On my way to Jordan soon

I've gotta say, the seasoning and variety of food in the restaurants here in Damascus doesn't seem as good as the food was in Aleppo. Or perhaps I just can't find the right places to eat in this town, as restaurants in general do seem scarce in my area of the city, and I've been scrounging mostly from street-side shwarma stands. There is still however an abundance of fresh fruit like grapes, pomegranites, figs, apples, etc., great pistachios and olives, and wonderful tomatoes - it's the harvesting season for tomatoes around here, so there are smashed tomatoes everywhere on the highways where the boxes fall off the trucks. Trucks are unfortunately loaded to Beverly Hillbillies levels with cartons and cartons and boxes and bags of whatever is being carried, and nothing is properly held down, so if there is wind or a sharp turn, or some crazy traffic, things go flying.

Tomorrow, I head to Jordan, and hopefully the border situation won't be as strange this time. I'll be meeting Bruce Gueswel on the 21st, and then I'll go from there on the next leg of adventure. I'm looking forward to seeing more desert castles, more Roman/Nabatean ruins, and more of the same fresh food and friendly people. There are also some excellent nature reserves in Jordan that I want to check out (there are supposedly oryx at one of them) in addition to bobbing in the Dead Sea, perhaps checking out the Red Sea at Aqaba and then of course the ruins and beautiful local scenery in the Petra and Wadi Rum area.

Have met a fair smattering of Iraqis here, but none have been able to speak any English of note. On the bus from Aleppo to Hama, I sat next to a guy from Mosul. He and I had both bought tickets for a previous bus, but the bus was cancelled, as the only two passengers were me and him. So we got on another one with another bus company two hours later. But he showed me his pictures of his family on his cell-phone and then a picture of his previous car that was apparently blown up (from what I could gather).

Have also seen a fair amount of European tourists in Syria - mostly French, but also English, German, etc. I have heard rumors of occasional Americans around here (in the Damascus souq yesterday - some guy said, oh, some folks from LA were just at his shop and why don't I stop in too - probably a trick, haha)  And when I was at Bosra, the Chinese ambassador to Syria was visiting there with his large entourage (quite a few nice black new Mercedes and little Chinese flags on them - there were guards and police everywhere sending people away for security reasons, but I must have looked goofy enough to not worry about). And then I went to a picnic the other night with a group of Danish tourists who decided to invite me along (everyone here goes to a picnic on the holy day), and we hung out in a grassy traffic island near the presidential compound and near some new-ish giant arch built for the martyrs of I'm-not-sure-which war or wars. One Danish guy taught me the meaning of the Danish toast: skol. Apparently the word is close to the Danish word for skull, and they think it came from the Viking days when the victors would cut off a piece of their defeated enemy's skull and drink wine or mead (or whatever) from it like a cup in some sort of ritual display of power. It's not an uncommon ritual. One of the Byzantine Emperors had this happen to him too. The victor was a Bulgarian chieftain named Krum. He actually made the emperor's entire head into a goblet, or so the legend goes. But this was centuries before any Vikings were around. I guess good customs stick around....

Anyway, now I'm off to the Syrian National Museum, which is supposed to be an excellent one and then back into the souqs for some late afternoon rambling.