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05/23/2004: "Dreams of Traveling"

If you ever dream of traveling, and the dream is one of the ones where you are running and running and you never seem to get anywhere, that would be last night. It took us 3 hours to find our hotel in Damascus, and the most unnerving part is that we didn't do anything wrong, particularly. Or at least anything small and correctably wrong. Not learning Arabic turns out to be a mistake. However, if you come into Damascus after dark, the traffic on the streets is about like lower Manhattan (except, who's ever driven in lower Manhattan?), and the streets themselves are like a particular text based computer game back in the day ("a maze of twisty little passages", for the youngsters) (tm) Anyway, we were doing all the things right that you are supposed to do, we had reservations ("new, exceptional value"), we had a map, we had a phone, and we did find people who spoke enough English to ask questions of --- it is sometimes mentioned that we should get a GPS unit for traveling, and some day we are going to, but Damascus (and every city that is older than Minneapolis) has the property that you can know where you are to within 10 meters, and be holding the latest map in your hand, and want to get to a place 100 meters away, and not have any idea how to get there. I want to reassure the Asperger's sufferers that it really doesn't help to get chummy with humans by asking directions. About one out of every ten people knows where he is right now. I had four guys leaning on a taxi assure me that we were driving on Sharia Souk Saroujeh and we turned out not to be. Fortunately there were more guys on the other side of the street who said it was al-Malik Feisal and it turned out pretty academic because when you get to the main intersection you can't go across and you can't turn in any useful direction, and when you call the hotel and they say they will send a boy over to fetch you (because remember, you are only 100 meters away), they don't, or maybe they don't know where you are. I don't know what happened there. Dave hailed a taxi and put me in it with instructions to go to the al-Diwan hotel so he could follow, and the taxi driver took me to the al-Iwan hotel. But the man at that hotel had heard of the other one, which was just down the street, and pointed it out with good directions. Dave looked at the room but didn't like it enough so he checked the hotel across the street but we came back to the al-Diwan and they gave us a room that smelled like paint so we made them give us another one and it doesn't smell like paint and only had one tiny cockroach who is probably trying to get to the al-Iwan.

We have just got back from the National Museum. It is exhausting. The way in which fragments of basalt weave themselves into the story of our own history! and the marginal notations in simple French (fortunately)! The garden especially is amazing, go find a website and a virtual tour, you know there's no reason any more to get out and do this stuff, you can experience it all on wikipedia or someplace and if you have a slow enough connection you can even simulate the part with finding the hotel.

We should go to dinner now.