Ebla Cham Palace Damascus

... from Minneapolis who returns to Damascus for few months every year and can often be found holding court at a bar owned by a friend in the Christian Quarter of the Old City, tells it convincingly. It's good enough that I'll bet at least one of you will recount it at some point down the line (albeit with strong caveats), or at least look it up in Wikipedia.

Over bottles of Almaza imported from Lebanon (only Reuben could tolerate the ...

... men were having heated debates about who knows what. I was using every sense I had to experience Damascus withing my first few hours of arrival...touch, taste, smell, sight. It all blends together and blows your mind.

Damascus is one city with so many different ways to play with my senses and I love how rounding a street corner can bring sites unknown at home. Men roving around with old coffee urns on their backs are something new ...

Visiting Damascus is a really interesting experience – one of the worlds oldest continually inhabited cities (if not the oldest, it competes with Aleppo for the honour), there are examples everywhere of modern conveniences cobbled together over a complex maze of ancient streets and crumbling buildings. This tends to lead to some interesting experiences.

Take for example my visit to the bathroom on our first evening in Damascus ...

... them sold her size. Finally we found a shop that had the right size. Noor got a blue one, and kept insisting to get a pink one, finally my parents gave in. We stayed in there another half an hour because we were looking at boxes too.

When we finally got out of the shop we went into another one because my parents wanted an antique plate to hang in the kitchen. Hope, Noor and I weren't really fascinated with the plate so we sat on the ...

... could take a picture and he took the bread down and then stopped and put it back up for us to take a picture. He took us down along another narrow street and showed us a restaurant set in the courtyard of the building. It is one of the very old buildings in the area. The woodwork is carved around the doors and the ceiling. The buildings are made of limestone white, cream and black balsalt stones. Quite impressive. Ornate tiles and mosaics around the doors. Went to the ...

... Western cities are quite comparable to the risk in their Middle Eastern peers. From the tourist's perspective, the issue with terrorism is being accidentally caught in cross-fire or being accidentally targeted by a bomb. Attacks are most often against policemen or soldiers. Therefore, the terrorism risk can be minimized by keeping as far away from government forces as possible. Another type of risk is one that springs from civil war. In this case, being ...

... extends up Jebel Quassion; this wh**e the President lives and the locations of many embassies including ours. I was thrilled, because this suite was mine for the next three nights. (See I do stay long** than a day.) I went to the gym and had the best massage ev**. The masseur was Syrian and stretched ev**y muscle of my body. Then back to the room for dinn**. I wasn't going to miss the opportunity of eating at my dining room table.

... de passer le weekend chez lui ; c'est un peu chaud mais ca va, et puis pas besoin de visa il n'y a pas d'Etat. Bon. Une anecdote, également, plus légère, ayant passé la moitié de ma dernière nuit jordanienne à tenter de me débarasser de ces feuilles de menthe que je n'aurais pas du déguster avec l'hummus, lors du dîner de la veille. En Egypte le voyage pénible, en Jordanie le vomi ; j'ai ...

... best place I've been so far. Although there's still a garbage stench in areas, the place is bustling and very elegant in places, old world charm. There are little alleyways everywhere to get lost in. Each time you step into a new street, the landscape changes. Some areas have a big, open market feel, while others are covered in vines and greenery. It's difficult to write how the feeling changes when you enter different areas. Another thing to note is the ...