Standing on the Pillar of St. Simeon

After all the reports I’d heard about Aleppo, most of which were more negative than positive, or at best boiled down to the phrase ‘interesting, not beautiful’, I was not expecting to want to spend a lot of time exploring the city, however I was pleasantly surprised to find Aleppo both interesting and beautiful, and the two days we spent there left me wanting more, and intending to return for a weekend whenever we find the time.

Our friend Sam arrived in Aleppo at the same time as us, so on our arrival into the out of town bus station late in the evening we took a taxi directly to Bab al-Faraj, the cheap hostel district near the Old Town, and checked into a four bed room in the same hostel for just under £5 a night each. It was more than we had been paying elsewhere in Syria, but the room was also considerably nicer, and we ended up staying three nights in the hostel, which was called Qasr al-Andalus, and had friendly staff, clean bathrooms and a lovely big reception area to sit and chill out and talk in the evenings, along with clashing but rather charming sixies décor.

Our first evening we went out to eat at a nearby restaurant which came highly recommended by Sam, who has spent some time in Aleppo, where we managed to dissuade Everitte from ordering lambs' testicles and shared a feast of mezze and mains, including the local speciality, cherry kebabs, which consisted of minced lamb covered in a think, extremely sweet, cherry sauce. It was very rich, but delicious in the extreme, and afterwards, feeling very well fed, we walked to the nearby Baron Hotel, an amazing place which was built 100 years ago to house travellers arriving in style on the Orient Express, and which was patronised by Lawrence of Arabia and Agatha Christie. We sat on the terrace for a drink and ‘got lost’ on the way to the bathroom so we could explore the atmospheric corridors with their old tiled floors and high ceilings.

The next day was spent exploring the Old City, starting in the Umayyad Mosque, the younger brother of Damacus’ Great Mosque by 10 years, where the boys got in for free but Becka and I were required to pay 50SYP for the privilege of donning grim-reaper-esque robes to wear over our already floor length clothes, with pointy hoods which looked comical but failed to completely cover our hair. We spent a pleasant half hour wandering barefoot around the huge courtyard with the cool marble underfoot, before sitting in one of the prayer rooms enjoying the silence, and watching some old men reading the Koran, looking like an old orientalist painting, while Islamic students sat and debated in another corner, their exoticism only heightened by the occasional younger man in jeans and a T-shirt, with the mandatory slicked back hair, looking every inch the modern young Syrian. Unfortunately we decided to take a look at one of the beautifully bound Korans, and were apprehended by a young man who spoke perfect English, who spoke to us on behalf of the older man beside him, and informed us very kindly that even though we had washed our hands we were not allowed to touch the Koran without performing the ritual ablutions, which we had to be taken through by a Muslim, after which the book was taken from us and purified by the older man who then set it reverently back on the shelf.

After leaving the mosque we stopped at a little stall to buy fresh fruit juice, before making our way into the souq, which was a spectacular affair, even more atmospheric and less touristy than the one in Damascus. We spent ages wandering the alleyways, exploring jewellery shops, butchers and tailors, and enjoying the various advertisements and questions directed at us in English, such as ‘Bad quality, expensive price’, and ‘Do you want to spend your money here? No? No one does!’. We paused in our exploration to visit a soup factory and an old mental asylum, a beautiful building full of courtyards and fountains, as the sound of running water was supposed to be soothing for the patients, as was live music which was played to calm them. The atmosphere was very peaceful and the hilariously badly translated signs which explained the ancient medicinal and alternative treatments made it sound like a much nicer place to incarcerated than most modern asylums, not to mention the nightmarish establishments for the insane which would have been around in Europe at a similar time.

In the afternoon we visited Aleppo’s citadel, perched on a hill overlooking the whole city, which was much bigger than I had imagined and took several hours to explore, including time spent sitting and admiring the views over the city. Below the citadel in the open areas around the entrance there were several cafés where we sat to have a drink and admire the castle, and there was also an open air exhibition of photographs by Yann Arthus Bertrand, including some beautiful ones of Syria, which made me want to visit everywhere in the entire world without delay.

On our way back to the souq Becka’s flip-flop broke, which provided us with the perfect excuse to abandon the boys for a couple of hours and go shopping. We started in the shoe area, but couldn’t find leather sandals anywhere, only cheap plastic rubbish, and in the end she bought a pair of cheap plastic sequinned flip-flops which were actually surprisingly pretty, to last her until we got back to Damascus and our friendly deaf sandal man. After this we wandered the jewellery market for a bit, looking at all the gold bling, before making our way into the cheap clothes and bizarre underwear area where we bought ourselves some rather nice eyeliner, and then each bought matching koufiyyas in dark red and white. All in all it was a fairly successful venture, but after haven been woken up early that morning by Becka and Quintin who are scarily awake morning people, I, who am not, was exhausted and went back to the hostel to take a nap before dinner, after our 9 hours solid spent exploring the old town.

In the evening we once again made our way to the Baron, this time for a pre-dinner drink, and there we met some other people from the hostel, one of whom was celebrating her birthday, and gave us all a huge slice of chocolate cake before inviting us out to dinner with her and the rest of the group, all of whom were guests at the hostel. We ended up at the same restaurant we had been to the night before, and this time Everitte could not be prevented from ordering his lambs' testicles, while another American man at our table ordered a dish simple advertised as ‘raw meat’. I steered well clear of the mysterious raw meat, although Quintin and Everitte tried it, however I did try a small piece of the lambs' testicles, which might have been unobjectionable had I not known what I was eating!

On the way back to the hotel several bottles of wine were purchased, and we all sat down in the lobby area to drink wine and chat, before Sam went and got his guitar, and he and Becka started singing. I suppose everybody was making a fair amount of noise, but when I went to bed at about 3am I had no trouble sleeping despite the sounds of laughter and faint voices. However in the morning the middle aged man who seemed to be the hotel manager appeared in our bedroom and said to us ‘You were singing and dancing and drinking in the hotel last night. Why did you do this? How many beers did you drink?’. We explained that we thought that all the guest were at the party and didn’t think that anyone was trying to sleep, and that as several of the staff members has been with us we didn’t think it was a problem, and he said that a French couple had complained to him about the noise (although why they had not asked us to be quiet at the time beats me) and that he was very angry. He left us feeling like naughty school children and then returned 5 minutes later and said ‘You must leave this hotel’. We were all strangely pleased with ourselves as we packed our bags, as none of us had ever been kicked out of a hotel before, let alone a hostel, and it seemed like an achievement to be perversely proud of. I have no idea if he kicked any of the others out or if he simply chose us because we were a group of 5 and therefore easy to blame. One of the guys who had been with us all night, who worked at the hotel came by and we explained that we were leaving and he said ‘Wait, I’ll talk to him’. Five minutes later the irate man came back and told us we could stay ‘but you must drink and sing in your room’ and then patted my on the head and said ‘India, India, are you okay?’ to which I said a bemused yes.

By this point it was fairly late in the morning, and we were in a hurry to get to our next destination, Quala’at Samaan, the site on which Saint Simeon spent nearly 40 years living and preaching on top of a pillar. It is only an hour or so by microbus from Aleppo, but on the way Quintin, who was luckily sitting next to the window, threw up out of the side of the bus. The poor boy was in a bad way, and had serious food poisoning, for which I blame the raw meat, and spent most of the couple of hours in which the rest of us were exploring the beautiful old ruins sitting reading on a bench in the shade.

I think Quala’at Samaan is my favourite of all the many forts we’ve visited, both for the beautiful old ruins and for it’s setting amid green Mediterranean farmland, covered in citrus and olive trees. We spent several hours wandering around the ruins, sunbathing on rocks and admiring the views (and of course I couldn’t resist climbing what is left of St. Simeon’s pillar after years of people chipping away pieces as souvenirs). Once again we had left ourselves with no way of leaving the site and getting back to town to catch the microbus back to the city, but met up with a group of German guys and all shared a service, so once again it all worked out okay, although poor Quentin once again threw up on the way back into Aleppo, where he went straight to bed, remaining there until the next morning. While Quentin, Everitte and I all slept in the afternoon Becka sat and chatted with Rani, a couch-surfer who was working in the hotel in exchange for a place to sleep, and as he was originally from Aleppo he offered to take us on a tour of some of the places we hadn’t had a chance to see.

Sam had left to head back to Damascus and Quintin was dead to the world in between bouts of vomiting in the sink, so we left him to recover and Everitte, Becka and I heading out with Rani to meet a friend of his, who picked us uo in his rather nice new car and played 90s dance music very loudly as he drove us around the new town shouting ‘Have you seen this? Have you sent this? No? You know nothing about Aleppo!’.
He took us on a tour of the New Town, stopping for dinner at a fast food joint ‘Much better than American fast food’ and then asked us ‘Do you want to see some beautiful women?’. He was greatly amused when Everitte immediately said ‘YES!’, so drove us to a café with outdoor seating which he preceded to slow right down and cruise past at about 5 miles an hour, staring out of the window at the customers, before circling the block so we could get a second look. He then said ‘Bad luck, today there are not many beautiful women’, before pulling up alongside a group of young Syrian girls and saying in English ‘Excuse me, where is the Syrian embassy?’, the hysterical nature of which had him and Rani laughing uproariously for 5 minutes straight.
He dropped us off in Al-Jadeida, a beautiful area of Aleppo, much like Straight Street but more extensive, where Rani took us to an amazing antique shop owned by a friend of his, who gave us coffee and told me that a belt I liked cost 7000 SYP (about £100) before realising I wasn’t Syrian (who knows what the tourist price would have been!). Later on he called a couple of friends one of whom owner a very swish café in New Town, and they came and picked us up in the car and drove us to the air-conditioned Starbucks-esque café where we sat drinking very good hot chocolate and smoking nargileh for free at the boss’ table until 1.30am!

The following day was our last in Aleppo, and we decided to see the Dead Cities, a collection of 15 abandoned Byzantine towns between Aleppo and Hama, which Lonely Planet had lead me to believe would be spectacular, before heading back to Damascus that night. We were warned by Rani that the Lonely Planet made them sound better than they were, but decided to see them anyway even though transport there and back seemed like it would be a bit of a nightmare without a car.

This turned out to be the case, and in the end we only made it one city, Serjilla, through a complex combination of taxis and minibuses, where we spent a couple of hours wandering but, as predicted, were not hugely inspired, despite the nice peaceful atmosphere. I found a wild tortoise among the ruins and had fun posing it for arty photographs (poor thing!) and then just as were about to start the long process of getting back to Aleppo we were stopped by a minibus driver who knew where we were staying and offered to take us directly to our door for 800SYP. It was over an hour direct, more like two hours the way we had arrived, so we were surprised and grateful when we managed to bargain him down to 400SYP (just over one pound each) and got into the bus with three other people who, it transpired, lived in Aleppo but had arranged to visit the Dead Cities through our hostel. When we arrived back Rani told us that he had asked the driver to look out for us and give us a lift back, but he had been supposed to take us for free, as he had already been paid for his days driving. We were mildly outraged at the nerve of him, but far from upset as we had nevertheless saved a lot of time and money, and were profoundly grateful to Rani!

We collected our bags, and after a quick dinner of fresh juice and falafels from the street stalls we headed to the bus station to catch our bus back to Damascus. We were able to catch the same coach as Quintin, who left us in Hama, and arrived back in Damascus at about 11pm, tired and very happy to be home!

The last week has been strange because I realised with some horror that I am halfway through my time here already. I’ve waited to have my year abroad for so long, and now it’s flashing by at a ridiculous speed, and there’s so much I want to do, and not enough time to do it all. I don’t feel like my Arabic has improved as much as I’d like, and I really need to get a tutor to practice conversation with, however I was reassured by the exam results which were given to us when we got back from our holiday, as I somehow, without really understanding the text, managed to answer the questions, and my final mark was 49.5 out of 60, which seems respectable, although I’m not sure what the pass mark actually is here. The exam wasn’t multiple choice this time, so there’s less margin of blind luck, but I can’t help feeling I must have got pretty lucky anyway, as I somehow got a better result than Becka, and she is a lot better at speaking Arabic than me, and seems to know more vocabulary too, so our results don’t seem to make much sense.

Last weekend we stayed put in Damascus for the first time in what feels like ages, and attended two parties, a fancy-dress party for Halloween on Thursday night, which was a little surreal, mainly because it was nearly all English students, and felt like being at a university house party in Edinburgh, a not altogether pleasant sensation, and the second Sam’s birthday party, which was far smaller gathering with live guitar music and singing of folk songs by Becka and Sam, and which was also attended by our Oud and calligraphy teacher who played and sang Arabic songs on the Oud. It was lovely despite the cold and rain, and seemed a lot more in keeping with life in Syria, so I felt less like I was in a strange dream, which was nice.

Calligraphy is going well and is very satisfying, especially as today I put together the knowledge of how to write the individual letters of the alphabet, painstakingly practised throughout the course of the last five lessons, and wrote my first sentence. It looks pretty nice, if I say so myself!

In disturbing news we have skipped autumn here, and gone straight from lovely Mediterranean summer to freezing, rainy, dark Scottish winter. It’s been a horrible shock to the system. Last week we were lying in the sun on the terrace and now I’m too cold to sleep at night and it’s dark at 5pm and raining incessantly. I’m a little worried as to how we’ll cope if it gets any colder.

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