On the road in Damascus

I've been in Syria for the past several days covering this side of the conflict in Lebanon (Syria is one of the key backers of Hezbollah and one of the Bush administration's least favorite regimes, plus it's hosting more than 150,000 Lebanese refugees). Damascus, the capital, is the world's oldest continuously inhabited city, although for the first few days here I didn't see that much of it. The story in Lebanon was moving fast and my work days were long.

Language has been a bit of a struggle for me. I don't speak Arabic, but I guess to Syrians I look like I should. People have tended to get 3-4 sentences deep into a conversation with me before realizing that I have no idea what they're saying.

Fortunately, I've had the help of translators for nearly all my interviews. On my first day here I arranged a trip to the Lebanese border to meet refugees fleeing the Israeli attacks. At the appointed time, the translator called my hotel room to say he was in the lobby, wearing a green sweater. I went downstairs and looked around for several minutes, but found no one wearing a green sweater (or any sweater, really, as it was nearly 100 degrees outside). Finally I approached a guy in a green t-shirt; it was him.

Hmm. Sweater, t-shirt? It was kind of a basic mistake for a translator, but I shrugged it off. We went outside to wait for the car. He asked me how I was enjoying Syria. I said I'd only been here about 12 hours, but everyone in the hotel was really nice. "Well," he said, "Syrians are known for their hostility."

Hmm. What was I more worried about? That my well-paid translator didn't know the difference between "hostility" and "hospitality" - or that he did?

Actually, the people here have been very cool. Not that many Americans come to Syria - getting a visa is very difficult - so I've had the feeling of being someplace cut off in many ways from the western world. You can't assume that anyone - shopkeepers, government officials, hotel staff - speaks English, and I'm told that until a year or two ago even Coke was exotic. It's also illegal to convert Syrian pounds into foreign currency, for whatever reason.

Damascus seems to be changing fast, although the Old City is still a trip back into another era - labrynthine streets, centuries-old mosques, throngs of people in covered markets, shops selling everything you can think of. There are also amazing cafes, nargileh bars and even boutique hotels tucked behind unassuming stone doors. Some pictures are below.

Now - although I was scooped by Yat - I'm off to Beirut to join our team covering the conflict. My long-awaited Kilimanjaro climb is off (I was going to hold Yat and Peter up anyway) but my colleagues in Israel and Lebanon have also had vacations and trips home cancelled for this story, so I can't complain too much. It's the nature of the job. Who knows how long I'll be there; the one thing that seems certain is that this thing shows no signs of ending quickly, or smoothly.