexie does the negotiation, we plop the backpacks in the trunk and climb in and we are off. But, even though our driver nodded and acted like he knew exactly what we were asking, he is evidently illiterate, because he pulls over to the side of the road and calls a teenager over to read our piece of paper with the bus station name on it. Bus station, buy tickets, present passport, guided to correct bus, put backpacks in cargo hold, find assigned seats.
We only had one issue on the bus and I might be making it up. There was one man and 2 women that sat across the aisle from us on the bus. I brought out the netbook and started typing. It feels maybe a little show-offy to flaunt my technology and wealth, but on a 4 hour bus drive, that’s the perfect way to kill time and get my journaling done, and I try to be unobtrusive. But the man in the Yassar Arafat kerchief, I think that it’s called a Kebbiyah, is awfully interested in my computer. He keeps stealing glances at it out of the corner of his eye and the 2 woman that he’s with, but are sitting in the seat behind him, are openly curious. I end up taking a brief nap before we stop midway at the Homs bus station for a potty stop and to let people off and on, and Lexie says that when I stowed the laptop back in my messenger bag, that they couldn’t keep their eyes off of it…. Hmmm. Maybe it was just curiosity, but I always take my messenger bag with me when we leave the bus, and they got off at Homs, so nothing happened.
Bummer, Sunday night at this same hostel, they told us that we might have to share a single room on Wednesday when we came back, but that’s not true. Some people who were supposed to leave in the morning have extended their stay and there’s other people that need a room, so we are asked if we could possibly sleep on the roof? I don’t really want to be up on a hot roof with tar paper and the outlet vents for the bathrooms, so we go to see, and it’s not bad at all, it’s like an open balcony. There are 2 *real* rooms up here and then a common area, a balcony and an area that they are hanging clothes and blankets to dry. It’s not ideal, there’s no privacy, we’ll be on cushions on the floor, but for a reduced price of US$8, we can do it. We leave our backpacks and take a couple things out and put them on our mats. We are in and out for the afternoon and evening, we find our version of the Sheraton in Damascus for wonderful air conditioning – the Cham Palace, and then run out for something to eat and to check out the Old City and when we come back Hemmat, the guy at the front desk, tells us “good news, we moved your mats over to the better place, so that in the morning when the sun comes up, you will not get sun in your face because of the walls. He takes us upstairs to show us that he moved our mats and our things over to the place where they were drying laundry before and it’s **better**. Code for: We had a group of 6 UK backpackers who were desperate, willing to pay any money for a place to stay, so you got bumped across the roof. And I thought that hostel people were generally courteous. Not so these guys, they are smoking while sitting close to our mats, and when we came up the spiral stairs, they said snidely to each other, “oh, here’s the Americans.” I had talked myself into being excited about being on the roof, it’s much cooler, there’s always a breeze, it will feel open and free – but now we are sharing that small space in close quarters with a fraternity. Oh well, I’m beat, it doesn’t matter while I am sleeping. I think that Hemmat talked to them because they settled down, moved away from us and got fairly quiet. It was a nice night frankly, the fresh air was wonderful and we just put all of our gear by our heads. AND up close and personal with my favorite 4am call to prayer was loud. We heard the one from further away start up muted and go for a few minutes, and the one right next door started, it was loud, but I’m thinking that they must always hold prayers in a certain key register? Because even though each one is singing his own thing, they mesh nicely. We have 2 nights here, and I’d totally do the roof thing again, but tomorrow they have our requested room for us.
So, sorry, no photos. The blogspot says that it uploads the photos but it doesn’t really. No facebook, no myspace, so much is blocked. Lex and I will try tonight to see if we are allowed to pull up CNN and some other news sites, wonder how restrictive this government is? Last night at our internet café, the gentleman that runs it said that he has a special program that will allow us access to Facebook, but we will live without it for now. Another interesting thing, on the Lonely Planet message boards that I followed, are stories of foreigners being followed by a ministry of the Syrian government, not scary or anything, they are just watching us. And most of the stories turned out well, one group got stuck in a sandstorm in their rented car and were desperate; and the car that they’d noticed following them came and rescued them. So, Lexie and I are always teasing about the spies, sent to spy on us. We might be hard to follow because we move a little chaotically, here for one day, there for one day…. But we are still watching just in case. We’d be disappointed to find out that we are not interesting enough to be followed. Well, tomorrow we go to Beirut (on the Mediterranean!! Surf and sand) and I don’t think that Lebanon’s government is as authoritarian as in Syria.

Tuesday, Aleppo tour

OH!! Didja know that there’s a call to prayer at 4am each morning?? It’s true, I know this, because I’m up at 4am most mornings. Each of the mosques usually is domed and each has a tall skinny tower thing called a minaret. I’m sure that a person can get up in the minaret, but they are mostly for show and to get the speakers up high so that everyone in the neighborhood can hear the call to worship. So sometime after 4am I fell back asleep, woke up at 6:30 to check the time and then back to sleep and awakened sharply at 8am when the power went out again and Lexie’s alarm goes off for the day. At least in the morning, it’s cooler so we can open our balcony doors and get a breeze and some light. We have some treats that we bought last night for breakfast, cuz breakfast does not come with this room, but we need to hurry out and buy some bottled water for our tour, it’s going to be our first day in the sun and not on a bus.
Ahmed, from the hotel (we’ve had to helpful Ahmeds at hotels now) introduces us to our driver, Abdul, who doesn’t speak English, but knows that we only want to visit 3 sites, and hopefully be back to the hotel by 1pm.
Abdul drives a Saba, it’s gray and he smokes, but since it’s so hot, all of the windows are open and that helps us not have to breathe smoke. Well, and although he’s a really nice man, sitting in his cab reminds me to reapply my deodorant. The drive is really pleasurable, we see fields and goat herds and all sorts of ruins just along the road. Whenever I pull up my camera to take a photo, Abdaull slows down the car and pulls over so I can get a good shot. Lexie is sad that he doesn’t do the same for her. We drive for about 45 minutes and get to a hillside, and we pull up a dirt road and park with a couple of other cars and a tour bus. It’s St. Simeon’s citadel. It smells terrific, a strong pine smell, lots of straggly looking pine trees and other foliage. We pay our admittance fee inside and Abdul gestures to the shaded seating area by the gate where all of the other drivers wait for their people, and then gestures up the hill for us to go and enjoy. It’s hot, really hot, but we stick to the shaded areas, it’s like something you’d see in Athens, a large roman ruin with a 180` view and you can see for miles, and the buildings are surprisingly ornate and intact. It’s nice; we walk from one end to the other. There’s a boy along the walkway in the middle who has a basket of what looks like pears, he smiles at me and shyly waves back when I wave at him. I walk over and see that they are figs, and I offer him the only coin that I have, a SYR10, he says thank you and I take the fig to share with Lexie, I wish that I had the superballs that I’d brought with me to give to kids, he should have a ball. Well, you can only look at pretty rocks for a short time so we walk down to the snack bar area to find our driver, and he’s been talking because the snackbar guy comes over and says, “Ameerikas?” and we say yes, so he wants us to buy a snack , something cold to drink? A candy, some icecream? We splurge on icecream bars and a yucky punchy soda that I thought was orange-aid. Good icecream, especially in the shade. I realize afterward that I should have offered to buy my driver a drink too, but honestly it didn’t occur to me at the time. I might have offended him. Or next stop was just around the bottom of the hill, it’s the ruins of the monastery that served the Citadel that we could see from the hill. It’s hot, we are by ourselves, Abdul stays on the road with the car and we are walking up a narrow dirt road to some broken down buildings, but we get to see a shepherd guy with his flock of goats, they are cute, long haired and have personality. We stand in the shade for a few minutes so that Abdul doesn’t feel like we don’t appreciate his sites. There’s a motorcycle parked there too and someone is making a lot of racket knocking rocks around inside the ruins, Lexie can see that it’s a guy in uniform, maybe military or maybe policeman? We walk back to the car without disturbing him and Abdul wants to know if we want to go to a pile of rocks on the other side of the highway, Ummm, la’a Shokrum (no, thank you). We drive back toward Aleppo for a couple of miles and turn off again, as we pass a couple of buildings, a gentleman shouts out to Abdul, evidently he knows him. The guys gestures to Abdul to pull into the driveway, but Abdul waves him off, and we continue past. It is like a canyon with large rocks on either side of the road, and we pass 2 children walking down the road, I dig as fast as I can into my messenger bag to get the super balls, and I want Abdul to offer them because but we miss the opportunity. But Abdul pulls the car over and turns around. Lexie thinks that he is pulling around specifically because I wanted to give kids the balls, and she doesn’t want to prolong our visit that much, but we aren’t turning around because of the kids, we are turning around to see the carvings on this big rock. Abdul boosts Lex up on the ledge to see them, then he helps her down. He’s sweet. We are done with that site now. We go back down the canyon and stop at a house that has 5 kids playing outside and Abdul calls one of the boys down to get super balls, I hand them over (I hope he shares with his friends and siblings) and then throw one to the other boy that is running down to us. Then we drive down another couple hundred yards and the man that waved to us on the way up is beckoning again. He wants Abdul to come to his house. Abdul, looks at me with his eyebrows raised and I nod yes. It’s a handful of concrete block buildings together up from the driveway, there’s a man with a little girl walking towards us from the fields and Lexie goes over to give her a ball. And our host, his name is Ahmed, comes down to greet Abdul effusively and then welcome us. He wants to know where we are from – our constant question. They don’t understand “United States” but they do know “Ameerika”, and a lot of times, they’ll ask if we are from a certain town like “New York” or “Boston”. Never do we encounter someone that rapidly knows Colorado. Lexie and I are having a great time giving out balls to lots of kids, it turns out that Ahmed has 9. He pulls us by the hand up the stairs and into the building on the far right, it’s just one room, with 2 windows, no furniture except for a book stand. There are 2 massive carpets on the floor and one wall has a kinda-couch cushion for padding like a flat couch. We watch to see if we need to take off our shoes, we do, and we are asked to sit on the couch area with Abdul. The kids stream in and the ones who haven’t yet gotten a ball come forward shyly. The oldest that we can see is a boy of about 13? I don’t remember his name even though we asked, it was a hard one to pronounce. Ahmed has decent English and he tells us that he’s the “guard” of this community. I take that to mean that he’s like the mayor? Whenever he barks an order, the kids scramble to do as he asks. There was a small tray on the floor when we arrived, maybe a snack, and that gets whisked away and the older boy gets sent away to do something and arrives back with a massive tray of food: 2 kinds of olives, a bowl of some orangey jam, bowl of olive oil, a bowl of scrambled eggs, fresh tomatoes, cucumbers(?), a bowl of something that looks like white squishy slabs – those are homemade cheese, it is a hard cheese even in the heat, but really tasty, and a bowl of dried Zatar (a spice). Then the son returns from another trip with gigantic pita breads, at least a foot across, and they insist that both Lexie and I take a whole one for ourselves. The food was wonderful, Ahmed spoke to us mostly but every once in awhile he would take to Abdul in Arabic for a couple of minutes. Out the back door of this room there were a couple of chickens, but no sign of the wife. We asked and Ahmed said that she was ill, that he is looking for a second wife that speaks English and could teach him, and since he’s muslim that’s OK. He asks if we are Christian and we confirm. Next the son brings in a teapot and glass cups, they are the size of a rocks glass at a bar, and boy do these Syrians LOVE their sugar, they spoon it into the empty glass first, at least 3 teaspoons, 1/3 of the glass full. Then you add the HOT tea (Chai – pronounced Shy) and stir. It’s really sweet hot tea on a hot day. He shows us some photos of the people who have visited over the years, the Japanese guy with blue hair helped the village run electricity to the homes, there’s Elise from France who came to volunteer. He again brings up that he’s looking for a second wife that knows English, he asks me my age and I say 43, he’s only 36, from Morocco and is very successful. I try to drop my husband into the conversation because I don’t want any confusion and he’s appalled, says that he wasn’t talking about me – now I feel really stupid. Maybe he’s talking about Lexie but that ain’t going to happen. He sends his son for fresh tea glasses, and Abdul stops him and says that we really need to be getting back to Aleppo, and that Lexie and I should be washing our hands now. So I get up and Abdul insists that I wear his crappy plastic shower shoes, one strap across the toes, he doesn’t want my shoes to get spattered while washing my hands – but I’m wearing my Tevas so that’s silly. The older son brings us over to a small little building and asks if we need to use the toilet compartment, we say no, and then he turns on a spigot and has me wet my hands, then he pours dishwashing detergent on my hands and I soap up some more and rinse. When I come out of that area Ahmed takes me over to the next building, opens the door and surprises a woman sitting on the floor (without carpets), she has 2 girls with her all in burkas. He introduces me to his wife, I make sure that I meet her eyes to communicate my gratitude and shake her hand with both of mine, and then we meet his pride and joy, 14 year old Fatima, his oldest daughter who studies English. She speaks really good English and we ask where she learned, she credited the nuns. Then we leave and drive directly back to Aleppo, it was a really special treat.
At the hotel, our room is blissfully cool in the lull between power outages. It goes off at about 8am and also about 4pm. We asked Aleppo Ahmed if this is daily and he says yes. Each neighborhood has about 6 hours of power and 2 hours without, then repeat and all get power most of the night. The city’s grid only can handle that much demand in the summer. So we lay down and take a little nap. We wake up when the power goes off again, and need to use the Internet café, but it’s in the neighborhood, so it also doesn’t have power, so we head off to our favorite, all power- all the time place, the Sheraton. They have their own generators, and would never in a million years deny entrance to westerners, no matter how sweaty or poorly dressed we are. Doesn’t seem fair, does it? We are kinda abusing this privilege.
We order fresh fruit drinks in the bar and Lexie charges her iPod battery on the mini-laptop, I type my journal and she reads her book. Then when we hear the Sheraton’s power hiccup when going from generators to the grid, we get up and walk to the internet café. Tonight we’ve planned to walk up to the citadel, the giant ancient fort at the top of the hill, it’s impressive from a distance, I can only imagine close up. It’s really cool, lit up fantastically in the dark– and – closed, but we get our bonus for the evening. There’s some sort of concert at the locked entrance to the citadel. It’s a rock band, but a strange one, they are flying the Swiss flag and the cute blonde girl, who you would assume is the lead singer, ends up playing this enormous “ricola” horn. You know, one of the ones that you see in the Ricola cough drop commercials, it is small up at her mouth, descends at an angle down about 6 feet and turns up into a big old horn. She’s little, dressed in leggings, and a flow-y silky long shirt, and she’s playing this horn while her band stomps out drums, guitars and keyboards. I have no idea how this little girl is playing notes on that giant horn. It’s really fun, but NO ONE in the crowd is moving, not the ones sitting sedately in the organized seating, the ones gathering around at the edges or the massive amount of police officers that are there to control the chaos. I cannot help but tap my feet, but I’m the only one. A burka mom scolds her 5 year old son because he’s dancing. It must be a bummer to play to this crowd. But the U.S. State Department tells us to avoid crowds and especially the ones with a police presence, so we hesitate only a little bit before heading out to dinner. We have to eat at the Miramar Chicken place that Lexie found. She watched Anthony Bourdain dine there in Saudi Arabia on his show and he endorses it, so we need to eat it. And it’s totally worth it – fried chicken with a differently flavored crispy batter, yummy seasoned fries and a great tzaziki (Janine? How the heck do you spell that word?) sauce for dipping. We invite Aleppo Ahmed, our host at the hostel to join us, so he brings us some hot tea (lots of sugar) and we converse for awhile. It’s a nice day, tomorrow we leave and go back to Damascus, to the same place as before and we stay 2 nights. We’ll visit one of the oldest mosques in the middle east.

Tuesday in Aleppo

Monday morning in Damascus. This really has to end. I’m really battling being alone and panicky at 3am. 2 nights in a row that I wake wide awake and stay awake for a couple hours. I have to recite the few scriptures that I know and just let my mind race itself into oblivion.
We jump up and start pulling our stuff back into the backpacks again. It might have been easier to just bring a wheeled suitcase, we haven’t really had dirt roads or lack of sidewalks yet, but it’s only day 3… Lexie struggles with her pack cuz it’s so giant and full. We get dressed and find 2 chairs in the courtyard, because it’s almost full with morning guests. It looks like we get presented a breakfast on a metal tray, not a buffet, and it looks wonderful. 2 people leave their table, so we scoop it up and a really nice woman brings us our breakfast: a warm hardboiled egg, about 6 black olives, a smear of cream cheese (maybe goat cheese?) a packet of spreadable cheese, a packet of apricot jam, a packet of butter, a little pear and a big piece of flatbread – AWESOME!
After cleaning up, we checkout and ask the gentleman, brother of Ahmed (didn’t ask his name) to write our next hotel on a piece of paper in Arabic. He’s so nice, we confirm coming back on Wednesday night for a 2 night stay and pay for the room – SYR1700. Then he writes down the name of the bus station for us, and says that we shouldn’t have to pay the taxi driver more than SYR100 to get there. We hump our packs and walk out to the main street, and Lexie says, “No, let me.” She’s the queen of taxi haggling, she hails the cab and makes sure that our fare is only 100, we put the packs in the trunk and get in. Off to the bus station. He lets us out after passing a massive building made of white marble and surrounded by gardens, it’s called the War of October memorial…. hmmm, we don’t know which war that would be, but it’s pretty. Quite a few of the buildings, and especially the government buildings have big pictures of the current ruler, but it’s his father that is displayed more often.
So at the Pullman bus station, we are confused as to where to walk and purchase our tickets, but two young men notice our stupidity and point down a side street. We walked down a pedestrian street and there were a couple of stores, food stands, and then an entrance to a building with soldiers and a luggage x-ray, we dropped our luggage on the conveyer belt and picked it on the other side, and then come out into a courtyard with 25 different offices and food stands, and again, we stand there like dummies, and a gentleman comes over and says, “Hamas?” And I say, “Aleppo” and he marches us past 4 different bus offices to a specific one, and I say, “we don’t need a tour, we just need to get to Aleppo” He nods and tells the people behind the counter that we want to go to Aleppo. They ask for our passport, and quote us SYR100 for both of us. We get out tickets and our passports back and I ask the girl behind the counter, “what time?” and she says “now”, and I ask “where?” and the first guy says “follow me” and we walk around the other side of the walkway’s stands and there is a line of 30 busses, HOLY COW! He takes us most of the way down the line and points to a bus. We show our tickets to the young man who loads our packs in the cargo hold and we board up the bus. We try to sit at the back, Lexie wants to be further back, but after a few minutes, the man comes up and says that we have to sit in the front (assigned seating). But the bus isn’t full, so we figure that we can move once we get started? But no, as we are pulling out of the chaotic bus parking lot, more and more people climb aboard, and they have assigned seating too. So even though we’d moved back, we had to give up and go to the front again. Lexie’s seat is on the window today, but the curtains are screwed into the bus wall, so she cannot see out – she’s very sad. But when the guy behind her opens his curtains, it gives her some slack to pull the whole panel forward. Boy, this is kinda ugly country for the first hour, very dry, mountainous (not Colorado mountains, just big tan/brown hills all around), a town every little bit, not much agriculture, some factories. Along the highway outside of Damascus, there’s a row of every car dealership, we see Ford, Chevrolet, some Iranian car maker(Saba?), Saab, Renault… Interesting. We noticed yesterday at the border that the wealthy burka-wearing crowds drive big ole GMs, like Tahoes and Suburbans, full of children and many ladies in burkas. A couple of the ladies were completely covered in black, so much so that you couldn’t even see their eyes. They had their veils pulled so high up almost to their headscarf and then dark sunglasses, spooky. OH!!! And burka women don’t like me and Lexie at all. We started out by approaching women on the street when we were lost or had a question and they won’t meet our eyes or acknowledge us at all. I try to smile when I walk past and rarely receive any smile back. Weird. So, we now know that men will trip over themselves to answer our questions in english, but leave the women alone. I suspect that having a beautiful daughter next to me certainly helps men in wanting to answer our questions. But back to the cars, they have relatively new Mercedes, Tahoes and Suburbans, but they are regular colors but painted this weird textured cream colored paint along the fenders and the bottom part of the car body – a lot of them like this. And the ritzier ones have flecks of metallic gold in the paint so they sparkle…. Don’t know why. Right as we pull out of the station, the bus attendent, brings around a basket of candies and we each get one, then he passes out cold bottled water. And then he starts playing a movie on the video system – Ummm, no wonder Americans are looked upon with suspicion, they are playing Owen Wilson in Shanghai Nights…. They think that we are all Owen Wilsons??? Well, at least it has Jackie Chan too.
We made a stop in Homs? There are several towns in this part of Syria that are dramatically different towns, but have similar names, so I’m being dense. Hama, Homs….. that’s where the first stop was, for the people who got off at Homs, but it’s a bus station, and now that Lex and I are seasoned bus-riders, we know that we can get off to use the “WC”. We follow the signs, in english, upstairs to the bathroom, I gave “question face” to the woman standing in the hallway and she smiled and opened the door to the women’s bathroom, so we went in. Same thing as yesterday, individual stalls, oblong hole in the floors with clean tile and a hole running from a spigot in the wall, in case you are doing #2 and need to rinse something down the drain. We carry our kleenex packs for a reason. Before we walk out, Lex says, “Do we have to pay?” and I said, “no one is in here, I don’t think so” but when we exit we notice the card table outside the door and everyone dropping change on it and taking one tissue from a tissue box. So we dig out our change and let the attendent man pick what he needs??? No idea how much to use the toilet. I guess that you pay to have the clean facilities? Then we walk back down to the first floor to grab a quick bite, it’s noon. We pay at the money counter for 2 pepsis and a meat rollup. It’s like last night’s falafel, except they have one of those “GYRO” spits that spins the roasting meat, and they take some meat and roll it up in flatbread and have a whole pile ready to purchase. It turns out that ours has the roasted chicken (??) and potatoes, it’s really well seasoned, yummy, it is a lot of food and it’s good to share. And this bus ride is a double feature, the next offering on the video system is another Jackie Chan movie, wow he looks like a baby, something like Flight of the Condor, part 2. Hmmmm. And Lexie is mastering numbers in arabic up to 100. By the time we finish, she’ll be talking like a pro.
OK, only 40 more Km to Aleppo, I’ll try to finish this and get it out later. Tourist Hotel, here we come, please, dear God let them have real airconditioning.
Ha ha!! Air conditioning, however, there’s a catch. When we arrive at 3pm, the whole neighborhood does not have power, we didn’t figure this out until we got in our room and the guy says, “no lights” and we just thought that maybe we needed to have the key in a special slot to get lights, like our first night in Amman, or Europe. But no lights in the bathrooms (it’s another hostel, but we have a selection of 4 full bathrooms to use) and the little guy comes in carrying a candle should we need to pee in the dark. Luckily Randy sent me provisioned with not 1 but 2 flashlights. It doesn’t matter, we are taking a nap anyway, and right now our room is cool and dark. OH, first though, we got off of the bus at the Aleppo station and pulled out the piece of paper with our hotel name written in Arabic that we had the morning guy write for us. The taxi driver nods and Lexie negotiates our fare down from S400 to S200 (she’s really good at this) and he drives us into town. We really like this part of the country, still mountainous, it makes me think of where my dad grew up and where my sister teaches down in the SW corner of Colorado. There are lots of hills, ravines and farm country: a field of green and then a plowed field. We really like Aleppo thus far. The driver pulls up to a fairly fancy hotel, and the name is not quite right. I booked a room at the “Tourist Hotel” and this is the “Tourism Hotel” and since we are keeping our accommodations cheap, it looks a little too nice, and I think to myself, “Oh crum, how do I explain to a non-english speaking cab driver the difference between an English “t” and “m” at the end of a Hotel name – and then how do we find this place, and how much more will it cost?? So we walk into the hotel and the counter lady speaks English and I say, “I have a reservation for the Tourist Hotel, this is not the right place, right?” and she says, No. But, and again God is faithful, our hostel is only 2 blocks down and over another block. She draws us a map and we start walking. It’s pretty hot, I’m melting and doing my usual gross head-sweating thing – but I have my bandana, so I’m not too drippy. We find our hostel down an obscure alley, it’s in the same neighborhood as at least 20 other hostels that I ran across in my Lonely Planet searches… so a good place to stay in Aleppo.
I sleep less than Lexie, it’s kinda involuntary and makes me sad, but I have an hour to kill while she finishes her nap, so I walk around to get my bearings, trying to find a pharmacy and an Internet café. I’d asked my hotel guy, but his English wasn’t so good and I didn’t understand his rights and lefts. Lexie had torn open a heat rash on her thigh while in Israel and it was swollen and not healing, it looked pretty terrible, and then she scraped open a mosquito bit on her ankle, so we needed antiseptic. (Umm Yeah, she is her dad’s daughter). I found a whole bunch of restaurants, a couple of tiny grocery stalls and a perfume counter but no drug store. And no sign of the internet café, but they had said that it was on the same network and wouldn’t have power anyway. I bought a couple of sodas and headed back, it looked like some of the businesses had their lights on now. YAY power, YAY airconditioning! We set our air conditioner to 27`C and went to ask for the internet café… again. We spoke to someone’s father or grandfather, he was incredibly French and gave us directions in a lot of French… I told Lex to listen, but she didn’t recognize it. Syria used to be a French colony. So we walked in the genera l direction and then asked again at a nicer hotel, and the guy there walked out in the street and pointed for us. Ta da, AND we found a drug store on the way, Lexie asked for the antiseptic in Arabic and we killed all of our birds with one stone. Then I showed her the Sheraton Hotel that I’d found in my wanderings. It’s massive and beautiful, a whole block long. It sits out all by itself with its clean and glowing walls, there’s a giant excavation all around it, kinda like a moat at the castle, and all cars have to go through a gate and the hotel building sits above the excavated hole by 2 stories. We can walk right up to it, the guy at the gate waves us on through and the kid running the metal detector doesn’t even look at our bags even though he makes us put them on the table and walk through the scanner ourselves. It’s like paradise: air conditioned, marble opulence. Lexie wants to find a Turkish coffee set, her one from Taiwan broke and she wants to replace it, but we hate to walk all over town if we can go to just one section, so we ask the 2 concierges at the front desk our question, but their English is poor, so they understand Turkish coffee, but not Turkish coffee pots and cups. So they walk us over the girl at the special events desk and we ask her, she has better English and understands and translates to them our request, and then they have a 3-way brainstorming session about where one would find such a thing. Finally they come to a consensus and take us back to the concierge desk and they give us a map of Aleppo and mark where we need to go. So we do, and we walk on a pedestrian mall with lots of other people, many, many packs of burka women. This is what they do for fun? Lex finds her set, in brass and then buys an extra coffee pot and haggles with the man by saying she only has so much money… I battled piping in with “Oh honey, I have money that I can lend you.” She wants to make a deal and I’m not supposed to interfere. Then I look at a really cute mirror that I should buy for my mom and don’t put it back on the shelf securely, so it slips off a bottom shelf and crashes into a magazine rack. The gentleman runs over waving me away and me apologizing all over the place, he shoos me away and says that everything is fine. She gets her deal and we head back to our section of the city for dinner. I had a fantastic schwarma and Lex had some grilled lamb, with an appetizer of hummus – Super Yummy. Then we go back to our cool room to settle down for sleep. It’s the first time that we have been able to stay in the same place more than one night. Exciting. We told our hotel manager that tomorrow we would love to go on a tour outside the city to Saint Simeon’s citadel, they’ll arrange a driver and we need to be ready at 9am.
Oh, and the funniest thing is that I can get onto www.blogger.com and I can log in and see my profile, and post, but I cannot see my posts, it’s being blocked. We think that it’s from the government censors, not just my blogs but any blogs are blocked…. Interesting.

Here is Syria

We are on the bus from Amman, Jordan to Damascus, Syria-
The countryside looks like we expected, hilly, browns and yellows and dry. Every once in awhile we see a green rectangle of orchards or some plants on the hills, but there’s not a lot of foliage. Lexie keeps seeing some sort of black dog, but I think that she’s making it up, I never saw one. We pass farms with lots of sheep and goats, and a camel here and there. After about 2 hours we pull into a convenience store in the middle of nowhere. This is good, cuz Lex has been dutifully drinking her liter of water that we bought last night and needs to use the facilities. When it looks like we are stopped so that the passengers can get off quickly and buy something or go to the bathroom, Lex walks up to make sure that there’s time to run to the bathroom and where it is. I can see her from the window and she goes around the building to a smaller walled building, and then a gentleman comes up behind her and points her another direction… ah, men’s room. She leaves my field of vision, and I see the Spanish woman waiting at the corner. Then Lexie comes back on the bus and says that it’s the most vile, filthy restroom that she’s ever seen. I asked if she’d taken a picture, she said no, but she wanted to, so she went back to get a picture. She said the floor was covered in “water”, that the door didn’t lock, so she had to have her hand bracing on the door while she was peeing, it’s a squatty of course and dirty, so there’s a lot of flies.
Just pullled into what I believe is Damascus. The border was interesting, first we had to get out of Jordan, which was a stop on the Jordan side, a payment of JOD5 for exit tax, which buys you a stamp and then a departure stamp. We were a little confused but the bus driver knew it, even though he speaks no english, he stopped us, pointed to the windows that we needed to go to and watched out for us. The tourist couple from Spain got caught up somehow at the window for their departure stamp, the guys kept asking them questions and moved them over to the side and it didn’t look good, but next thing we knew they were gone. We finished our two windows and looked around for the driver and he was gone, so we looked for someone else that we knew from the bus and couldn’t see the Spanish couple, and we found the lady in the burkha with the two little boys, but she was in an office with another guard, I wasn’t sure that we were supposed to backtrack to the bus, but we couldn’t figure out where else to go, so we walked through traffic, the large parking lot was FULL of cars and trucks with no rhyme or reason to parking, at times there was no way to pull forward with so many vehicles parked. And we got back on the bus, which I guess was the correct thing to do since there were other passengers on it. Most everyone drifted back to the bus and boarded, but there is no sign of the Spanish people, and it was worrying me. I didn’t want to forget them, in case the driver was going to leave, but I didn’t know how to speak about them. But the driver was counting heads, and he came up short. He honked the bus horn loudly, but there’s no sign of them. He sent someone back into the sheds, but that guys came back and shrugged his shoulders. So the driver went back out. We watched and watched, and eventually, they came around the corner looking all shook up. They boarded the bus, and one of the Arab guys said something rude to them, and they apologized in English to every passenger that they passed walking back to their seats. I guess that they got into Amman at the airport after midnight and when they went through to get their visas, that the man forgot the entry stamp. That’s a big no-no, so they got called into the police office for questioning and it took almost an hour to clear it up. Did not sound like fun. We started up the bus again and crossed the no-man’s land between borders and came up to the Syrian side with all of the happy photos of their leader, president, king??
My first time with a squatty AND an attendent, we had to pay her, not sure how much I only had Dinars and technically we were in Syria… but she smiled, had a big chat with Lexie about where we are from (Lexie’s arabic is getting a little better) and gave us change. Back on the bus after getting all of our stamps upon entering Syria. Darn, I made Lexie throw away all of her newspapers from Israel just in case we had our luggage searched and were questioned. They didn’t question us nor did they open our luggage. I guess that getting our Syrian visa from Washington was a really wise choice. After about another 2 hours, we arrive in Damascus and we got out because it was continuing on to Aleppo. Hmmmm, maybe we should have done the Aleppo trip all in one day? Oh well, it would be nice to get off of the bus even for just a few hours. We asked the bus driver how to catch a taxi to our hotel, and they actually found a guy that would give us Syrian pounds for American dollars, awesome. Now it’s 46 Pounds to the US dollar. Lexie was horrified when she thought that I agreed too fast to the taxi rate of SYP$300 to go to the hotel. That’s about $6 and she was sure that she could have negotiated down to less We arrived and met our hotel guy – Ahmed, he reminded me that I said that we’d be there around noon and it was after 3pm. I said that we’d just been delayed on the bus, but he was really nice and showed us to our room. It’s a hostel so we don’t have a bathroom, even though that’s what I’d asked for. The bath is down the hall and there’s several choices. Our room is a triple, which means that it has 3 twin beds, a ceiling fan and wardrobe, there’s a mirror on the wall, that’s about it. It reminds me of some of the Inns in Guatemala, with kind of an open courtyard and then rooms leading into it. The courtyard has a roof, but there’s a great fountain and several tables and chairs. That’s right outside our room and that’s where breakfast will be served. I asked Ahmed when the banks closed, and he said that they were closed right then for midday, but opened up again at 6pm. We need to figure out how to get cash, it was worrying me that we might not be able to find an ATM that takes Mastercard. We went to our room and right to sleep cuz we were tired. After waking up at 6pm, we get a map and the new guy at the counter Manfred marks where the hotel is and recommends a specific street for banks, so we walked around the corner to the next biggest street – Thalwah, and we found a street place to have a snack, since it was only 6:30 and we are trying to get into a schedule like the people here, nap, late dinner, early rise. We bought a falafel wrap, it was excellent, and we picked up a guide – he said that his name is Sam. He initially struck up a conversation with Lexie about how tall I am, he wanted to know if I played basketball, he’s early 20s, attractive, dark and brooding. He name drops Kobe Bryant in the conversation about basketball and marvels that Lexie is so short (HAHA, take that munchkin!) And I’m not sure how but he starts walking with us and asking where we want to go; and he stayed around for the next couple of hours. I thought that Lexie wanted him to stay, so I was nice and didn’t make a fuss, he took us to a bank, and YAY, Mastercard…. No problem. We are really being taken care of, just the right thing at the right time. God is faithful. We sort of stopped at a fruit and nut stand cuz Lex wanted a photo, but that meant that the guy running it started giving out tons of samples, which is impossible to say no to, and also makes us feel guilty that we are eating his food without buying it. After 4-5 almonds roasted in the shell, he gave me a purple fig and Lexie a yellow fig, almost overripe and really tasty. So I asked Sam to bargain for some almonds, ½ a kilo. And Lex paid for it and we paid WAY too much, SYP300, yikes, as much as a taxi, but still only about US$6.
It’s pretty hot here, I almost melted in the taxi to the hotel, and although we have a fan in our room, there’s no airconditioning. Luckily on this one pedestrian street with lots of shopping, there’s quite a strong breeze, so it’s comfortable. Also, we feel more at ease here in Damascus, there’s a lot of women who aren’t in full burkas, nor even the hajjab head scarf. Sam tells us it’s because they get a lot of tourists from Iran and some from eastern Europe. We see many women in what we are trying not to wear – tight shorts and tank tops. In Amman, for that little bit at night that we walked around, we saw no women in less than a hajjab, and most were in full burka. Except for younger girls, all women were completely covered. I had a moment with Lexie in a dress shop and she said that she was tired of Sam. As was I, but I thought that she wanted him around. So when we got back to the square where the banks were, I thanked him, offered him a soda and Lexie got his email address. We weren’t really hungry, but tried to find a place to have a simple meal, maybe to share. But Lexie has become something of a cheapskate after her time with the Israelis, so she’d ask the price and refuse to pay that much for a schwarma or a bottle of water. Bottled water here is really cheap, I bought 4 ½ liters of water and a coke for SYR84, so less than US$2. We walked back to the hotel, didn’t end up buying anything except for the drinks and almonds. Luckily for me, Lexie is just as tired as I am and wants an early evening. We take out showers down the hall, squeegie up the watery floors, cuz we are good hostel guests and turn in. Our room is an oven, but with the fan turned up to “helicopter”, we have a nice hot breeze. Unfortunately for me, my body has no idea what time it Is and I wake up for the second night in a row at 2am, disoriented, hot, uncomfortable and unable to fall back to sleep despite the Tylenol PM. Hoping to work out of that soon – please God. Monday, we find another bus to go to Aleppo in the north of Syria. We’ll be back in Damascus at the end of the week to more fully explore.

Journey to Jordan, JFK

OK, so who’d have thunk that I’ve have a story to tell just on a day spent at airports?
I’ve never had to do this before on a layover, but I had to claim my baggage at JFK from the Jetblue terminal, carry it by AirTrain to the international terminal and I’m waiting to re-check it. Kinda a drag, turns out that my gigantic backpack that I borrowed from Randy for the trip is only 33 pounds, but it feels A LOT heavier, and it’s not tiny and maneuverable either. But I have a 5 hour layover and I cannot check my bag for the next leg until 3 hours before departure, so I’m blowing time in terminal 4. Looks like I’m in good company since there’s no extra seating and people are piled up on the floor with their luggage. BUT, something interesting is happening. I’m leaning against the wall with my bags on the floor and I notice that up on the concourse one floor above me is giant white sails (?) and I thought that they might be doing some construction, but when I look closer, there’s all sorts of extra lighting on tall tripods and many people standing around, and then there’s a guy with a microphone on a long pole and someone with a big movie camera on wheels. It looks like they are shooting maybe a documentary??? But I watch as they run it over and over and have some girls in goofy flight attendent uniforms come back and start over, and then they talk to the guys in the TSA uniforms (actors?) and run it again. I tried to find someone that I’d recognize, but I don’t know…. 2 guys flashed some sort of pass coming up from another part of the terminal, and maybe one of them is that hairy guy from (??) Saving Sarah Marshall (is that the name?) The one that hosted the MTV awards? But I’m probably fooling myself. Anyway, it now looks like they are filming a movie, although I’ll never be able to tell which one, if/when I ever see it. And to confirm that impression, I took a photo from down here and my camera automatically flashed and a guy in a red shirt with a walkie-talkie came running over and told me , “Ma’am, if you are taking pictures, please do not use your flash, it messes up our lighting structure.” SO, I apologized and took another photo without a flash.
So, the two girls in flight attendents uniforms are in the center. Ughh, cannot upload photo - don't have time to figure it out. I'll try later.
Anyway, I forgot to pack the charging cord for my Kindle and that’s bad, hoping that the 2-3 week charge is true, otherwise, I think that I can download all of my bought books to this little netbook and I can read them there. I have the cord for that.
Inshallah!
***** It’s Sunday morning in AMMAN
I’ve arrived, late. Had a delay in my flight to Amman, an extra 4 hours in JFK cooling my heels, 12 hour flight. But I’m HERE!! I had fantastic people on the flight, I have 2 phone numbers of men who will “sell their house” if I get into trouble and need money or assistance. That’s nice. Lex is wonderful, but too beautiful, all of the men stop and watch us walk by and it’s not because of me. I had a fantastic late night dinner of Talerook (?) that is grilled chicken last night and then crashed and couldn’t sleep cuz I’m so goofed up. Pray for us.
We catch a “service taxi” in a few minutes to Damascus. We already have our visas, so hoping that there’s no catch at the border. Depending on Internet, I’ll try to post from there. Love ya!

Next Chapter tomorrow!

Friday morning my flight leaves for JFK and then Amman, Jordan. It's going to be fun! Today I am just stressing about being able to find an ATM that will give me money in Syria - gosh I hope that it's not a big ugly deal. It's silly for me to take US cash, because you have to pay such a high fee to get money changed internationally. Travelers checks are impossible and really outdated, so ATMs are the best, you get money in the currency of the ATM and only pay a miniscule fee to your bank for playing.
I meet Lexie at our hotel in Jordan on Saturday evening, it'll be fun to see her again, it's been 6 weeks. She arrives about 4 hours ahead of me (that is, if the flights are on time) and so we pre-paid a fancy Westernized hotel that most cab drivers should know of and just will meet there. But only one night in Amman, since we'll get a bus to Damascus, Syria the next morning. So, I need to get enough JODs, Jordanian Dinars to cover the cab, dinner, breakfast and the busfare to Syria. Because then I'll have to get Syrian Pounds for the next 4-5 days.... yikes! Money Hell. And the conversion is dramatically different for each country - I will never know if I'm getting a good deal. Oh well, I can afford trinkets and if the little man or woman at the souk (market) fleeces the dumb American, good for them and I hope that their family has an easier day.
I am leaving my poor team at work in a bind and shorthanded. It's just the way it worked out... we are only 4 people and 3 of us are somewhat unavailable: a new baby, a consulting project in Phoenix and me in the middle east - bummer.
Alrighty, I've got my Obsessive-Compulsive disorder in line with copies of my itinerary and lists galore.
Thanks for your prayers, please no debilitating jetlag!

Back Home for a little bit

I am back home. I was met on Sunday morning at the airport by my husband with roses in hand and my daughter, she made me th most awesome card with photos. It's nice to be missed!
Just putting in some time at work until I leave on Friday, the 24th for Jordan. I don't have too many shifts at Carrabbas before I head out again, and that's nice, cuz I have all of this free time in the evenings to be a slug. I really love not being booked every minute of every day.

Kira and her dad have started climbing a 14-er once a week and I'm really proud of them. Here's a fantastic photo that she took last week up at Mt. Harvard. Lex is sad, cuz she's in Israel and not able to hike with the gang. But she's having fun, living with her friend and his family, 4 sets of grandparents and one set of great-grandparents. I guess that they speak in a mix of Hebrew/Russian and yiddish, so she's learning a strange mixes of language.
OK, I don't have anything else fun to share. Thanks to everyone who is praying for me. I hope to see you soon and share my stories, and photos.

Just stuff

So, I've been storing up all the little hints and tips about what I love about Brazil and the wierd stuff too. Of course, I'm old and I forget the list, but here's some of it.
So, the windows on my hotel room have to be single-paned, they don't keep the temperatures out nor in, and they definitely don't have any effect on noise levels. I'm on the 3rd floor facing the street, and I can hear the conversations of the taxi drivers parked out front -- too bad I cannot understand the language, but I can hear the individual words. I guess no one minds in the winter, because it doesn't get that cold, but you would think that they'd care in the summer, when it's hot? They are doing some renovation in a couple of rooms on my floor and it's not a problem at all except that the dumpster sits on the front curb and the trash truck comes almost everyday at 5am, it's really loud.
I had a great dinner, by myself, at a Pizza restaurant down the street, if I didn't know that the little guy who waited on me was Portuguese, I'd swear that he was someone's sweet Italian grandfather. I keep thinking that I do a good enough job with the simple phrases that I do know in portuguese, that they may not know that I cannot speak it well. But after a few moments of perusing the menu, he came up and gave me a menu in english. That's a bummer, cuz I was really fine with the first one. He was so courtly and courteous. At a pizza place in Brazil, the minute you even get close to finishing your current slice of pizza on the plate, they rush over to serve you the next one. You are not allowed to do it yourself - that's how good the service is. He really wanted me to order dessert and I declined. But he walked me out of the restaurant and bid me a good night. I kinda love him.... BTW, you cannot eat hamburgers, pizza or many other finger foods with your, ummm, fingers. You must use a knife and a fork or you'll be glanced at like a pig. Same goes for an icecream cone. They have these little McDonalds stands all around, just for McDonald's icecream. Sorvetes means icecream (I think?) and they are McDonald's Sorvetes stands. You can get a mini icecream for R$1, it's kinda the perfect size. BUT, if you are Brazileiro, you eat it with a spoon, you don't lick it!
There's no voluntary tipping here, I guess that you could. But 10% is automatically added to every restaurant bill for service, and the maids and taxi drivers don't expect a tip. So, I left my maid a tip and she wrote me this incredibly gushing note, and she works extra hard now, although that wasn't my intent. I have the kitchen and one night I was too tired to do the dishes that we made on a team meeting potluck, which I totally can do, and the next day, she did all of them. On Sunday, I was reading and watching TV on the couch, and she knocked on the door to clean the room, I thought that she would move on when she saw that I was around, but she cleaned around me, it was a little awkward.
The traffic is crazy. NEVER, EVER assume that just because the light is red, that the cross street traffic will stop. I almost got hit on Saturday, and I was walking across the street with the light and WITH a bunch of other people, scared me to death! My taxi drivers never stop at a stop sign, it must be considered a suggestion not a command, and sometimes stop at red lights. The taxis also rarely stay in one lane, they kinda straddle two lanes to give themselves some extra options, so that they don't have to make a decision about which lane is moving faster until the last minute.
My name is pronounced EE-von-ee, which is kinda sweet and I don't mind. The taxis have been pre-arranged for the whole month but rarely do we have the same driver, so Santhosh and I are used to walking up to a waiting taxi and saying, "Ee-von-ee???" and most of the time, they'll smile and say, "Ee-VON-Ee!" The same thing happens to the other girls. Carol is cah-RROLL, with a heavily rolled 'r' and heavy emphasis on the second syllable. Maureen is Mah-HHHEEN, with no 'r'. So the boys get a kick out of calling us by our taxi names.
The people are absolutely fantastic, even strangers. When they find out that you didn't understand their last question and I say my typical, "Nao fala portuguese", they bend over backwards to help out. It kinda cracks me up that some of the people on my team who haven't spent much time trying to master even a little bit of portuguese think that they can just keep speaking english at people who didn't understand them the first time. Gawl, pretty arrogant.

Yesterday, our coworkers at the Instituto gave us a going away lunch. They had lunch catered in and set up a table in the backyard, the weather was fantastic and it was very, very nice. Then Santhosh and I received our gifts - a pair of Havaianas each, the quintessential Brazilian gift. They are flipflops and I bought some to take home as gifts, and I guess that everyone knows about them??

So, my gift pair have a little Brazilian flag on them. I guess that Santhosh doesn't show his feet, so he refused to remove his socks, here's the photo:

We are really going to miss these people.
Oh, and I have to stick in a photo of a sculpture!!! So, while the students were still here, we walked down to the entry area and there's some piles there, and it looks really real, you'll see with the photos. And there's 2 piles on the floor, and then on the side table is a creature rising up from the pile. One of the students decided to display them in the front area. I love them, and what a great sense of humor! Well, it's been 2 weeks and the brown is a lighter brown, so less effective, but still they are here!

The mystical WooHoo bird in the tree

Like I've said, at the office Santhosh and I sit facing a wall of windows on the second floor, so there's quite a story going on outside most days.

I have yet to figure out the unending stream of traffic coming from the busy main street to our right and streaming down (fast of course) and turning to their right just across from the building, going (fast) to the next corner just a 100 yards down and turning right again to get back on the main stree that you would assume they just came from. Taxis, busses, private cars? A steady stream. Maybe they all took a wrong turn and need to go the other direction? Otherwise our street is mainly residential and we see alot of dog walkers and some pedestrian traffic.

I do not know the real story, but I am making one up in my head. Yesterday morning an older gentleman with a grocery sack stopped in front of our building and had a chat with Franklin, our security and all-around guy. And they both spent alot of time looking up in the massive trees and doing a whistle thing, 2 notes {high, slightly lower}. I am going to call it the woohoo whistle, because it's what I do in a giant clothing store when I've lost my daughter and I need to get her attention, therefore, her nickname is also Woohoo. So, the 2 gentlemen are having a pleasant discussion accompanied by looking upward and whistling. Then the gentleman on the outside of the fence reaches in his grocery sack and pulls out an orange and gives it to Franklin. Well, isn't he a nice man??

Then a couple of hours later, the same older gentleman returns with a younger gentleman and they wander in front of the fence looking into the trees and doing the woohoo whistle. And then they have a conversation with both Franklin and Deda (our other all-around man) and I have no idea what kind of drama is going on. Luckily Joice is in the office by now and I asked, "What are they doing??" And she tells me that there's some bird, that is up in the tree and isn't eating. And everyone is concerned.

Is it a pet? Is it just a friendly neighborhood bird? I don't know. But it didn't eat the orange and everyone is concerned. I had forgotten that when we got in the office this morning and I was plugging in my computer when I noticed that the security police officer that patrols the neighborhood is now parked in front of the building, talking to Franklin, looking upward and whistling. And, doggone it, I want to see the bird!!! So, I run downstairs and ask Rute at the front desk if she can see the bird, she doesn't have much english, so I flap my arms for her and point outside. She laughs and says that the bird's species is Roxledic (no idea of spelling) or maybe it's name is Roxledic. And I go out to see if I can see it in the tree with the police guy. I don't see it. Maybe this is like a big joke on the goofy American girl. In the U.S., especially at teenager summer camp, there's a trick that you play on gullible people called a Snipe hunt. You give the curious camper a pillow case and send them out into the night to catch a Snipe. I cannot remember if you have to make a silly noise or bang on trees with a stick. But the whole point is to laugh at them. So, maybe someone staged this whole production for me to stand out in the parking area looking up into the trees and whistling to the fictional WooHoo bird??