Syria

 

After spending time with Suska in Syria we thought we’d ask her to write a ‘guest’ post on the blog. Here’s what she had to say…

I still haven’t quite understood what hit me in the beginning of my one week’s holiday. I had changed my travel plans like a million times before finally setting my mind on going to Aleppo first. After a month in Syria it was a shock, to say the least, to casually enter your own dorm room without knocking only to see more skin than you’ve seen in the entire month in Syria before that. There they were, these two English blokes, with their bare, hairy chests, and legs showing as far high up as the viewer had decency to let her eyes wonder! What an unexpected encounter with your own and a reminder of “back home”.

Adam and Danny they said their names were, and little did I know what kind of adventure I was about to embark upon when shaking their hands and welcoming the opportunity to share a room with them and their travel stories from some of the very same places I had been to a year before. After my blush had settled and my poor heart had got over the shock of seeing nearly-naked bare English butts, the picture started to become clearer. The boys said they were on their way across the world. With bikes. Yummy. Something I always more or less fancied doing. During the next couple of days we kept bumping into each other, first randomly, later in a more planned way in the dormitory in the heart of Aleppo, right around the corner of the famed Baron Hotel, where we, mind you, went for drinks one night.

 

The once casually aired joke of me hopping on the back of their bikes and riding along with them to their next destination became quite real when it was time for them to move on. A girl’s not gonna turn down an offer to race through the deserts of Syria on the backseat of handsome little devils like our boys, now, is she? 😉 Especially when the deal includes the never-ending movie quotes from “The Life of Brian” and “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels”, not to mention the jokes and witty lines that hardly bare any resemblance to real English anymore… you all probably know what I mean… 😉

 

Riding to Hama with Adam and Danny turned into a couple of nights there, going to the Krac de Chevalier (the world’s finest crusader castle that made Adam wet his pants – in figurative speech) with them, and eventually catching a ride down to Damascus, again, with them three days earlier than I had planned – in other words, making me re-plan my whole trip. And why? I think the answer is simpler than I realised before myself. It would have been just too hard to say good-bye, and as long as I had days on me, I could keep on postponing the eventually unavoidable. Letting them leave without me, not waiting anymore for the que from Danny to say it’s ok to jump on; not tying my scarf around my head to keep the wind and sand off of my hair (and to make me look like a proper Muslim wife); not having Adam pissing himself laughing at my quirky interests in motorbikes and aeroplanes, and unfortunate mistakes in the use of English language (use your own imagination to figure out what I might be referring to…) – no, the whole concept seems inconceivable at the moment. They’ve been here to keep guard on me as my brothers, husbands, dads, uncles (as women sometimes need to be in these countries) and they’ve done a great job. They have welcomed into their team in a way I never expected, and have stolen a piece of my heart to take with them around the world.

 

The voyage one normally sees only in the movies is about to come to a sudden halt, for the moment at least (one never knows what the future holds), but until the dream ends, there will still be a couple of mezze-hunts to do, a couple of pictures of mosques to take, and couple of jokes to joke around before the night falls…

 

Well, the boys seem to be finished with their bikes, and my hands are in a desperate need of some moisturizer. Plus, I think it’s time for wor lass to get the mash on. Again. Girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. Syrian law. And the way of life with Adam and Danny. 😉

 

Love,

“Tweacle”

 

P.S. If you’ve got problems of understanding what I was trying to say, ask these shandy drinking soft southern bastards, who have screwed up my English permanently – there’s no guarantee that the explanation would be any clearer, though! ;D

 

 

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