Travels in the Levant

The highlight of today and our trip so far was seeing the gigantic Umayyad Mosque in the Old City of Damascus. Brian, Steven, Tyler, Juan and I left the hotel after a restless night and walked about 5 blocks to the old city. The Mosque, built in 706CE, covers around an entire block of the cobbled streets. We entered from the side where I donned a full length robe and hood and entered the mosque. Saladin’s tomb lay to my immediate left and as we continued we came to a place where everyone removed there shoes and entered the enormous open courtyard of the Mosque. Here’s a picture I found on the web

The Shia martyr Hussein’s tomb lies on the far side of the courtyard; this makes the mosque a huge pilgrimage site for Iranian shia muslims, who we saw in droves, with the women in billowing black chadors. I met two girls who spoke very little English and so I tried to communicate with them in Arabic, only to discover they were Iranian. I also met a couple from Aleppo who spoke to me about the beauty of their town. They wanted to know how we, Americans, had managed to get into Syria; I told them “God knows.” It is encounters like these that really have made my trip in the Middle East. Everyone, even in Syria, has been incredidbly friendly to me, which is a shock considering what our government says about Syria. Something to ponder.

Off of the courtyard there is an enormous room where the Shrine of John the Baptist lays, who apperently Muslims regard as a prophet. We saw a number of Islamic prayer leaders (possibly Imams) giving sermons to different groups, a number of them speaking Farsi. Here’s a shot of the shrine i found on the web.

We drank fresh blackberry juice on the street and found a restaurant called the Umayyad cave where they were out of almost everything and served the guys’ cheeseburgers without buns. Later, we wandered by shops filled with glittering gold and silver until we found Straight Street, which is actually quite kinked. I bought a bottle of water in one store and the man gave me a whole plate of hamoudeh for free, which is some kind of sweet paste made out of sesame seeds, which i am not particularly fond of. We found a tiny factory which made kufiyyas and i managed to give away most of it to the workers, who in turn shared their olives with me.

The roof of our hotel is beautiful but sleeping at night is rough. By around 2am it was so cold that I was covered in goosbumps and had only my towel and a sheet I had begged of the manager to cover up with. I eventually went back to sleep, but was awakened at 3:45 by the call to prayer, from the mosque less than 100 meters from our beds. I woke up again at around 7am because the heat was unbearable and I was sweating all over. I drifted in and out of sleep for a while longer and final gave up and took a shower in what is basically a closet with a drain. We have been told that, God willing, rooms may be available tonight and so I’m keeping my hopes up.

Tomorrow we go to Beruit, but I will be sad to leave Syria. Perhaps, a study abroad is called for in the future.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 16th, 2005 at 10:08 am and is filed under Syria. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.