Trip to Palmyra

I was lucky enough have a good friend visit me in Damascus this past week. After spending a few days in Damascus eating as much as possible, we took two days and went to Palmyra. The trip itself was wonderfully uneventful; however, the pre-departure was a nightmare. After spending the whole morning trying to get a decent bus to Palmyra and getting the ‘run-around’ from most every person we met, we finally decided to embrace our comparative wealth (compared to the natives) and rent a car. Most of my foreign friends thought we were totally out of our minds for willingly driving in Syria. Yet, I did not think driving was all that bad here . . . a trip across a mountain pass in the middle of winter is much worse than the traffic here. The major difference is people don’t seem to follow any traffic rules: blind-lane changes with a honk are the norm.

Sadly, I can’t do justice to the historical and archeological ruins of Palmyra. Thankfully, my friend is a MA student in architecture and thus had tons of insight concerning historical site. I have a final Arabic exam looming around the corner so I’m going to rely upon pictures for this post.

UPDATE: I spent 45 mins waiting at an internet cafe for my pictures to upload on to blogger. It was a huge pain. the cafe just switched back from DSL to dial-up for mysterious reasons. Anyway, expect more pictures (and large ones as well) to come. Sorry for the temporary lameness . . . text is much easier to put up on the net.