scenes from...

the train to Lattakia: we leave Damascus mid-afternoon for a 4.5 hour ride to Lattakia (on the Mediterranean coast). this is before daylight savings, so there is only daylight for the first half of the trip. the train is quite comfortable, but in spite of our books, music, etc. we start to get pretty bored once it’s dark. at least, that’s the only explanation we can come up with for why we get off the train at Jebleh – about 30 minutes short of Lattakia. we don’t actually know immediately that we’re in Jebleh; quite a few people in our car get off and subconsciously we are apparently done with the train, so we get off too, only to discover, as soon as the train pulls away, that we aren’t in Lattakia. fortunately, some friendly folk immediately guess that we aren’t where we meant to be and offer to drive us to the service taxi station where we get a ride the rest of the way to Lattakia.

a grocery store in Lattakia: after dinner, we stop at this store to buy some water and perhaps a bottle of wine. the owner’s grandson (probably 10 or 11 years old) takes Ethan behind the counter for a better look at the alcohol in stock. there is an extended conversation between them about the particular wine brands that the store carries, and Ethan settles on a red from Tawfiq wineries, a Syrian line. he pays the boy approximately $2.50 and asks if they can remove the cork there. the boy retrieves a bottle opener and goes to work (this is short-lived, as the bottle turns out to have a plastic twist-off cork). transaction complete, we head back to our hotel, twist off the cork, and try just one sip of what should probably just be labeled vinegar.

qala'at marqab: this is an enormous castle overlooking the Mediterranean. one end of it is fairly intact; the other end is primarily a walled area full of collapsed stones, trees, wildflowers, etc. after wandering around the main part, we walk along the wall out to the far end. this is easy, but then we continue on a grassy path around towards the back of the castle. after a while, this path gets less and less clear, and we start to realize just how big this castle is. it's late enough in the afternoon that we decide it might be best to try to cut straight across the middle back to the entrance instead of continuing all the way around the edge. it's a great plan, except that cutting across the middle means blazing our own trail through tall grasses and shrubs (some a bit thorny) and over lots of shaky rock piles and low walls. it takes about 20 minutes, but we manage to get across with only the tiniest of scratches to show for our efforts. just as we’re finally back on a real path, Ethan’s mobile rings. it's our Egyptian-American friend who lives in Damascus calling to ask how to season the rice for sushi.

we just look that good?

yesterday afternoon, we were in a cafe enjoying some food and wireless internet (we were downloading the new U2 album, if you must know) when a photographer came over and asked if he could take our picture for a magazine. this isn't exactly a big deal; there are often "society" pages in local magazines that have lots of pictures of people sitting in popular restaurants, etc. so he took our picture, showed it to us to make sure we approved, wrote down our first names, and left.

this is only remarkable because the same photographer took our picture for a magazine at precisely the same table at that cafe last week.

then again (post from the dark)

today. get up and do things requiring lights on until noon.

noon. lights remain on. aha! perhaps today will be a day of light! it's possible; there was no outage yesterday.

1 pm. begin load of laundry since it turns out there was no reason not to start one this morning.

4 pm. lights off.

laundry.is.ten.minutes.from.finishing.

photos...or not

have been trying for the last several weeks to post photos here, but apparently the ongoing clash between blogger and local server will not allow this, at least for the time being.

so, what you would have seen...

1. the baron hotel in aleppo. there are a few on flickr, but we have more - especially good ones of the bar, which is stocked with bunches of vintage-y bar paraphernalia.

2. strawberries! it's strawberry season here, and we've been eating a lot of them. unfortunately, the coming of the strawberries apparently signals the end of avocado season. we had been having guacamole just about every day, but when we tried to restock on avocados last week, the price had doubled.

3. our apartment. when we moved in (some five months ago now), we got a few questions from friends and family about where we were living. don't think we ever really answered those questions. we're on the first floor of our building; we have two salons/receptions, bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen with balcony (covered, fortunately, as the clothesline is out there, and it's been raining a lot recently). high ceilings, tile floors. we're about a two minute walk from a huge market area where we get most of our produce. it's pretty common anywhere in the city for the electricity to go out from time to time, but they've recently instituted rolling blackouts, so our power is out every day from noon to 2 pm. it's really not that big a deal most of the time; fully-charged laptop battery lasts almost two hours, gas stove still works, and there's plenty of water for two hours (all water in the apartment runs from a tank above the kitchen, which is filled from a tank on the roof of the building, so we can go for a while without a pump running). it can get a little miserable on really cold/dark days when we can't use our space heaters and we're likely to keep the window shades closed to keep the cold out. but otherwise, the only thing we really have to plan around the outage is laundry. a full wash cycle takes a little over three hours, so unless we're organized enough to start a load by about 8:30 am (which, frankly, has been almost never here), we either don't start a load until after 2 pm, or we forget, start a load, and it stops in the middle for two hours.

little bit freaky christmas

we found this guy hanging out in the Old City.