Mid-Mac

Damascus, Syria

 

Sunday morning and my head is pounding. The stomach is doing much better, but now I've got a bitching headache and I'm not happy. In all my life I've rarely gotten sick so when I do get it, I'm not really all that prepared to deal with it. Apparently, my "grump" factor goes up exponentially and my energy level plummets, much to enjoyment of others I'm sure. Around noon I manage to crawl out of bed just long enough to walk down the street to little corner store to get some water and yogurt, thinking that maybe some of the headache is just from plain old dehydration. I down the yogurt and water, then head back to bed, which seemed to help because by around 4pm I'm orders of magnitude better.

 

Bramwen is on a mission to find some newsstand that offers foreign (read: English) newspapers and she's been told that there is one about 20-30 minutes away from the hostel, so off we head. We don't have much of a problem getting to the area of where the newsstand is supposed to be, but we can't quite pinpoint exactly where we are on the map. Our first attempt at getting directions got us closer, but the directions seemed a little off in my navigational eyes. (Had we have followed them all the way, we' d have gone in the wrong direction at the end...) As the three of us our standing at a rather major intersection trying to figure out which intersection it is on the map, two school girls come up to offer us some help.

 

In an attempt to just get us re-oriented, we ask directions to the British Embassy, since from there we could easily find the newsstand. Well, it turns out that the embassy was just up the road from us, the intersection was actually the one we were looking for and low and behold, guess what's across the street... A newsstand, which English newspapers. And literally it was just a newsstand on the sidewalk, not some big magazine store or anything like that... Go Lonely Planet!

 

With our English newspaper in and, we walked back towards the center of town, passing through the main city park for Aleppo, which in the non-winter months is probably quite nice with water fountains and what not. At this time of year, the water fountains aren't exactly running at 100% pressure and there's just a general sense of "uh, I guess winter is coming", as you walk through the park. (Though strangely, they had a few open cotton-candy stalls, each with a very circus-oriented decor to them... Seemed a little out of place in Aleppo, Syria, but that pales in comparison to all the other "Western-contrasts" one sees.)

 

Daily readers might remember that the previous night we feasted at Pizza House, a Syrian knockoff of Pizza Hut, well on Sunday night we decided to hit another Western knockoff restaurant... Mid-Mac. It doesn't take a PhD to recognize that Mid-Mac is a knockoff of McDonalds, but just in case it did take you 5 years to pass Calculus, the golden-arch logo that is plastered everywhere should pretty much tell you everything you need to know.

 

Since Mid-Mac has a great outdoor seating area and honestly, I did want to try it, the three of us grabbed a table outside and checked out the menu. Turns out Mid-Mac is going upscale from it's Western counterpart. The menu was surprisingly diverse with just about anything you wanted on it, though sadly the "burgers and fries" were buried near the bottom and didn't look all that special. Sadly, none of us ended up ordering anything that resembled what you would find at McDonalds and for all the visual comparisons between the two, the food wasn't even close to the same. And, while not ashamed to admit on, on that night, I would have actually preferred to have had the Western version... Ah! You gasp... Well, readers, after weeks and weeks of similar food in the Middle East, sometimes you just crave a box of chicken nuggets and fries, something I'm hoping I'll be able to get in Amman, Jordan in the next few days.... Sorry.

 

After dinner, we just headed back to the dorm and chilled out with the other travelers in the lounge. By now I was just about back to feeling normal again. At least the stomach and head were no longer hurting... (And remember, my ego was still inflated thanks to my boy-band experience a few days earlier, so I always had that to cheer me up...)

Kenny