Damascus spring.

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The temperature’s crept past 90 and there’s a blanket of haze smothering Damascus. Summer’s arrived with a wallop. The days are long, weary slogs; in the morning, it feels like I’ve taken twelve rounds of body blows and a few 2x4’s across the back. Around the hotel - its courtyard draped with ivy, the birds twittering in their cages - there are bodies littered in the shade. The Japanese couple sharing my room is putting in 12-hour shifts in bed, and the room’s beginning to smell like feet and stale air. At night they spend a full 20 minutes brushing their teeth - I’ve ticked off the time on the wall clock - but whether this is heat-inspired dementia or a new hygienic craze in Harajuku, I can’t rightfully say.

I spend a few afternoons beating the heat inside the Old City’s cafés, applying my usual measuring stick to a city’s worth. These aren’t the fluorescent-lit, male-only preserves that abound in the Middle East - dice rattling across the backgammon boards, bespectacled old men hugging their argileh pipes - and they’re not the charmless, overpriced, Western-style knock-offs of other capitals. There’s exposed brickwork and towering archways and wooden rafters covered in crawling ivy. On the walls are colorful woven rugs, or paintings steeped in the mystique of the Orient without resorting to the clichés of tourist kitsch (“Man Brandishes Scimitar Atop Camel”; “Woman Carries Something on Her Head”). The clientele is young, and if not altogether hip, at least straining in that direction. Pretty girls - their faces smeared with make-up, the hair tumbling down to their shoulders - eye a table of guys nearby. Young couples stroke each other’s arms and make little cooing noises across the table.

To see the sexes mixing so freely here in Damascus has caught me off-guard - but then, it’s been a humbling week. I’ve been busily weighing my expectations of the city - a cross, perhaps, between Old Cairo and Kabul - against the modern, secular town that’s greeted me. I’d expected bearded clerics breathing fire on every street corner, or women draped in coal-black chadors, or the Morality Police confiscating “Yanni: Live at the Acropolis” and “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” and other heathen hits from the West.

Wael, a local CouchSurfer, is enjoying my surprise. But it’s nothing new for a guy who’s used to entertaining foreigners “People come here and expect hijabs and big beards,” he says. “Damascus is more modern than Cairo, or Amman. No one tells the girls what to wear. I had a CouchSurfer come here once, she asked if she could sit at a café with a guy!”

“Ha ha,” I say, noting the preposterous lilt in his voice, and ignoring the fact that, just days ago, meeting a female CouchSurfer in the Old City, I asked if it was okay for us to hug or shake hands.

He takes me one evening to Kassioun, the mountain whose gentle slopes rise over the city. Near the top there’s a stretch of restaurants and cafés perched along the edge, and half of Damascus seems to have made its way here to take in the hazy sunset. Families stroll on the promenade. Young couples sit on the hoods of parked cars, or on rocky outcrops jutting from the mountainside. They lock hands and share their argileh in the dwindling daylight, watching the lights of the city flicker to life. Guys are selling coffee and tea from the backs of their minivans, where full-service espresso machines hiss and steam.

Wael spends a few afternoons showing me around the city. There are new mosques being built, and new shopping malls offering the latest in high-end designer duds - a major triumph for Damascenes. For years stylish, well-heeled Syrians would cross the border to do their shopping in Beirut - at under three hours’ driving time, an easy weekend getaway. But after the relationship between the two countries soured in 2005, with high-ranking Syrian officials implicated in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, Syrians - their intelligence apparatus, their army, and even their shoppers - were given an unceremonious boot from Beirut. Now these ritzy malls are hoping to jumpstart Syria’s own sluggish economy - not to mention sating the stylish Damascenes and their endless material yearnings.

At a café I flip through a glossy magazine that seems to be nothing but filler: page after page of splashy ads - Swiss watches, French perfumes, Italian shoes - and snapshots of local nightlife. Men grimacing into the camera with their slightly crooked neckties. Women in gaudy, beaded gowns, their hair immaculately coiffured, their faces so painfully smoothed and tucked that you wonder if UNESCO had a hand in the restoration. This isn’t your typical Syrian society rag, though. In fact, Wael explains that most of the featured couples aren’t showbiz luminaries or even camera-hungry B-listers - they’re average Damascenes, shelling out S£1,000 - or twenty US bucks - to have their pictures included. Whenever a new issue hits the stands, these ersatz celebs flock to see themselves staring back with pale complexions and shell-shocked eyes.

Not surprisingly, the idea for the magazine was a Lebanese import. But then, it’s not always easy to tell where one country ends and the other begins. The very idea of a Lebanese state is, after all, a relatively recent one - some deft political half a century ago. “What is Lebanon?” asks Amr, another local CouchSurfer. “Lebanese food, Lebanese music, Lebanese language - this all comes from Syria.” The country’s failed politics, he suspects, is a sign that it never should’ve left the Syrian fold to begin with.

But I suggest he’s being unfair - always ready, it seems, to go to bat for the luckless Lebanese. In the Arab world especially, where borders were typically drawn up at the tip of a European’s pen, most countries are leaps of faith to begin with. Looked at another way: three or four or five generations later, having inherited this great big mess, why shouldn’t the Lebanese be proud that it’s their mess all the same?

He clucks his tongue and shakes his head, not trying to hide his bitterness about the falling out between the two countries. Fiercely proud of his Syrian roots, it pained him to see the demonstrations on the streets of Beirut two years ago. “There were a million people marching, saying, ‘All Syrians are assholes, all Syrians are assholes,’” he says. “And this is going out to the whole world. Millions of Arabs are watching this.” No one bothered distinguishing between the Assads and the Amrs, just as no one took pains to point out, as he notes, that Syria lost thousands of soldiers “stopping their civil war.”

We’re sitting on a park bench with the boughs of a tree bending over us, finishing two cups of ice cream. It’s late in the day; mothers are chattering away on the benches nearby, now and then looking up to keep an eye on the kids scooting across the playground. It’s a scene just a shade removed from any American city. Then the soaring cries of the muezzin - “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!” - fill the park, and a pair of soldiers in crisp khakis walk by, giving us wary looks.

Amr waits for them to pass and continues. “People talk about Assad like he is Hussein,” he says. “But he is not like that, at all. And the country is much better than it was under his father. Much.” He points to the rusting satellite dishes on a nearby apartment block. “Ten years ago, there was no satellite television. And you could not talk about the government. If you said anything about the president, you might disappear for three, four years.”

Of course, he understands how far his country has to go. Journalism in Syria is risky business, and the government still takes criticism about as well as a two-year-old takes cough syrup. For years Amr kept a blog, a small soapbox to talk about his life and his country. But the technical challenges became too big a hurdle. “You could not access the blog in Syria. You had to re-route it through an ISP address in Jordan, or Saudi Arabia. Everyone is trying to stay ahead of the government. But what is the point of having a blog that I can’t even access in my own country?”

Still, the situation is less grim than it was a few years ago, and Amr hopes that Assad will follow through on his countless promises of reform. During the brief, hopeful months of the “Damascus Spring,” with the elder Assad finally laid to rest and a youthful new president in power, Syrians had hopes that change was in the air. But while the hope was short-lived - Bashar quickly clamped down on the media and put tight restrictions on the Internet - it hasn’t entirely died. “If you listen to the American media, Syria and Iran are like Trinidad and Tobago,” he points out. “But we are a modern, secular country. And we are going to get better. We must.”

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