Mr A and I parted ways at Larnaca Airport as I headed off for the second part of my early-December sojourn. Boringly, he had to get back to work in Doha whilst I had arranged to meet a good friend in Damascus. We carefully disentangled our possessions, checked we each had our own passports, and bid an emotional farewell for our week apart. I had to change flights in Amman so was just wandering through the airport (full of men in white on their way to Hajj in Saudi – I felt extremely dark and female) when I happened to put my hand in the key pocket of my bag. Ah, that’s rather a lot of keys, I thought as I pulled out not only my house key and car keys but also Mr A’s house and car keys. So that would be all the house and car keys we own. Mr A gave me cheery little call a few minutes later to say hello from Dubai airport. I quickly put a dampener on his mood as he realised he was about to arrive in Doha at 3am homeless, car key-less and due in to work 4 hours later. Luckily a lovely friend had a spare room and was willing let him in. So Mr A hated me a little less (though really was it my fault? Maybe he should have checked whether he had his keys with him? Or maybe I should have checked I didn’t have his keys with me? We haven’t really discussed it as these are the kinds of conversations that could end in divorce).
Meanwhile, by some miracle my friend J and I had arrived at Damascus airport at roughly the same time. Also relying heavily on the kindness of friends, we were staying in Damascus’s old town in a beautiful courtyard house. I managed to remember where it was in the dark, and J and I awoke in the morning to bright sunshine, orange and grapefruit trees outside our bedroom, and an urgent need to find DHL. Luckily, being us, Mr A and I have utilised the services of this company before and so I knew where the Damascus branch was. Leaving no time for J to appreciate the finer things of the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world (I know, others claim it too), we marched off. An hour, £35 and one really ugly complimentary cool bag later, the car keys were allegedly winging their way to Doha and we were free to potter to our hearts’ content.
J had never been able to visit us when we lived in Damascus so I was meeting her there partly to show her around and partly so I could remember all the things I love about the Sham and see all my lovely friends. Which meant that she got almost no choice about what she saw as I took her to the places I liked, ignored the places I didn’t, force-fed her Arabic food and made her hang out with people she didn’t know gossiping about people she didn’t know. Brill.
Some things about Damascus have not changed in the year we’ve been away. At my favourite restaurant, where I was absurdly, childishly pleased that the waiters recognised me, we ordered my usual truckload of falafel and tabbouleh. I loved being able to speak Arabic every day, though got frustrated that my vocabulary seems to have contracted to the point where I can only have a substantial conversation with my Arabic teacher. And I remembered all the reasons why I love the architecture: we visited an incredible V&A Museum ceramics exhibition at Khan Assad Basha, admired the Ummayad Mosque in our ewok outfits while avoiding the freezing stone floors in our bare feet, enjoyed the serenity of the Azem Palace and almost retched at the smell of mothballed stuffed animals on display at the Maristan (medical museum).
But much has changed – a lot of the old town has had a makeover for the ‘2008 Capital of Arab Culture’ celebrations – the ancient Straight Street now has amazing smart shutters and clear pavements rather than piles of rubble for a road and dangerous electric cables hanging at head height. And I baulked at the prices of pretty much everything. This exchange rate business really is a bugger.
When in Damascus one must watch the sun set over the city from the top of Mount Qasioun whilst sipping a cool drink. Unfortunately my planning went awry and we actually got there just after the sun had set, and I had failed to register it was December so we ended up on a hill, in the dark, freezing cold, sipping tea. But our 17 year old waiter (a soldier doing his military service) kept us entertained as he displayed mild shock at his luck in getting not one, but two women at his café. Two girls from London. Who spoke some Arabic. And smiled at him. That should keep him going for a while.
Heading home we chanced upon a parade. Keen for some political action (and in retrospect possibly defying advice from every guidebook in the world), we stationed ourselves on top of a bollard to wait for something to happen. Smart young boys practiced their trumpets as hijabed young girls looked on. Men in black leather jackets strode past with Lebanon flags as residents peered out of their windows. After half an hour of cold, numb extremities, we dived into a shop (there’s nothing like a Palestinian Women’s Co-operative to make you feel like the really expensive bag you like really HAS to be bought) to buy Christmas decorations and so missed the whole thing, though since it was a visiting Lebanese bigwig it wasn’t such a bad thing. Given the frequency with which politicians from Lebanon are blown up, there are safer places to stand than next to them.
It has to be said that courtyard houses are somewhat more romantic in summer when you can sit in the tree-filled courtyard, around the fountain, smoking shisha and having urbane intellectual conversations in the manner of Isabel Burton. In winter, having to go outside to get to the loo in the dark by the light of your mobile phone, when it’s cold and your host has let slip that he killed a rat that was IN HIS BED, is not quite as beguiling. We had also been warned that we might be woken up in the morning by the Syrian security services having a look around, so we weren’t heart-broken to leave the city.
Heading for Palmyra I hastily remembered the rules of Syrian driving (never waste time looking in your rear view mirror, use the horn at all times, if in doubt ignore the traffic signals) as I got us lost on the way there in our hire car. Following the signs to Baghdad, we eventually found our way and joined the road with the magical trucks which look like they’re carrying goods until one, and then two, and then forty women and children stand up in the back and wave. J was suitably impressed by the golden columns surrounded by desert and we rewarded ourselves with a half bottle of Lebanese wine (delicious) and a glass of Syrian wine (disgusting). We set our alarms for sunrise the next morning, which is a must-do at Palmyra. Except that I have never managed to do it. Here at last was my opportunity. J leapt out of bed into ALL her clothes as our alarms went off. I buried deeper into my duvet, grunted at her to feel free to leave without me and, in similar style to my two previous visits, lay in my bed wondering whether it was really worth it. Apparently it was as J came back with idyllic tales of having the ruins to herself as the sun rose behind the mountains, though it then took her about 2 hours to warm up again which I think vindicated my decision since I forgot to pack socks let alone a coat.
Back to Damascus via a Bedouin-run café where J swapped a pen for some spinach pastries and a whistle-stop visit to the Christian villages where at least one woman still speaks Aramaic, we snuggled in to another generous friend’s centrally-heated, all-mod-cons flat and spent the next couple of days seeing old Syrian friends, buying up carpets, knives and nativity scenes, reading Heat magazines, and going to an utterly bizarre Finnish National Day party where we didn’t meet a single Finn. I thought it was important to give her an unforgettable cultural experience.
So after all that it was time for me to return to Doha for the Eid holiday (no danger of going back to work just yet), J to return to the UK, and us both to realise we’d picked up a stomach bug as a memento of our time together. Ah, good times. Better times than a Doha acquaintance who was holidaying in Damascus at the same time as us and was apparently amazed because he’d never travelled to a Communist police-state before where there are food shortages. I have no idea which Syria he went to.
(P.S. For those of you with long memories, I was updated on the progress on the tortoises whilst I was back. They are well. A little too well. Lady has apparently given birth to babies, something I can only say was inevitable and may well be down to our over-zealous care. That probably means she has had children with one of her sons. Disgusting. Or is that acceptable in the animal world?)
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