visa (definitely not american express) to haleb

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Monday was a very long but eventful day of travel, hanging out at the border, and talking with lots of friendly syrians. We started the day with an excellent breakfast quesadilla-type things that seems popular in both Lebanon and Syria. It's just melted cheese in a fresh flat bread, made on a big circular grill-type thing. Then our hotel owner talked us out of trying to see sites on our way to the border at Damascus, which turned out to be a very good thing. So we set out in a minibus to Homs, just a bit north of the border in Syria. The drive through the Bekaa Valley was really interesting - the road is lined with little towns with buildings in various stages of building and decline - everything is made out of cement and stone, and there are a lot of unfinished buildings that we are trying to figure out - are they in the process of being built, or abandoned?

We got to the border very quickly and learned it would take until 4 or 5pm to get our visa (it was only about 11:30), so that wasn't great news but wasn't unexpected. Meanwhile, we watched lots of folks from Europe fly right through. Everyone was very nice, though, and after a while we headed outside to sit in the sun. There were tons of vans full of syrians crossing over the border into lebanon, piled really really high with stuff (ryan kept calling them syrian travel pods which kept cracking me up after our own trael pod-packing adventure) and lots of those families were also waiting around. We started to get pretty hungry around 2pm, so a nice ice-cream guy helped us buy sandwiches from another guy who was driving back and forth on a motorcycle to bring people things. Then one of the border police guys brought us coffee and everyone started chatting with us. I talked for a long time with a woman next to me who only spoke arabic, but we had a great time talking anyway, and figured out lots of things about each other. Then her husband started chatting with us too and we all took photos and exchanged phone numbers before we left. Around 5pm, we finally got our visas and started the trek northwards to Allepo, called Haleb by the locals.

After crossing the border, we unfortunately picked a taxi driver who said he would take us to Haleb, but instead tried to bamboozle us into staying at his house for the night. We drove for about 5 mintues before he said he needed to stop for coffee and then drove a short ways to what turned out to be his house, where he gave us really good Turkish coffee and his wife brought us out a big spread of food, and only after much insisting on our part eventually drove us to the bus station in Homs to head up to Haleb. Once in Haleb we showed up at the Tourist Hotel, which we had tried to call ahead, but never answered. By now then it was about 8pm and we were really tired and soooo glad when they had a room for us, complete with a rain shower (heaven). We had a really interesting talk with the hotel manager, who is Kurdish and is seriously the only person either of us has met traveling that had something nice to say about George Bush. He went on at some length about how good Bush and his father had been to the Kurds, and how they had wished he could stay for a thrid term.

Then we decided to head to the Hotel Baron bar, which is an historic hotel, for a drink after the long and stressful day. We got there and it was this funny ex-pat type place, full of cigar smoke and mostly british tourists. At the hotel, we booked a tour to see the nearby sites on Wednesday - a church called Qala'at Samaan and the Dead Cities, which are ruins of early christian cities - which you can only get to by private car. We also learned some more arabic, including "jouzey" which is husband and "martee" which is wife, and "sabah al kher" which means good morning - from the very nice Mr. Walid, who made it seem like he himself would be giving the tour, but later pulled a small switcheroo.

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