i havent slept in a bed in four days

this is the syria entry. get excited.
starting on the syria-lebanon border, we finally got visas. we had to find another cab to get to damascus because our first guy gave up after like 3 hours. we got ripped off by both of them, which is typical because, hey, white people are made of money. whatever. we got into damascus at about midnight and called our couchsurfer. much to our dismay, he was busy (who is busy at midnight...?) and he said he would call back in an hour or two, so we, having no idea where we were or where to go, found our way to some park benches and sat down. everyone else fell asleep pretty quickly so i stayed awake to make sure that we didnt get robbed, and then i called caesar (the couch surfing guy) at about 2. he said he was still busy and couldnt come get us and that he would call in an hour, but the girls were loathe to spend the night on a park bench, plus it was really cold so we found a hostel and crashed.
the next morning we met a guy staying in the same hostel who was from baghdad... it was sort of an uncomfortable introduction:
him- "where are you from?"
us- "america. where are you from?"
him- "baghdad."
...pause...
us- "...sorry..."
but he was a cool guy and he showed us a neat little sandwich shop, so no hard feelings. incidentally, eating in syria was just as pleasant as eating in lebanon. the street food is only a touch more expensive than that in cairo, and the restaurants have little pizzas and plates of hummus for like 60 pounds (about 1.20 dollars), and everything is quite tasty. and also, there are these lovely bars filled with hanging baskets of fruit on just about every corner and you can just wander in and pick however many fruits you want and the guy will blend them into a juice for you, or you can just grab a glass from the giant random mix blender, which is basically the dregs of everyone else's juice.
so we ate and got juice and then found our way to old damascus, which is, according to lonely planet and all other sources that i can think of, the only cool thing to see in damascus. it is basically a huge series of tiny alleys and shops and restaurants and baths, plus a huge souq (though not as big as the one in cairo). we went first to the souq, carrying all of our bags through the thronging crowds, and then emerged in front of the huge omayyad mosque. that is probably spelled wrong. christianna happened to be friends with some british guys who were in damascus, so she called them up and we met them at said mosque and tried to get inside, but the thing closed right as we walked up to the door. naturally they had no qualms selling us a ticket immediately before closing time... they said we could come back the next day, but we never did end up getting there in time to go inside. we also tried to get into an oriental bath, but they dont allow women during the eid holiday so that was scratched off the list too. (usually they allow women from like 10 in the morning to 4 and then men the rest of the time, but men only during the holiday.)
finally we hooked up with caesar, who told us that he still could pick us up because we were in the wrong omayyad square and he was super far away, but we gave the phone to a cab driver and finally made it to our hosts' place. we were to stay in his brother's empty apartment, and it was pretty excellent, albeit tiny; there was a living room with a few chairs and a little half-sofa, a bedroom (with one double bed), a bathroom, and a little kitchenette which we didnt really use at all. if you remember, there were five of us, so sleeping arrangements were interesting... ah, and also the apartment was inhabited by a very tiny kitten. everyone else freaked out at the sight of a kitten, naturally, and i put on my headphones so that i wouldnt have to listen to the high-pitched squeals of "youre so cute!" note that these were mostly emitted by luke; the three girls were much less vocal. sorry luke, but its true.
we went back to old damascus for dinner with the brits that night; caesar couldnt come with us because he had to work. he explained that he had been directing a dance troop all the previous night and that he was a writer slash director trying to get all his affairs in order so that he could report to the syrian army in ten days, so we forgave him for being too busy for us. anyway, we did our usual giant spread of stuff you have to eat with pita for dinner, plus some random vodka stuff, plus sheesha, which was all quite pleasant. then the seven of us went to a fair that we had spotted while riding the bus. there were loads of rides all along the highway, but it was about the sketchiest fair i have ever seen. nothing had safety belts or lap bars, and a lot of the rides were straight-up man powered; no engines necessary. we started out on one of those huge pendulum swings, and this one did have a motor, so it was able to swing the entire contraption totally vertical; i flew out of my seat on every apex, regardless of whether or not i held on. naturally i wanted to see what would happen if i didnt hold on, then, and sam (one of the brits) freaked out and grabbed me when i started to leave the seat with my hands up. altogether quite amusing. then i rode a mechanical bull, and, using only one hand, i did much better than most of the syrians who went before me, but that ride is really difficult, i must admit. then there was a ride something akin to the scrambler, the ride in the sandlot wherein all of the kids puke their guts out, only this one had no safety equipment at all so we were sliding everywhere and there were arabs trying to stand and dance and stuff all during the ride. i saw no serious injuries the whole night, though, so maybe all of the safety equipment in america is just crippling us for the real world :)
we stayed up really late reading and writing poetry and just generally being rather bohemian, which i approved of. of course, that meant that we slept ridiculously late; we made it into town for "breakfast" at about 4 pm. then we met up with the brits again (the girls all had super huge crushes on them because, lets face it, they were adorable and had cute accents to boot) and went to this really cute mosque that housed the remains of the niece of some holy imam or other. the whole of the inside was covered with spectacularly arranged, tiny mirrors, so everything was very shiny and sparkly. quite nice. then we went to a cafe just to hang out since we had all eaten quite recently, and we played backgammon and cards and smoked sheesha and ate ice cream for a long, long time until we were hungry again, so then we moved upstairs and ate dinner and... thats pretty much it. i guess mostly all we did in damascus was eat and hang out...
so yeah, thats about what we did on the next day as well. caesar came to town with us that day, but he couldnt hang out because he had to shop and have some time with his girlfriend. but he did take us to a bath that would accept girls, so luke and i dropped them off and headed to the men-only one. conferring afterward, the girls' and our experiences were very similar, but luke and i thought the whole process was remarkably cooler than they did. basically it went like this: you trade your clothes for a "towel," which is really just half a sheet, and go into a big, tiled room with faucets and basins all along the walls. you fill a basin with water and then take a little tin bowl and splash said water on yourself. then you take the soap and loofa (that smelled like it must have been made of horse hair) that they give you and scrub off all of your skin. then you go to the steam room, basically just a sauna, and then to another, smaller room with more basins where you pretty much just repeat the process. so luke and i washed each other and chilled with lots of naked arab dudes, and every time i tell this story it sounds more homo-erotic, but it was quite platonic and entertaining.
when we finished the bath part, we got full body massages which, for me, were the highlight of damascus. i just wanted to take a nap, f'sho. then we wrapped up in some dry sheets and sat in their lobby on these nifty raised couches and drank tea and imagined how cool it would be to live in a room like the one we were in. then we left and bought some pastries and went to pick up the girls. they told their story, and, like i said, it was basically the same as ours, except they didnt enjoy it at all. then we bought pastries since the girls hadnt eaten all day, and then we met up with sam who took us to the home of a friend of his. this girl, valeria, lived in about the most amazing house i have ever seen. fortunately she was about five feet tall because the front door was about the size of the door to a hobbit-hold, but inside it was all artistic tile and stone and super old wood with lots of random niches in the walls and lots of creaky staircases. the center of the house was a huge open garden slash patio where we sat and ate sunflower seeds, and then we went onto the roof and did gymnastics and played (lakeshore) games.
then we (the five from auc, 2 brits, valeria and one of her roommates) wandered around for a while looking for food. we ended up just getting street food by the omayyad mosque since we were almost totally out of money and we still had to get to the airport. so we ate next to the mosque and then, to kill some time before the flight, played mafia in the square for like 2 hours.
then a cab, a plane, and cairo.
and, to top off this hugely awesome and relaxing trip, i left my ipod on the plane. so dang.
we got back at like 6 in the morning and then off to school. katie (strickland) is visiting cairo from ghana at the moment, so i had dinner with her and her travel buddy on tuesday and then on wednesday i went to christiana's and cooked dinner and studied physics. stupid physics...
then on thursday, luke chelsea, christiana, katie, sarah (katie's friend) and i got on the midnight bus to dahab, a town on the sinai penninsula very near the saudi arabian coast. we arrived at around 9 in the morning (after sleeping very little on quite a loud bus; egyptians tend to play music and movies at obnoxious volumes) and walked across some stretches of desert, encountering a random roving camel, to the boardwalk. we walked toward the cheapest hostel, all along the way fending off egyptians trying to sell us scarves or get us to eat at their restaurants. luke, chelsea and christiana wandered off somehow, so katie, sarah and i stopped to wait for them (it turned out they had randomly decided to sit down for milkshakes, go figure) and were quickly surrounded by adorable little girls selling these really lovely bracelets, so we bought some, found the others, and dropped off our stuff at the hostel. i dont know specific timetables because i didnt write anything down since we didnt really do anything spectacularly interesting; mostly we just relaxed in the wonderful breeze.
there were tons of restaurants right on the water, but we easily found our favorite, that is, the cheapest one, and after eating we sat and talked with the owner, this 21 year old bedouin guy named, of all things, muhammad. he was super cool, though, and we spent quite a bit of time chilling at his place, which was basically a big pile of blankets and pillows right on the beach, so you can probably understand the appeal.
friday night we climbed mount sinai. this is quite a complicated process, we quickly found out, because you have to arrange for a bus to take you out to the monastery, then you have to buy a ticket to get in, then you have to hire a guide (as dictated by law, actually), but we got through all that jazz and started up. it was a really easy walk since 1) the monks built stairs on all of the steep parts and 2) about seven million people go up every night so its quite a well-worn trail. it was incredibly beautiful, too; the night was totally clear and, when some stupid european wasnt shining his l.e.d. headlamp in your face, you could see an inordinate number of stars. the view was, like i said, occasionally spoiled by the insane crowds and by people insisting on using flashlights, but it was without question lovely nonetheless.
our guide's name was muhammad, too, and he did a pretty good job of keeping the 13 of us together; my group was joined by some germans and norwegians and a couple of australians. so we made it to the top and, as the sweat from the trek up evaporated, understood why everyone tells you to bring warm clothes to the peak. it was quite freezing and, since we didnt want to pay for blankets, we made a big pile of people and huddled for a while to wait for the sun to rise.
and then it rose.
and it was really cloudy, so you couldnt actually see the sun. but the morning light spreading over the mountains was supremely beautiful, and the monks in the background singing hymns in coptic added mightily to the ambiance. the random koreans crying and singing their own hymns was sort of obnoxious, i though, but to each his own. and then we hiked down, the faster way this time, down a set of three thousand some-odd stairs made single handedly by some monk or other. and then we went back to the beach. we spent sunday in pretty much the same way, sitting by the beach and eating and smoking.
oh hey, i forgot; we did go snorkeling, which was quite excellent. there were loads of scuba divers right off the coast, which i thought was exceedingly silly because most of the reefs were only about 3 meters down, and some i could touch from the surface just by stretching out my hand. actually there were several times when i was floating on a receding wave and seriously feared that it was going to drop me straight onto a reef. but yeah, lots of fish and coral, very pretty, hooray. luke and i are definitely going back sometime in the not too distant future to do some real dives.
and then katie, sarah and i left; the other three stayed to celebrate chelsea's birthday, which was today, but i didnt want to skip more school, alas. so i got back at like 7 this morning and then to the new campus, which i why i havent slept in a bed in four days. i have either been dozing on buses or climbing mountains every night, and im tired.
thats all.