Feet on the ground.
Trip Start
Nov 30, 2007
1
26
34
Trip End
Jan 17, 2008
Damascus,
Syria
Friday, December 28, 2007
The first day was really a mix of culture shock and wayfinding. I spent a couple of hours trying to find a cheaper hotel than the one I'd crashed in the night before, but first I had to get my bearings, since arriving by taxi at night means you're pretty clueless, and the area I was in was a maze of angular roads. Most of Damascus is a maze of angular roads; it's the world's oldest continuously inhabited place (over 5000 years), and the state of travel demand modelling even as recently as Roman times, more than halfway through the city's lifespan was shockingly bad. (They predicted a mode split of LXXVIII per cent by chariot in their 2000 horizon scenario, for example.)
Before I checked in, I had a bit of a stress issue since the main banks here are only on the Visa network, and I couldn't use their ATMs. I eventually found a hole-in-the-wall that was Cirrus, but not without increasing my blood pressure a little. It's nice to be able to withdraw 10,000 things in one transaction, even if the Syrian pound is 50:1.
Anyways, this is a long way of saying it's easy to get a little lost in this city, particularly when Let's Go's helpful map was scaled such that it put all the hotels in an area the size of a dime. But being a little lost is wonderful; this city has great people-watching.
Once I resettled, after a leisurely lunch overlooking Yousef Al-'Azmeh Square, I hit the souq around 4 PM. The Damascus souq is considered by some to be the greatest in the world.
It's amazing; a quarter of the old city, essentially, lined with hundreds of stalls selling everything from fake fruit to hanging Mylar decorations. Huge crowds of people, haggling, chatting, wandering through the side passageways. It was Thursday night, too, whch is date night, so I saw lots of couples -- one woman who sticks in my mind just looked deleriously happy, like a bride. Just an incredible experience.
I did the main aisle of the souq, then went past the Umayyad Mosque (prayer time; I'll visit it today in daylight), and just sort of lost myself in the alleys of the old town, passing shops, houses and so on, in a layout that's millenia old.
And from there, back to my hotel for a taking it easy night -- I grabbed a roast chicken from a man who said he had visited Montreal, and thought Canada was a wonderful country. It was on a street nearby that's entirely chicken vendors, mostly raw and some with roasted as an additional option. It was a very good chicken.
So far, it's interesting, because the Syrians I've met are nice, although there's a much stronger language barrier than the Gulf states. But the infrastructure is in much worse condition; honestly, Damascus reminds me as much -- if not more -- of China as, say, the UAE. What a difference some oil makes, I guess.
