Letter From Syria

December 16, 2009

I returned to Lebanon on Sunday after more than a week of traveling in Syria. Next to Cuba, Syria is probably the country most misunderstood by Americans--though I hasten to add that Syria is not next to Cuba, nor anywhere near it.

I went to Syria with Matt, my good friend since middle school, who is now in many ways partly British, having lived in London more than a third of his life. Matt came to meet me in Lebanon after we wrapped production in early December. I was actually in Jordan the day he arrived, and then I slept most of the first forty-eight hours we were together in the Middle East. Such a host!

The geographical area of Syria is approximately fifteen times the size of Lebanon (which, as you will remember from an earlier report, is half the size of New Hampshire--itself being roughly twenty times the size of the five boroughs of New York City). Are we all clear on the size of Syria now? Please note: I may have most of my numbers wrong.

Let me be clear about one thing: there is enough hospitality, kindness, and good will in Syria to fill an entire continent many times over. The hardest time my travel companion and I had was getting across the border into Syria in the first place. The entire process took six hours, not including travel time--but delay is to be expected entering a country the United States government has officially considered a "rogue state" since 1979.

So many Syrians we met along the way took us in and offered us whatever they could: tea, cigarettes, food, lodging, travel pointers, and backgammon tips. (We did not realize there are several ways to play backgammon. Apparently, Westerners play "the boring way".) At each stop, our hosts would be curious why two Americans chose to come to Syria. The truth was that there was nowhere else to go from Lebanon.

Damascus
Damascus is thought to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. I lifted that phrase right off Wikipedia, so it must be true, though I think they may have taken it from the Lonely Planet guide. Aleppo, in the north of the country, vies for the title as well. Plagiarism and contests aside, Damascus is a bustling old world city, with vast and significant religious and cultural history that one can feel as well as see. In a country crammed with ruins and thousands of archaeological sites, Damascus offers travelers a different experience, as one actually witnesses the current incarnation of the place as well as sees its artifacts.

The basement chapel where the apostle Paul, né Saul, first preached the gospel still exists in the Old City there. Paul claimed to have been struck blind by a vision of Jesus while en route to Damascus, where he intended to punish Christians. An early Christian dude named Ananais helped Paul recover and then helped him set up shop in his basement. The tiny hidden chapel reminds me of the Cavern Club, where the Beatles played those early gigs in Liverpool.

The Umayyad Mosque claims the status as the oldest location in which Muslims have continuously prayed. I can't tell you how many times I wrote that last sentence before it made sense; seriously, it was more than a twenty times. There are traces of civilization in Damascus and the surrounding area dating back, by some accounts, as far as 9000 B.C.E. For you historians, that's a very long time ago.

There is a small Jewish Quarter in Damascus as well, but you wouldn't know it when you're there. It's not exactly South Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

The Souks
The rambling pedestrian marketplaces in Damascus, called souks, extend in a spaghetti maze within the walls of the Old City for miles. When you take into account the side streets and alleyways, the opportunities for commerce seem to go on indefinitely.

The question what is for sale in the souk? is actually easier to answer in the inverse: what is not for sale in the souk?, the answer to which seems limited to the following items:

• Stocks & bonds
• Automobiles
• Farm equipment
• Pornography
  
• Drugs & (with a few exceptions) alcohol
  
• Newspapers
• Yachts
  
• Land (as far as I could tell)
  

Any item not on that list could be found in a souk. I dare you to challenge me on this. The well known specialty items are the aged olive oil soap, silk scarves and linens. There is also an abundance of all clothing, socks by the dozen, jackets, hats, candies, nuts, coffee, tea, beeswax, handcrafted wooden boxes, swords, knives, antiques, cutlery, furniture, rugs, blankets, luggage, toys, paintings, cheese, fruit smoothies, shawerma sandwiches, falafel, yummy pancakes, fine dining opportunities, pearl-inlaid backgammon boards and chess sets, and underwear. There are several stores that only sell candy-covered peanuts.

Aleppo
On our first night in Aleppo, a northern city as large as Damascus, Matt and I had the misfortune of getting lost while attempting to take our tiny rental car the mere one hundred yards from our own one-star hotel into the basement parking garage of a luxury hotel down the street. I was at the wheel. One wrong turn brought us inside the Aleppo souk, which is at times barely six-feet wide, and we couldn't find our way out. I felt I was trapped in the Middle Eastern version of that 1960s folk song about "Charlie & the MTA" by the Kingston Trio. It took us the better part of forty-five minutes, sometimes driving in reverse, of barreling down those dark and narrow alleyways, past vendors, donkey carts, shoppers and, surely, disapproving secret policemen, until we popped back out onto an actual street. We were laughing harder than what you might think is appropriate given the situation, and we must have looked like idiotic American tourists.

The parking garage ended up costing more than our hotel.

Syria Feels Safe
For tourists, Syria is one of the safest place to travel. It seems unthinkable that a crime would be committed anywhere on the streets of Syria. The sad reality is that Syria is a police state, yet we saw no (uniformed) police presence anywhere, save for the traffic cops here and there. Statistics state that fifty percent of the Syrian populace works for the government in some way, and the vast majority much of the police force is undercover. The hotel where we stayed in Aleppo (just south of the Turkish border) was also the headquarters of the so called "Tourism Police" and we saw middle aged men in plainclothes come in and out all day and night. No evidence of crime can be seen anywhere.

Old Country For No Women
In a decidedly male dominated region, Syria is a decidedly male dominated society. Women out and about during the day, but the overwhelming majority of businesses are operated by men.

Syria has a very active nightlife. While it is mostly men eating and hanging out in the restaurants late at night, there are some families here and there. Most shopping in the souks closes down by seven or eight o'clock, but the restaurants are packed until one or two in the morning. There's no New Orleans style rowdiness at all in Syria. The Muslim population--ninety-percent and growing--tend not to drink, and indeed most establishments don't serve alcohol. You see a lot of card playing and backgammon, sitting around chatting, and smoking tobacco in a nargileh--also known as shisha, hookah, or "hubbly bubbly".

Syria is the First World
Coming into Syria from Lebanon is an enlightening experience. In so many ways, Lebanon--open to Western influence and commercialism--remains a developing country. This has a lot to do with the economic hardships created by long stretches of war. Syria, however, compared to its tiny neighbor the west, really seems to have its act together. There are trains and buses and the traffic flows according to a plan. People stop at traffic lights. Beirut doesn't think twice about putting up a luxury hotel with a Dolce & Gabbana store inside the lobby, but they neglect to replace the torn up sidewalk in front of it. In Damascus, the sidewalks are in good repair, and people use them.

Bedouin Culture: Welcome!
The Bedouins are the most hospitable people I have ever known, with Appalachian porch dwellers coming in at a close second. Inside the ancient ruins of Palmyra--an area that extends for miles allowing a visitor to roam freely through the temples and along the colonnade--we were invited in by a family of Bedouins: Khalid and his wife (whose name I found unpronounceable) and their two young daughters, both toddlers, Cedra and Nour, who are so different from one another but both lively and adorable. The four of them live inside a small complex of three tents, the largest of which is about fifteen by eight feet. Khalid's wife is pregnant with their third child.

Matt took photos and video of the six of us sitting inside the tent, drinking tea, smoking Khalid's knock-off Marlboros and playing silly-face with the girls. Neither Matt nor I speak Arabic, and Khalid's three words of English ("one", "two", and "welcome"--by far the most used English word in the Middle East) weren't enough to make up for own ignorance, but we happily spent more than hour with them, laughing, and playing, and "talking". We took turns pointing to phrases in Khalid's dog-eared English-Arabic phrase book to communicate such ideas as "it is still raining", "we are friends" and "Italy is nice." I gave Khalid my sunglasses as a thank you gift, in anticipation of the rainy season someday coming to an end.

When we finally went outside at sunset, there was still a light rain, and as we walked away we saw a rainbow high in the sky which seemed to end right at the entrance to their tent.