Dominating Damscus

  Damascus, Syria
Saturday, April 28, 2007

A new day in Damascus.

Still buzzing from our beautiful walk the night before, we were excited to hit this ancient city. We immediatly headed for the National Museum... and quickly got lost. After asking some locals and getting dragged all over the place (turns out the locals don't know where the National Museum is either) we found out it was across the street.

Once inside, we were both bewildered and impressed by the increadible, but apparently completely random, collection of ancient artifacts. Lacking almost anything in the form of labelling, we were still pretty stunned at the variety and extensive-ness of the collection. Everything from ancient glass and pottery to statues to paintings and mosaics. Beautiful ancient books, increadibly decorated, and an entire transplanted tomb from Palmyra. We also managed to get to the closed of section upstairs without having to bribe anyone! Very sneaky.
Some of the modern art is very interesting as well. Mostly depicting scenes of battle, strife, suffering, and Syrian's slaughtering Israel.

The military museum continued this last theme in some of its exhibits, and contained some impressive collections of ancient and modern weaponry. Entire rooms full of bejewelled swords and daggers, chainmail armour, more rooms entirely full of hand guns or rifles, and another room dedicated to heavy weaponry!

We headed back to the hotel to meet up with some group mates, with plans having been made to visit a Hamam (Traditional Bath House). The group bailed, claiming low cash flow whilst counting out thousand dollar notes for their next shopping excersion. Shopping was the priority.

Mosaics at the Mosque

Unfortunatly, it wasn't advisable that either of us go Hamaming alone, we flagged. We headed down to the soque instead for a little shopping of our own before hitting the wonderous mosque of Damascus, the Umayyad Mosque. The mosque was just spectacular, different in style to many of the others we had seen, with a huge central courtyard where kids ran around playing and families had picnics on the marble stone. The mosque itself was decorated with massive mosaics in shades of blue, green and gold. We spent a long time just sitting in the courtyard admiring the colours before heading back through the souk.

Pillars of the Mosque

We tried our hands at bartering for a shirt at some of the shops along the way, but it turned out that Gabrielle was terrible at bartering. Dan did most of the talking, and eventually ended up with a new shirt himself!

Images from the Souk #3

The souk was an incredible experience in itself, though, the colours of the spices and nuts piled up for sale, the smells and strange sights, covered women shopping for bright fabrics and racy underwear, stalls where almost any animal skin you can think of was for sale as cures for various ailments...it was very interesting.

Images from the Souk #2

We are off for dinner here as our farewell to Damascus, so will sign off. Wherever you are in the world, hope life is treating you well, it certainly is for us here in Damascus!