Syria - Part 3
Pictures: school buses, Al Shami House restaurant, should I sell soap or hot fudge, Mardini, the friendly waffle guys.
Old Damascus
December 2008
Old Damascus is an ideal place to explore without getting too lost. There are several main thoroughfares crisscrossing the walled in city. There are several pedestrian areas and these are marked with signs indicating the route. I see signs pointing to the Classical Route, the Crafts Route and the Souqs Route. I walk along a main road about the width of a kitchen table that some how accommodates two way traffic. The cars are small but every now and then a behemoth SUV enters the mix creating a mess. More honking tries to speed up the process of unblocking the road but to no avail, it only makes the mess more maddening.
I walk by many kinds of churches planning to return to see the insides later but that never happens. For now I just want to be out walking after a morning of sitting and waiting. A whiff of hot fudge stops me dead in my tracks. Coming from New England I know hot fudge and I think I smell Friendly’s hot fudge sauce but where is this coming from? I sniff a few more times until I see a Belgian waffle stand. The two young workers are eager to pose for a picture and then one wants me to crawl under the counter to have my photo taken in their tiny work space. I had to oblige. It sure does smell good and at night I notice they do a brisk business.
Dusk comes early at 4:30pm and I continue to walk as the evening crowd grows thicker and thicker with people returning from work, school children heading home, and people out shopping. Passing a fresh fruit stand I realize I am getting hungry too but don’t want to stop yet for a meal and decide to order a juice to go. Some places serve the juice in a glass to be consumed there or you can order it to go. I take mine to go and happily sip away passing by an old hamam, tempting jewelry shops, and cozy cafes.
I stop in an art gallery and learn there are many talented Syrian artists and this one gallery owner sees it as his duty to promote these artists. By the looks of the gallery, the owner must spend a lot of evenings there. He has a TV going and a small stove for making hot water. We chat some and on the way out he recommends a restaurant on the way back to the Mustafa’s. On the way there I take a small detour to explore a covered souq not knowing what this one is called or what it specializes in. I see soap, coffee, more soap, and cheese but this is only at the entrance. I call this the hodgepodge souq. With the recent tour of the soap factory in Lebanon, I want to check out the soap here and I approach a stall and start gazing at the piles and piles of stacked oil olive soaps. There were also bins of different shapes like half moons, paisley, stars, and squares. I like the look of them very much and the shop keeper picks up on this.
He introduces himself as Mardini and says, “think of the drink martini but change the t to a d and you get Mardini and that is me.” Then we go through the all familiar exchange, “where are you from?” “are you living here?” “you speak little Arabic – very good” “where is your husband?” “how many children you have?”. Mardini also has a shop in Aleppo and that is where the soap is coming from. Aleppo, like Sidon and Tripoli in Lebanon, also has a soap history. Aleppo was once a very important stop on the trade route from present day Iraq, Damascus and India becoming a huge business center and by the looks of it today, it still is. We talk soap until the shopkeepers start closing for the evening at 8pm. Now I feel hungry and walk over to the restaurant.
In side I am pleasantly surprised to see a fountain in the middle producing soothing water sounds with tables around it. The menu looks fine and affordable and there are plenty of empty tables. I amble over to sit by the fountain at one of the lovely tables but, whoopsie, these tables are reserved for parties larger than one I assume. The solo people sit on the outskirts in the dark. At this point, being too hungry to care, I order lentil soup and hummus and inhale the food while reading about the restaurant. The Al Shami House is a 17th century house belonging to the Ottoman ruler Medhat Pasha. The restaurant sits on a street originating back to the Roman age with the Roman arch still standing. And this is the arch I use as a landmark to turn down the street to the gallery.
Back at Mustafa’s I can still smell the hint of varnish and I make a mental note to add to my list of hotel questions, “has the room been recently varnished? Painted?”, “is there a bright light outside the window?”. It is cold at night and there is a space heater in the room but I prefer the good old fashion way of sleeping in the cold – under lots of blankets. Unlike my bedroom in Saudi where there is a high power security light outside the window and night is always day because of it, and come to think of it, the same was true in Al Hada with another security light beaming into my bedroom, it is dark and I quickly fall comatose.
I awake as quickly as I fell asleep. It is a new day and I am biting at the bit to get out walking again. It is 6am. I shower in the telephone booth, wrap myself in a sweater and shawl and proceed to exit the gallery waking everyone up in the process. I could not figure how to open the front door and I am banging it back and forth trying to figure out what lever or button I need to press to open it. The watch man on duty comes drugged with sleep and gives me an, “it is not that difficult” look and opens the door. Well, when I was leaving Beirut it was difficult to open the door because it was locked and I didn’t have the key to leave and it was 6:15am and I figured if I rattle the door long enough the watch man would hear it and he did. I don’t like being trapped inside but now I am outside and ready to set foot in magical Damascus under a rising sun.
An informative site. I should have read this before I left.
http://www.bietrumman.com/content/view/9/23/
Aleppo Soap
http://www.historische-aleppo-seife.de/engl_story.html
December 2008
Old Damascus is an ideal place to explore without getting too lost. There are several main thoroughfares crisscrossing the walled in city. There are several pedestrian areas and these are marked with signs indicating the route. I see signs pointing to the Classical Route, the Crafts Route and the Souqs Route. I walk along a main road about the width of a kitchen table that some how accommodates two way traffic. The cars are small but every now and then a behemoth SUV enters the mix creating a mess. More honking tries to speed up the process of unblocking the road but to no avail, it only makes the mess more maddening.
I walk by many kinds of churches planning to return to see the insides later but that never happens. For now I just want to be out walking after a morning of sitting and waiting. A whiff of hot fudge stops me dead in my tracks. Coming from New England I know hot fudge and I think I smell Friendly’s hot fudge sauce but where is this coming from? I sniff a few more times until I see a Belgian waffle stand. The two young workers are eager to pose for a picture and then one wants me to crawl under the counter to have my photo taken in their tiny work space. I had to oblige. It sure does smell good and at night I notice they do a brisk business.
Dusk comes early at 4:30pm and I continue to walk as the evening crowd grows thicker and thicker with people returning from work, school children heading home, and people out shopping. Passing a fresh fruit stand I realize I am getting hungry too but don’t want to stop yet for a meal and decide to order a juice to go. Some places serve the juice in a glass to be consumed there or you can order it to go. I take mine to go and happily sip away passing by an old hamam, tempting jewelry shops, and cozy cafes.
I stop in an art gallery and learn there are many talented Syrian artists and this one gallery owner sees it as his duty to promote these artists. By the looks of the gallery, the owner must spend a lot of evenings there. He has a TV going and a small stove for making hot water. We chat some and on the way out he recommends a restaurant on the way back to the Mustafa’s. On the way there I take a small detour to explore a covered souq not knowing what this one is called or what it specializes in. I see soap, coffee, more soap, and cheese but this is only at the entrance. I call this the hodgepodge souq. With the recent tour of the soap factory in Lebanon, I want to check out the soap here and I approach a stall and start gazing at the piles and piles of stacked oil olive soaps. There were also bins of different shapes like half moons, paisley, stars, and squares. I like the look of them very much and the shop keeper picks up on this.
He introduces himself as Mardini and says, “think of the drink martini but change the t to a d and you get Mardini and that is me.” Then we go through the all familiar exchange, “where are you from?” “are you living here?” “you speak little Arabic – very good” “where is your husband?” “how many children you have?”. Mardini also has a shop in Aleppo and that is where the soap is coming from. Aleppo, like Sidon and Tripoli in Lebanon, also has a soap history. Aleppo was once a very important stop on the trade route from present day Iraq, Damascus and India becoming a huge business center and by the looks of it today, it still is. We talk soap until the shopkeepers start closing for the evening at 8pm. Now I feel hungry and walk over to the restaurant.
In side I am pleasantly surprised to see a fountain in the middle producing soothing water sounds with tables around it. The menu looks fine and affordable and there are plenty of empty tables. I amble over to sit by the fountain at one of the lovely tables but, whoopsie, these tables are reserved for parties larger than one I assume. The solo people sit on the outskirts in the dark. At this point, being too hungry to care, I order lentil soup and hummus and inhale the food while reading about the restaurant. The Al Shami House is a 17th century house belonging to the Ottoman ruler Medhat Pasha. The restaurant sits on a street originating back to the Roman age with the Roman arch still standing. And this is the arch I use as a landmark to turn down the street to the gallery.
Back at Mustafa’s I can still smell the hint of varnish and I make a mental note to add to my list of hotel questions, “has the room been recently varnished? Painted?”, “is there a bright light outside the window?”. It is cold at night and there is a space heater in the room but I prefer the good old fashion way of sleeping in the cold – under lots of blankets. Unlike my bedroom in Saudi where there is a high power security light outside the window and night is always day because of it, and come to think of it, the same was true in Al Hada with another security light beaming into my bedroom, it is dark and I quickly fall comatose.
I awake as quickly as I fell asleep. It is a new day and I am biting at the bit to get out walking again. It is 6am. I shower in the telephone booth, wrap myself in a sweater and shawl and proceed to exit the gallery waking everyone up in the process. I could not figure how to open the front door and I am banging it back and forth trying to figure out what lever or button I need to press to open it. The watch man on duty comes drugged with sleep and gives me an, “it is not that difficult” look and opens the door. Well, when I was leaving Beirut it was difficult to open the door because it was locked and I didn’t have the key to leave and it was 6:15am and I figured if I rattle the door long enough the watch man would hear it and he did. I don’t like being trapped inside but now I am outside and ready to set foot in magical Damascus under a rising sun.
An informative site. I should have read this before I left.
http://www.bietrumman.com/content/view/9/23/
Aleppo Soap
http://www.historische-aleppo-seife.de/engl_story.html
posted by Becky of Arabia at 10:55 AM
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