D is for Damascus

I had a busy day and didn’t get to visit many blogs and tonight, I spent watching Carolina play for the NCAA championship—an incredible game and I now get to feel like Georgetown did back in 1982 when Michael Jordan beat them with a last second shot…  I’ll try to catch up tomorrow.

There are a lot of nice places to visit that begins with a D:  Denver, Dallas (well, I’m not sure anything in Texas is nice), Durango, Denmark, but I’ve been to all of those (including both the Denmark in South Carolina and the one in Northern Europe).  Since I am looking at new territory for my bucket list of places to go, there is one place that I’d really like to visit that begins with a D, but probably not this year.  That’s Damascus.   Yep, the city in Syria which is embroiled in chaos.  Damascus could be another chapter for P. J. O’Rourke’s classic travelogue, Holidays in Hell.  So, why would I want to visit?  First of all, it may well be the oldest inhabited city in the world.  It is a city that has held a front-row seat for many of the great events of the world as well as having been invaded by all kinds of people: Hittites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Muslims, Mongols, and Turks.  Famous people have traveled to the city.  The Apostle Paul found cure in the city after having been blinded on this way there.  Mark Twain later visited it on his Holy Lands trip in 1867.  He wasn’t impressed and said if he was to return, he’d look at the city from the distant mountains and then leave.  There was no reason to enter the walls of the crumbling city during the waning years of Ottoman Empire.  From a distance, it was attractive, but at close quarters, the quarters were too close.  The streets were crooked, so much so that Twain attributed it to divine intervention that the Apostle Paul was able to find a street named Straight.

Twain pointed out a legend that Damascus was the site of the Garden of Eden. “It may be so,” he wrote in Innocents Abroad, “but it is not now.”

 

So what would I do in Damascus?  In the good old days, it would be nice to take a train from Istanbul to Aleppo and then on to Damascus, but the second leg of that trip isn’t currently possible.  Actually, my main thing to accomplish is to avoid bringing home any shrapnel souvenirs lodged my buttocks.   I enjoy Middle Eastern food, but I doubt there would be a safe place to eat falafel, hummus, or a kabob. Maybe I’d just catch a Manfred Mann’s concert and then head on over to Jordan to visit Petra. 

Question, why would Sage seek out a Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in Damascus?  Answer will be given tomorrow (I’m borrowing a page from cleemckenzie’s blog).