Fame, at last!

I’m not going to be a diva about it or anything, but I just thought you’d like to know that I have finally made it. Fame, at last! It’s been tough, but worth it.

I'd been in Damascus for two days, when some hip Damascene guy arrived at the hostel with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth looking for English movie stars (extras) to star (appear in the background briefly) in a film about the English invasion of Bedouin territory in the Gulf.

Naturally I was reticent in the beginning, but he let me eat my breakfast and made a promise to deliver champagne to my dressing room before I agreed to set off on the ‘twenty-minute’ journey.

One and a half hours later, and we’re still cruising the desert hunting for the mysterious ‘set’, with myself and my fellow act-tooors wondering whether instead of meeting fame we were about to meet our untimely deaths.

Fortunately this wasn’t the case.

I will prove this with some glorious photos of me sweating my tits off in the desert all in the name of art.

The film is called Gate of Clouds in English (or a load of squiggles in Arabic). Please hunt it out and take glory in my one moment in the limelight.

NB: The champagne never arrived, and for that matter neither did the dressing room. Sigh.

There's friendly, and then there's FRIENDLY

Syrians are such a friendly bunch. I mean, really friendly - I think I might have mentioned it before.

Even the unfriendly ones aren‘t that unfriendly. You wouldn’t even notice them if it wasn’t for the goggle-eyed stares at your breasts and occasional growling sounds.

One rung up from this there’s the moderately friendly ones: these tend to look politely at the breast area and then, when you catch their eye, smile and say “Well-come”. The meaning of this is always quite ambiguous.

Then you get the really friendly ones. These want to sit next to you, feed you countless cups of sugary tea and invite you home to meet the family.

These are the people who engage all their friends to help you find your way, until you have a Pied Piper throng of Arabs leading you through the city.

Sometimes they also like to put their arms around you and casually waft a hand across your bum cheeks on the way down.

But then there’s the one-eyed madman we met a few days ago - he was in a league of his own.

We first encountered him in a barber shop in Damascus. He beckoned Aaron in and, for reasons unbeknown to me, Aaron accepted the invitation and plonked himself down next to this heaving, one-eyed hunk of a man.



Following what was an obviously engineered twist of fate, I then found myself sandwiched between his bulbous face and sweaty arm, while he repeated his splattering and unlikely statement of being a jockey.



Fast forward ten minutes and we were bemusedly trotting behind him, with absolutely no idea where we were heading, watching as the evening sun streaked through his dress, crisply outlining his black underpants.



He finally reached his destination and led us into what I assumed must be his house. He took us through a hallway, past a darkened room where veiled women lurked in shadows, and into what I can only describe as the most ridiculous room I ever saw in my life.

Lining the walls, neatly placed in order of size, were hundreds of glistening swords and guns.

Giant machetes and bulging sabres perched dangerously above our heads as he stood in the middle of the room, bellowing like a proud father: “You likeee? You likeee?”



Had we solved the mystery of the missing eye?

After showing us a priceless photo of him sat on a bow-legged donkey heralding some type of sword - a jockey, of course! - he then produced a box filled with Arabic clothes and began dressing us up, with his friend appointing himself official photographer.



(There’s also the part where his friend studied my legs a little too aggressively and had to place a cushion on his lap, but I’m not going to expand on that one.)

The next day while wandering through a completely different part of Damascus, we came across a shop that sold every type of sword under the sun.

While we marvelled at the shiny swords suspended from the ceiling, we heard a spluttering voice come from behind us: “My frienda! My frienda! Come and sit downa!”

Lo and behold. There he was. On a stool next to the sword shop, with the sun illuminating his full glory.

A room with a view and a pie with a face

Dining out in Syria is certainly not for the faint-hearted - or fussy.

Menus are mostly in Arabic - and that’s if they even exist - but if the stars are shining down on you and you happen across one in ‘English’, the meal takes on a life of its own.

We‘ve so far had the pleasure of discovering ‘Chicken Soap’ - or ‘Cream Soap’ if you would prefer? -‘Jam and Cheese Pancake’ and the most exotic-sounding pie known to man.

This particular menu - the product of an ambient rooftop restaurant overlooking Damascus’s famous mosque, Umayyad - was transcribed literally into the Roman alphabet so made little more sense than Arabic.

So we enlisted the help of the waiter, who, in a thick, gummy accent, provided us with this description:

“So firsta we mix the wheeat wid the water and place it around the chopped lamb meeeat. Then we put it into the grrrill to cook. We then rrremove it from the grrrill and rrrub pomegranate in its face.”

When the dish finally appeared, which was little more than a tasty doner meat pie, it was distinctly lacking any pomegranate and, more disappointingly, it had no face - so far as we could see.

But after earlier polishing off our millionth kebab, anything remotely different was a pleasure so we gobbled it with gusto and soaked up the views of the glowing mosque.

And as we were wandering down the steps back into the winding alleys of the souq, as a final parting gift of hysterical laughter, we heard the waiter’s lilting voice carry over the distant call to prayer:

“…we then rrremove it from the grrrill and rrrub pomegranate in its face.”

We heard no laughter from the table of Japanese tourists so I assume it was a case of really lost in translation.