Prologue

Trip Start Feb 22, 2007
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Trip End Jul 19, 2008


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Thursday, February 22, 2007

My time in Yemen was a perspective-widening experience, and it was a beautiful country that I will always look back on in fondest memory. It was also a superb place to have learnt Arabic, with a dialect close to 'fusHa' (modern standard Arabic) and an abundance of opportunity to practice with willing locals on the streets. Having been there three times for a total of nine months, however, I felt it was important to inject new life in to my Arabic-learning journey.
 
In this world of mine - of twenty-something language students, learning Arabic and discovering its lands and peoples in tandem - it is an unwritten rule that the two prime locations in which to study are Yemen and Syria, as they represent the last vestiges of the old Middle East untainted by massive oil wealth and Western influence, and whose people are not English-proficient as a matter of course. Syria, therefore, was the logical next step in my journey toward Arabic-proficiency.
 
Syria is little known-about by most in the West other than its assigned status within Bush's 'Axis of Evil', and its precarious position on the borders of two intractable conflicts in Iraq and Israel/Palestine, and its capital, Damascus a mere 40 miles from a still-unsettled Beirut, victim of last year's war between Hizbullah and Israel.
 
As well as being excited by the prospect of learning Arabic in a fresh environment, I am keen to establish in my own mind - whilst being careful to avoid commenting on the al-Assad regime itself - what everyday life is like inside this secret state; discover the feelings of ordinary people towards their counterparts in the West, and, hopefully in doing so, separate the people of the country from the politics of the state, and dispel Western visions of this historical country as a bastion of anti-Western hostility and cauldron of terrorist recruitment. For I have heard Syria has beneath the hardened surface a dictatorship some of the friendliest, most hospitable people in the world. Let us find out.
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