week one: cairo eat your heart out

so i realize the name of this blog no longer applies, but for the sake of continuity i will just use this same website to update anyone on my little excursion to syria. it is far too difficult to email/facebook everyone and sending mail is uber expensive, so read this if you like

so after what i would call a long and arduous trip from akron to damascus, we finally arrived here a few days ago...i won't fill in all the details since that would take literally pages but here are the highlights of the trek here:
-5 hour delay of flight from NYC to Rome
-horribly uncomfortable flight to Rome followed by a 10 hour layover there which may yet prove to be the hottest day of my life, but Rome was still excellent
-overnight flight to Beirut (the redeye if you will). arrive to beirut 2 am and pray our baggage made it (affirmative). catch a taxi (subsequently get horribly ripped off despite my negotiating efforts. dropped off at the syrian border (sounds great to most of you i'm sure) at 4 am and wait there for about 6 hours to get our visa into the country...all in all horrible 48 hours of travel but definitely interesting, no doubt about that

anyway, we then caught a taxi into damascus (not ripped off this time, ha!) and met ryan's friend Fuad who subsequently found us an awesome room in a house in about 2 hours and got our cell phones working...honestly without him ryan and i would probably be dead and/or homeless by this point, so thank you to him...but our room is on the bottom floor and we share the 3 story house with 2 german girls, 2 syrian/italian dudes, 1 hungarian girl, 1 syrian, and one saudi/syrian for the time being...and honestly all of them are incredibly nice and have helped us a great deal already in the last few days, so we definitely lucked out

at any rate, ryan and i mulled over the decision to attend the university and decided against it since we hadn't heard very many good things about the program. so instead we are hiring private tutors which ought to be much better. probably 2 hours a day with them (only 8 bucks an hour) one-on-one which is more helpful than 4 hours in a class of 20, then studying and practicing at the stores and in the streets here...ultimately i think its the best decision, and in fact i just had my first lesson with bashir, a dude from Chad (i'm certain more than half of you reading this have no idea where that is...look it up) who speaks no english...a challenge? yes. but just after my first lesson i could tell it would be incredibly helpful

all in all, so far, so good. damasacus is incredibly cool and i suggest you all make it here someday...and no, it isn't a scary, terrorist laden country crawling with long-bearded extremist arabs. in fact, i'm probably one of the few with a full-fledged beard around here because i'm lazy...but the barbers here will also shave my face for next to nothing, so consider that on my list of things to do. i am tired of the paragraph form though, so i'll end this in my typical list fashion:

-of all the middle eastern cities i have been to (capitals and other cities, maybe 10-15), damascus is the by far the cleanest (hence the title "cairo eat your heart out"...honestly, cairo, you should follow damascus' example, its almost pristine)

-the first thing ryan and i noticed were the highways are perfectly paved...if only our first world country could follow this example

-i feel safer here than i EVER have in columbus...or downtown akron for that matter...ever

-the weather here is hot with a capital H...during the day its pretty unbearable outside, though its not too humid so it could be worse...in the evening, however, the weather becomes incredibly mild and perfect...which is great for our house because the equivalent of our "living room" is an open air courtyard and it's awesome

-this blog will not be nearly as in depth as the one from cairo, if you read that one. i don't really have as much time to write, and there isn't nearly as much to tell yet, though that may change

-the traffic here is almost as nuts as cairo...though they actually obey traffic lights here (amazing)...also, ryan, fuad and i were pulled over in fuad's car the other day cuz ryan didn't have seatbelt on (neither did i)...no big deal...except the cop that pulled us over was ON FOOT. hard to explain, but we didn't get a ticket, though our pride was dented from being stopped by a cop without a vehicle

-there certainly aren't as many things to take pictures of here, so there may only be a few pictures posted during these next weeks. sorry

-i hope you're all doing well and i hope to hear from you all/see you all at the end of july

fii aman Allah,

todd