Posted 29 Nov 2008 — by sarah
Category Journeys
One reason I travelled to Damascus was that it seemed exotic and also it was just there, it was a destination. On the journey I started to look more and more at links and borders – lines of separation.
Once I got to Damascus I wasn’t quite sure why I’d come. I found myself wandering in those nameless streets. But I was glad to have travelled somewhere that’s sometimes spoken of negatively.
Actually, the streets do have names. They’re written on the signs in Arabic and English and also given a number. The numeric code gets round any confusion over inconsistencies in transliteration, I guess. Perhaps in practice nobody who knows the city uses them. For an outsider it’s useful to have a shared frame of reference. That way you can use your existing map and what people tell you as well as what’s actually around you to feel where you are.
Leaving home challenges you into reality, you’re forced to experience and absorb. Back home you can float in the familiar.
Posted 21 Nov 2008 — by sarah
Category Journeys
I was in the Internet cafe ironing out a wrinkle in my return schedule and there were three middle-aged men in suits there - pretty unusual. After they left the guy at the desk said they were from the Government and had taken the sheets logging customers’ names and the times they were using the computers. They also downloaded a computer file, but he wasn’t sure what.
I had a definite impression this was unusual
There is pretty open access to everything in Syria, I understand, but the authorities apparently take exception to particualr sites from time to time and block them. The social networking site Facebook is currently out in the cold. Internet cafes get round the controls by using a proxy server.
The guy in the shop also said he’d given them his name and that was a problem because he was a soldier.
After all the fuss with the visa I did start to wonder about restrictions. It made me think that’s the really damaging thing, when they get into your head.
Fortunately the Syrian people are so welcoming there’s no possibility to put up barriers. The teenagers I met the other day have just sent a text inviting me to dinner. I can’t go as it’s time to turn around and head back up to Aleppo.
Posted 21 Nov 2008 — by sarah
Category Journeys
The huge hole in the centre of Damascus is the courtyard of the Umayyad (Umwiye?) Mosque.
A group of Japanese tourists traipses by – dutifully bound up in their Islam-friendly grey robes with pointy hoods handed out to visitors. Three Arab looking girls, about eighteen years old, sail past their grey gowns flapping open in the breeze to reveal tight jeans and tops and lots of hair and make up.
We’re surrounded by incredible green and gold mosiacs showing trees and rivers and fantastical buildings. Islamic, the guide, says but the style is more Byzantine except no human or animal form is used. That’s forbidden in Islamic art.
Whatever the origin they still impress, which was surely the real point.
The mosque is the Christian basilica turned sideways so the focus is now towards Mecca instead of along the two rows of some twenty columns to where the altar would have been. The Koranic inscription in the dome before the mihrab is along the lines of, “Be what you are and do not try to be otherwise”.
I say it’s similar to something from Shakespeare and the guide says yes but it’s a-thousand years earlier and he has a BA in Eng Lit from Damascus University.
Posted 19 Nov 2008 — by sarah
Category Journeys
The train station at Aleppo smells of roses. There are no roses inside but the air is perfumed somehow. It’s very lovely with a wooden ceiling and huge clusters of lamps. I’m gently guided onto the fast train to Damascus.
We pass through beautiful desert – not crowded or pretty but a spare beauty. It’s so flat, opening out to the horizon with many changing colours, like a calm sea.
And finally Damascus; it’s now after dark, but my excellent information from one who knows helps me find a cheap room and miraculously avoid being ripped off by a Damascene taxi driver.
I’m surprised by what’s in front of me, by the traffic and the fly-overs and the half-finished buildings. It’s not the romantic destination I had in mind but rather a Middle Eastern twenty-first (twentieth?) century city. I think I was expecting the thirteenth century.
Mohamed (blessed be his name) said he would not visit Damascus because he wanted to visit Paradise only once, after death. If you arrive in Paradise then the journey is over. I’m reminded that I travelled here for the joy of the journey at least as much as the destination.
Posted 31 Oct 2008 — by sarah
Category Journeys
My passport is with the Syrian Embassy. I have every faith and confidence it’ll be back in my hands by the time I’m standing at St Pancras station ready to board the Eurostar and track Damacus-wards. It is a worry though. I left it a bit late to apply.
But passports are only paper, a representation of a bigger system breathing away in the background – like money or blogs.
