Palmyra

Amman, Jordan

 

Thursday morning I was up at a decent hour to explore the ruins of Palmyra. Even though the previous night I had turned down the motorcycle offer, I still got a ride on a motorcycle to the ruins themselves just a few minutes away. Basically on the outskirts of town, the ruins are free to explore and concentrated over a roughly 1 square kilometer area, with just a few ruins further away.

 

I don't think I've ever really seen any ruins of cities before, other then the odd individual building, so seeing something the size of Palmyra was new to me. You can get a basic idea of the layout of the old city because the columns that would have lined "Main St", per say, are still somewhat standing and you can easily make out the roads path. Along the street are ruins in varying degrees of decay from a very well restored amphitheater to basic rubble. Wandering through the desert you get a sense of awe of just how old some of this stuff is.

 

Sadly, since Palmyra is predominantly a tourist town, the vendors are present right at the unofficial entrance to the ruins. They aren't overly pushy, but the fact that you sort of have to "run the gauntlet" is sort of annoying. Coupled with the endless sales pitches to purchase 10 packs of postcards from the kids makes for rather tiring introduction to the ruins. That said, since I was thirsty, I did entertain one offer for tea from one of the vendors so I guess I can't complain to much.

 

Further down the main street, essentially at the other end of the ruins, is probably the only house that is actually in the ruins and not in the town of Palmyra itself. It's sort of a rundown clay/brick/plaster square dwelling and I doubt the family that lives there is in the upper tax bracket because the scene just spells poverty. The mother and at least two kids wander the ruins trying to sell some handicrafts and postcards. They sort of follow you along for a bit since they don't really have a table setup like the other vendors. After about the 10th "No thank you", they switch tactics and the kids just start asking for "Money please, Mister, money please." When you say, "Sorry, but no", then it goes to "Pen please, Mister, pen please"... The pattern repeats itself with "paper" and finally "gum". It's kind of sad but at the same time I can't go around giving pens and chewing gum to every kid in Syria. The family eventually moves on and I'm left to explore the rest of the ruins.

 

Probably the most ironic thing I came across in the ruins was a portable toilet station which is most likely the best toilet in all of Syria. Normally I wouldn't write up much about a toilet, after all you spend half your time in the "hole in the ground" type in Syria, but at Palmyra, they've trucked in a trailer that has about 8 toilets in it, all spotlessly clean, fresh smelling and with plants inside. Not to mention that all the toilets are of the western design. Amazing! And this is in the middle of the eastern Syrian desert. Even the toilets in the hotel I was staying weren't half as nice. The one catch, of course, is that you have to pay for the toilets. There was a basic of loose change out front and when I asked how much it cost, the kid on duty said "50", which is 50 Syrian Pounds, or about 1 US dollar, which in Syrian is a ton of money. I balked at that price and turned to walk away when he said "Ok 25", still too much I thought. Finally he just said "What do you have?". Other then bills, I only had 5 Syrian Pounds in change, which he gladly accepted and let me in. That's a decent 90% reduction. I suspect there probably wasn't a real payment for use of the facilities but at 5 Pounds I wasn't going to complain, and hey they were so clean!

 

After watching the sunset over the ruins, I headed back to the hotel to drop off some stuff and then took a stroll through the town of Palmyra itself. The town is actually bigger then one thinks, but there really isn't much there for a tourist other then the ruins. As I walked down the main street, getting further from the "tourist area", the pleas for money from the seemingly endless stream of street kids grew. At one point, about a dozen of them insisted that I stop and sit with them, even pulling on my jacket and blocking my path. As much as I wanted to sit and entertain them, I knew they only had one thing on their mind and as they saw I wasn't going to leave, the pleas for "money and gum" started. Most gave up after a few minutes, but one kid followed me for about 5 minutes before giving up. It's just an awkward position to be in because you know that you can easily give the kid 10-20 Pounds (less then fifty cents), but if you do then he'll run back to his friends and then you'll be a marked man.

As I turned around near the end of the street I made the unfortunate mistake of getting a chocolate bar at a local corner store. Another kid saw me make the purchase and saw the salesman hand me my change back, which I just stashed in my pocket. This kid followed me on his bicycle for probably 10 minutes, constantly pointing at either my pocket or his pocket when he asked for money and I said "No". He too eventually gave up but I made sure to not eat the chocolate bar until I was clear of all the kids.

 

For dinner I went to the second restaurant in town, the Spring Restaurant. I'd passed this place several times before and was kind of turned off by the fact that the place was empty, the atmosphere was really dead (open cement building, fluorescent lighting, no crowds) and the waiter out front was rather aggressive with his "Hello's". That said, I had already eating across the street at the "Pancake House" the night before so I figured I should at least check out the "other" restaurant in town.

 

Turns out the overly aggressive waiter, also named Mohammad, is the restaurant owner and/or operator and a really nice guy once you get past his rather in your face greeting. He cooked me up a spaghetti dinner and we just chilled at an outside table, talking about life, Palmyra and just about everything else. It wasn't long until another lone traveler walked by named Julian, from Germany, who joined Mohammad and I for dinner. Julian and I hit it off and the three of us just enjoyed relaxing outside in the cool night.

 

Just as we're finishing up dinner, who walks by but Katharine and Eddie, the Australian couple that I met in Aleppo and then saw again in Hama. The travelers circuit is indeed small and they joined us for tea. Rounding out the table was Tayser, then young guy who I had helped the earlier night write a love letter to some girl in Georgia. It quickly became apparent that Tayser and Mohammad need to work on their western style greetings of tourist passerby's, because the in your face technique they were employing just doesn't cut it.

 

Maybe it's a cultural thing, but I've noticed that in the Middle East it's very common to speak over top of someone else. In the west we'd call that being interrupted, but here I just think it's part of the custom because someone is always interjecting or starts speaking before the other person has finished. This is particularly confusing when both are speaking rather broken English, because it's already hard to follow one of them, let alone two of them talking over each other. Now imagine they are both trying to say "Hello, where are you from?" in broken English, over top of each other, to each passerby and you get the idea why the restaurant was probably empty. Oh, and it doesn't help that Mohammad knows the basic greetings in about a dozen languages, so if what he thinks is a Spanish person walking past, then he tries his Spanish, a German he tries German, an Asian, well he just picks an Asian language that he knows. All very entertaining if you're already sitting at the table watching this happen, but rather unnerving if you're the passerby. I tried to pass on some western etiquette techniques that might help him actually land a customer, but I doubt anything that I said stuck. Too bad, because it's a great place to eat one you get past the greeting.

 

At one point, I asked Mohammad if it would be ok if I went across the street to get a sweet pancake for desert to bring back to eat. Normally the Spring restaurant offers pancakes themselves, but I guess since this was the off season they didn't have any batter made. Initially Mohammad didn't seem to mind if I went over there, but he kept asking me what I wanted. At one point I realized that he was actually going back to his kitchen and was making pancakes for us. Score! The first batch was decent, with lemon and sugar. Then the second batch was your basic chocolate pancake/crepe. Julian then asked for a banana chocolate one to which Mohammad happily obliged. Only one small catch... He had no bananas but he quickly hoped on his bicycle, peddled down the street, picked up some bananas, peddled back and minutes later we had out banana chocolate crepe! This went one for the next hour or so and I have to say, that for possibly one of the first times in my life, I was over full from crepes....

 

Mohammad is either a really, really nice guy, a poor business man, or genuinely just enjoyed the company of Julian and I because after about a half dozen cups of tea each, 6-8 pancakes and the spaghetti, I think I paid the equivalent of around 2$US, or about 110 SP.

 

Julian and I head back to my hostel for some tea with the other Mohammad, but he's not his usual lively self and with no other guests the hostel is rather quiet. Presumably a friend of Mohammad's is in the lobby and tries to have a conversation with Julian and I, but he only speaks Arabic and Mohammad is all that attentive when it comes to being a translator, so the conversation is somewhat one side (in Arabic). Sometimes I just don't know what to say to someone who is clearly trying to communicate with me, but I don't understand a single word they are saying and either they don't care, or don't understand that I don't understand because in most cases (and this has happened before), they just keep speaking. You can only fake laugh and smile for so long before it gets a little tiring trying to follow along. Eventually, he either finishes what he wanted to say, or just gives up trying to communicate with me and heads out. With no one else left in the hotel, Julian heads out as well and I head up to bed with the plan to head to Damascus the following day.

 

Kenny