al-Gawaher Hotel Aleppo

... we cannot convince him otherwise. He tries to<br>teach us a little Arabic and in between correcting my pronunciation<br>he asks me repeatedly whether or not he is going the right way!!!<br>This is the way with many of the taxi drivers so keep an eye on the<br>road that you may know where he needs to go. As in Turkey, people see<br>a foreigner, assume you are lost and immediately offer you help! Our<br>hotel is stunning, one of the old Ottoman houses in Aleppo (what they ...

... at 2.35pm and drove into Jordan at 7.30p.m. That was 2 hours with the Saudis and then 2 hours and 55 minutes with the Jordanians. If you want to get through the borders there's no point in arguing too much with anybody about anything, just keep patient and go with the flow. We finally arrived at the InterContinental Hotel in Amman at 9.40p.m. on Sunday night, to find that we had been upgraded to a suite, so all's ...

... esta especialitzat en un tipus de mercaderia: especies, vestits de nuvia, merceria, joieria, articles de metall, sabons, teles, mocadors, carn, ... Per cridar l'atencio del turista et pregunten d'on ets. Si els respons, ja has begut oli, i entrem si fa o no fa en la mateixa dinamica: que si t'agafen la ma, que si t'inviten a un cafe o te, i aleshores t'intenten vendre de tot. Res de sorprenent. Com que jo ja duc la motxilla prou carregada, m'intento esmunyir ...

... After some shouting with another driver for a few minutes and running off with our passports (Lee made a mad dash just following the passports which the guy took into a tourist office) and about 20 minutes later we were on our way to Aleppo. No problems at the border although we had to get out a few times and they checked our bags and the car and had to show our passports to about 5 different people, but we made it though and got to Aleppo about 20 hours after leaving Goreme, only about 6 ...

Hey People I am in Syria right now and what a time I had getting into the country. I left Goreme at 8:30pm after a day of horseback riding and a Turkish bath and went to Kayseri where I got onto a midnight bus headed to Antakya, a town close to the Syrian boarder. I was planning to spend a night in Antakya and find out what I needed in order to get a visa into Syria but that was not to be. I got there early in the morning and while I was waiting to get my luggage ...

... du Krak des chevaliers. J'en viens, à l'heure du départ, à dresser un bilan arabe. Reflechissant ces derniers jours à la tournure particulièrement heureuse pris par les événements, je crus en comprendre l'élément décisif en la manière dont laquelle, les jours passant, ma personne fut peu à peu "dépassée", réduite au silence par mes récentes découvertes. Je ne fus ...

... at this elegant, historical Armenian owned hotel including Kemal Atatürk, Woodrow Wilson, Laurence of Arabia, Agatha Christie, King Farouk and other notables. We were offered the room Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express in... but we would not have been able to tell otherwise. Perhaps any vacant room is her suite, but who cares. The hotel has that kind of dusty post-imperial air that seems to have been lost elsewhere in the world ...

The bus ride from Antakya into Aleppo (requiring a border crossing into Syria) went about as expected. My bus was supposed to leave at 7:30AM and I dutifully showed up at 7:15AM. I gave my passport to the bus company (leaving my passport with someone is still difficult for me but it's the order of the day here) and bought a few breads from a street vendor for breakfast. <br><br>About 8:15AM the bus manager arrived at the bus to distribute our passports. There were only about ...