Well, the A-A caravan has been very busy entertaining parents/in-laws and then travelling to India.
We went on a roadtrip with Mr A’s parents – to Krak des Chevalier (the geeks among you will note we have been there before, Crusader Fort, very windy); Aleppo (beautiful hotel in a converted house, citadel – where I thought a young chap wanted to be my friend but he just wanted to see my camera, lots of juice bars and offal); and Lattakia (beach).
We stopped off in Doha for 24 hours on the way to India. It couldn’t be more different from Damascus, we got a bit of a culture shock….. draft beer, pop music, a Virgin Megastore, really clean streets, extremely hot, billions of building sites and a serious lack of visible Arabs. I made the British Embassy security guard laugh his head off by saying good morning in Arabic (he’s Nepali). The flat we’re going to be living in (at least when we first arrive) is on the 18th floor of a tower, has at least five Phillipino boys at the entrance saying ’hellogoodmorninghowareyou?’ and an utterly ridiculous Americanised name. The building also comes with a swimming pool, jacuzzi and last but not least a magical bathroom, where you go in for an early morning pee, shut the door behind you, and then find there’s no way out…. Eventually, after much shouting and screaming, Mr A found a maintenance man with a screwdriver, and I was released.
India was a lot of fun. We spent a couple of days in Mumbai – getting hot in rickshaws, hanging out in J’s air-conditioned flat, eating pig products, Chinese take-away and fondue (Did you know you can get vodka delivered to your house in Mumbai? Now that’s our kind of city). We did go down to the must-see-tourist-old-building-stuff in the central Mumbai, but we had breakfast first in a genuine Indian café – which meant we both needed the loo pretty speedily. After an hour of 10 minutes looking at stone Vishnu’s in the museum, 5 minutes sitting down to recover, 10 minutes in the ‘loo’ (a hole), 10 minutes looking at pictures of Vishnu, 5 mins …… etc etc we gave up and went back to J’s bijou flat. Then the three of us headed to stay with Uncle R in the middle of nowhere in Gujarat. They’re pretty keen on Gandhi there, and so the whole state is DRY. We had decanted a bottle of vodka into a water bottle, and then made J carry it so that we wouldn’t get into trouble on our Diplomatic passports. It turns out we didn’t really need to bother, since R’s friend has the biggest drinks cabinet we’ve ever seen. And you can buy booze from the police if you run out. We went for supper with a seriously Hindu man who, when asked ‘what time do you get up in the morning?’, gave us an extensive rundown: ‘there were problems with the USSR and America in the 1960s and 70s …. it was called the cold war …. Hinduism is all about creation and destruction … and South Africa is better than Zambia’. And got a 5 hour train back, where loads of people came to chat to us - try explaining to someone that you come from London, yes you are British, but you’re living in Syria at the moment, no that’s not in north London, no you won’t be there forever, you’ll be moving to Qatar in October. Confusion all round. Meanwhile, Mr A wasn’t very well and couldn’t hear anything so started taking some antibiotics that R had. But it turned out that they have a side effect of giving you a bad tummy so Mr A felt even worse. We then headed to Goa where we have no funny stories as our days were divided between lying on sunloungers, eating and sleeping. Actually there was one thing that made me laugh – the female security guards at the airport frisking me to check I wasn’t carrying a bomb had spotted me talking to Mr A. They asked me (whilst giggling) if that was my husband, I said yes, they exclaimed ‘but he’s so small’. Mr A is not amused.
In other Syrian news, there have been elections in which a man with a head like an egg was running. We’re not sure who votes in elections here - you get to decide who sits in parliament to rubberstamp what the President has already decided, but if you’ve ever been picked up by the police for anything political you can’t stand for election or vote. We haven’t yet met a single person who voted. We found the remains of a roman road and aqueduct half-way up a big hill outside Damascus. Actually a shepherd had to show Mr A where it was (and gave him some oranges and Islamic tips en route), and then he took me there. I clambered up in flip-flops so my feet are now full of thorns but it was okay because we ate processed cheese at the top whilst boys in pick-ups held drag races on the road below.
I have been learning how to read in Arabic and feel like an illiterate 4 year old. Mr A has been playing football with young Syrians and now knows the equivalent of ‘nutmeg’ – ‘egg’ (i.e. you have two between your legs). It’s much hotter so we’ve been hanging out in our garden, with our fountain. And ….. having been slightly starved whilst we were away, the tortoises (Randy, Andy and Lady) have been munching their cucumber and are, you will be pleased to hear, AT IT once more.
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