Today was a day of extremes. Our low points unfortunately overshadowed the high. This morning we set out to find the Arabic school we plan on going to. Map in hand, we ventured out onto the streets of Damascus with the directions the school had given us. After asking about 7 different people we were still no where closer, every suggestion seemed to be indicating for us to make a left hand turn. We managed to say things and quickly realized we had absolutely no idea what they were saying to us in return. We were relying on a lot of gesturing and charades to guide us to no avail.
Deflated, we set off back towards our hotel and popped into a soap store to look for some laundry soap. The shopkeeper Ali spoke a little English, invited us to join him for some tea, two cups each to be precise. After the tea, pinching my cheeks and giving Rob kiss on the cheek, we left Ali’s shop with high spirits and 3 boxes of laundry soap for free. While walking along we also came across a great food shop and had some fantastic hummus and kebabs, the best meal of our trip all for a few dollars.
When we returned to the pension, we used the owner’s cell phone to try to call the teacher, no answer. He then wrote out the address we had in Arabic so we could show it to a taxi, the ride would only cost us about 2 dollars so we figured it was worth saving us from the long walk. In our directions, it says the school is next to a mosque, fair enough but nearly everybody asked us if is the Zainul Abidan Mosque or Zeinul Abidan Mosque… we have no idea. So he took us back to the area that we circled around earlier in the day and we spent a few more hours circling around and left again pretty devastated. We thought to make the trip worth it to stop by a phone shop that we went to earlier who had good prices only to find it closed.
We were quite upset walking home….again. Hopefully we will have better luck tomorrow, we plan to go first thing in the morning to buy a phone. We will try to get the school again and if not, we have some leads in Aleppo too. Either way, I hope that by next week we will have everything in order!
I think you have hard day , but I know you are a good person , I hope you live in graet time , syria good plase to visit , I miss you & rub , you know we lived to gither like brothers , I hope see you agen .