I confess that this trip has started in a
fog for me. Poor sleeping on the planes, along with a ten-hour layover in London’s Heathrow airport had me arriving to Damascus fairly wiped. We reached our hotel at 6 AM, after a largely sleepless night that had followed another night spent in a plane seat. We were given four hours to clean up, eat up, and rest up. Then our day began.
Damascus is a city of 7 million permanent residents, along with 2 million “guests”, refugees from the West Bank and from Iraq. As a city of that size and one of the major centers of the Arab Middle East (along with Cairo and Istanbul), one could spend a week touring Damascus’ sights—we had one day!