Arrival

Last Friday, July 4th 2008, I left my home at 5am to take a morning flight to from Dublin Airport to Hungary. A few hours later I landed in Budapest, where I had a twelve hour layover, so I went into the city to wander around for the afternoon. That evening I returned to the airport for my connecting flight to Damascus. I touched down in the Syrian Arab Republic in the early hours of Saturday morning, July 5th, and arrived at the As-Salaam Hotel in central Damascus at around 5am.

I’m planning to be here for at least 6 months – and probably more like 2 years – in order to learn some Arabic and get to know a little about Arabic culture. Why would I do such a thing? A lot of people I know in Ireland don’t seem to understand why I'm interested in doing this. Why not go to Australia, like everyone else, or travel around Thailand and southeast Asia? All I can say in response is that if you don’t get it now, you’re probably still not going to get it after I explain it to you. It’s a big world out there, and Ireland is very small, and I just want to experience another way of living.

I was pretty lucky with how things worked out for me in those first few hours in Damascus. In the Departures lounge in Budapest airport, I got chatting to a very friendly guy from Holland called Peter, who was on his way to Syria to study Arabic for two months. Peter was to study at NIASD, a Dutch institute in Damascus, and they were sending a car to the airport to pick him up. He said that I could probably get a lift into the city with them. This was great news, as otherwise I would have had to get a taxi into the city, which would meant trying to haggle with the driver to get a decent price. This would have been particularly difficult for me as my Arabic is pretty much non-existent.

Peter’s Arabic is pretty good as this is his second time here – he also studied at NIASD last summer – and he has also been doing an Arabic course in university in Holland for the past year. It was great to run into him, and it made it a lot less daunting to land in a totally unfamiliar environment where I didn’t speak the language, and to then have to try to make my way through customs and immigration.

Along for the ride into central Damascus was another Dutch student and a few Arab guys. At the end of the journey, I had a good chat with two of the Syrians, both of whom were Kurdish, and I agreed to meet up with one of them for a language exchange at some point. Then I was dropped to my hotel where a very sleepy receptionist – who I would later know as Zubair, from Tunisia – had me checked into my room by 5am. After the previous 24 sleepless hours of travel, I turned on the air conditioning, turned off my brain, and didn’t leave the room until around 8pm the following evening.