My last few days in Damascus were dominated by studying for the final exam, and trying to write my 2000 word essay, in Arabic, about the role of Jesus in Islam and Christianity, actually a process of simplifying and translating an essay I’d written in first year, as finding the sources to write a new essay from scratch in Syria seemed like far more trouble than it was worth. Nevertheless we found time to have plenty of fun in between, including a visit to the Umayyad mosque for the Eid morning prayer, which Sam and Tamsin’s housemate Abdu invited us to, telling us everyone was welcome to attend. Unfortunately he subsequently informed us, at 5.30am the next morning when we arrived at the house, that only Muslims could attend, and that we would have to all ... read more

The morning after our return from Amediyya, despite all falling asleep midway through another BJ fuelled debate, we managed to get up relatively early, and made our way out to negotiate a taxi to take us to Lalish, the monastery and pilgrimage site of the Yezidis. The Kurds were originally Yazidi, though many converted to Islam, and those who are left are often accused of being Satanists amd have been persecuted for their beliefs. They worship a peacock God named Malek Taus, who refused to bow to Adam on God’s command, because when he was created he was told never to bow to anything. The Yazidis see this not as a sign of sinful pride, which prompted Satan not to bow to Adam in the Islamic and Christian traditions, but rather as a sign of his ... read more

In breaking news, Becka and I finally did Krak! After spending two consecutive weekends in Damascus, I finally made it to Krak des Chavaliers, or Quala’at al-Hosn, a place which I had planned to visit on about 5 separate occasions before various other things intervened. The last two weeks have been spent in the city, as last weekend I had an oral presentation on Sunday about globalisation and the mixing of cultures, and so spent a depressing number of hours writing my 10 minute speech, as my rate of writing in Arabic is about 1 minute per hour. On the Friday night Becka and I once again went to a gig with the first Arabic Latin Band, who we had seen at Marmars a few weeks before. It was an amazing concert as it was in ... read more

After living in Syria for over six weeks we finally got round to exploring some more of the country in our holidays last week, when Becka, Everitte and I set off all alone to travel to Palmyra and up the Euphrates to Aleppo. We had had rather a late night the evening before our departure due to meeting up with a couple of English guys we met in Lattakia who turned out to be great company and one of whom, James, worked for a human rights organisation in Serbia and was full of useful information and fascinating stories. We met up with them on Friday night and went to a night of live Latin music at a club called Marmar, where we attempted to dance on the tiny dance floor and choke down the ‘free drink’ ... read more

Getting to Wadi Mujib turned out to be something that should really be attempted with the freedom of a hire car, a fact which we hadn’t realised would be the case when we decided to go from Wadi Rum, rather than heading all the way up to Amman and back down again. After our night in the desert we ended up sleeping most of the bus trip back to Petra, where we arrived to find a taxi driver who said he’d drive us to Wadi Mujib for 80JD! We politely refused and told him we couldn’t afford it, but we were well aware that we had no other real choice of transport to Wadi Mujib from Petra, and in the end we settled on 40JD between us for the two hour drive down to the Dead ... read more