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Bosra and Beyond
Had a pretty good weekend last weekend: It was the first one where I actually ventured out of Damascus to another town, this being Bosra: an old roman town with loads of ruins.
However the weekend really started on Thursday night, as in Syria the weekend is Friday and Saturday, but Sunday is a working day, which is really hard to get your head around when you first get here. Anyway, Thursday evening we were absolutely shattered from being at university and all the work they give us, so we got a few snacks and spent the evening just chilling out watching Date Movie which we bought from one of the many DVD shops that download films from the internet for free, then burn them onto discs and sell them for the equivalent of 80p… And how may you ask? As far as I’ve been able to work out Syria has no copyright laws so they can. If you want any films brought back for you then let me know!
Friday morning I went to a breakfast hosted by a Syrian family across the way from me, which was pretty awesome, the table was laid out with a variety of different foods and everyone passed everything around and tried out all the different things available whilst drinking “orange and carrot” juice which was actually really nice despite what I feared it might taste like. It was horrifically sweet like most Middle Eastern drinks. I swear they put at least 3 or 4 teaspoons of sugar in hot drink they give you and all their soft drinks are full of it too. Make sure if you come to the Middle East and want to make sure they don’t put heaps of sugar in it, ask for it “bedoon sukr” so your teeth don’t fall out.
Friday evening soon came around and me, GG (Hattie), David and Jen all went up one of the hills surrounding Damascus and chilled out watching the sun set. I’ve taken some pretty awesome photos of it, if I may say so myself, so I’ll put those up in a bit. The city itself is actually so much bigger than I thought it was, it seems to stretch on for miles. Seen from such a height it’s awesome, especially when the sun goes down and all the lights come on in the city and you can see all the cars weaving their way through the streets.
We also met a really nice family up there who were all studying English, all with a name beginning with “d” (like Diala, Diana… e.t.c). We offered them cookies and they gave us tea and we chatted to them in a mixture of Arabic and English, which was really good fun, then we all exchanged numbers and email addresses and went our separate ways.
Saturday we (GG, Fiona and myself) went to Bosra and decided to get up really early and catch a bus there from the station just outside Damascus. We left the house at 7:30am and paid 200SYP to go to the bus depot place, then paid 200SYP each for a return to Bosra. The bus journey took an hour and a half and luckily I had my iPhone to keep me entertained with such jewels as “Angry Birds” and “Flick Football” as I’d finished my Bond books the night before.
We got there and were greeted by an awesome amphitheatre left over from the Roman times. What I loved about it was that there was no thought given to health and safety. You could clamber all over the amphitheatre as high as you wanted, which was a lot of fun. It was literally, pay the entry fee, then you’re on your own to do whatever you want to inside… There were no “attendants” or anything like that.
After we’d exhausted the amphitheatre we went off to a restaurant where we had a range of foods laid in front of us for 1500SYP, which was a complete rip off, but we kinda expected it as it was quite a touristy place. Needless to say we left no tip for the waiter…
We then went around the other ruins and tried to find one of the oldest mosques in the world and got lost in the process. We did however stumble across a place surrounded by graves, which we thought might’ve been that mosque, but unfortunately it wasn’t, however it did turn out to be a place where supposedly the prophet Muhammed had visited as a child, then again when he was 25.
We then eventually found our way round to the the mosque we were actually looking for and looked inside after a man let us in. It was quite modern inside with an LED display for some reason but you could see the structure of the old mosque which still remained inside.
What I did learn from Bosra is that people, like in taxis, expect you to tip if they show you places and they become annoyed if you don’t give them anything, so make sure you have a spare 50 or 100 SYP spare to give to them.
After 125 photos and a sweaty and exhausting walk around Bosra we found our way back to the bus stop and waited with a couple from Vienna for the bus to come. The bus back was a squeeze: every seat was filled with a family of around 18 people taking up the majority of the seats. I was squished in next to some army guy who attempted to sleep most of the journey, though I don’t know how that was possible given the noise of the children around us who insisted on spilling their water on us…
Once we’d departed from the craziness of the bus we caught a bus back to the centre and I went off to have my first Hamam experience, but I’ll save that for another time once I’ve experienced them some more.
D
