You've been framed...

A selection of photographs that I shouldn't really have taken but did:

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.

Women: know your limits

This country is truly an anomaly.

It’s in George Bush’s ‘Axis of Evil’, yet is among one of the most friendly and hospitable countries I‘ve ever visited. It’s fundamentally Islamic, yet alcohol is freely available. Women, when visible, wear full hijab or burqa, yet I haven’t once felt uncomfortable being significantly more obvious (and loud) and wearing considerably less.

Although a recent breakfast escapade to a street-side falafel store did result in a right kerfuffle.

So there I was, at the bar, innocently chomping away on a great mint and chilli falafel wrap, when I noticed a throng of veiled women outside having an animated discussion with the owner. There must have been five or six women with at least five or six children attached to them in a myriad of ways.

As I watched the scene unfold, it became increasingly clear they were talking about me. Illegible words were punctuated with raised eyebrows and baffled jabs and laughs in my direction. Arms were being thrown in the air in that inimitable Arabic way.

All eyes were on me as I happily stood among the falafel-snuffling men and stuffed the remains of the dripping yoghurty wrap into my mouth.

I couldn’t work out whether the eyes contained envy at the fact I was standing there mingling with the men, or disgust at my inability to eat the falafel with anything remotely resembling femininity.

The moral of the story: Women, know your limits. Laura, take a bib.

A room for Pythagoras

Ridiculous hotel number two: Near the clock tower, Aleppo, Syria. I would tell its name but I’m not sure it has one. Let’s call it Triangle Hotel for posterity’s sake.

We found it as one usually finds things in Syria, through a combination of sign language, phrasebook prodding and meeting a man who knows a man who knows a man who knows a man.

“Cheap otel? Nice otel?” we say, in an attempt to stray from the Lonely Planet trail.

“Oh yes, yes, nice otel, cheap otel. I give you good price, but you no see because room full at moment. Check out 12. I show you other room. Same same but different.” We approve of the room and the deal is done.

So after a hard day of wandering the back streets of Aleppo, we ambled back to the otel for a siesta.

But to our surprise, we found the room in a state of much confusion. This room didn’t have four walls like a normal room, oh no. It was a triangle room. A TRIANGLE. Not only a triangle, but an extremely tiny isosceles triangle.

To give you an idea of precisely how angular it was, we couldn’t even close the curtains due to the ceiling fan rhythmically slapping them into a whirling red frenzy.



Add into the mix some truly gaudy orange seventies wallpaper, polyester leopard-print bed sheets, shutters containing centuries worth of dust, and a fan that sounded like a harem of sparrows being strangled, and sleep is not your friend.

Aleppo and a brand new baby

We’re now on day three of life in Aleppo, sat by the Sheraton swimming pool admiring the higgledy-piggledy city from the monolithic and hideous - but calm - walls of the hotel. It hasn’t all been like this.



Upon arrival we utilised our very smooth Arabic skills - “Salaam alaykooooom! Errrr, do you know errr cam-errr-ahhh shop? Can-non? We buy where?” (Yes. Our language skills are on fire) - and following an exhaustingly hot goose chase around town, we finally struck gold in an underground warren of shops stuffed wall-to-wall with spare car parts and tyres. Well, where else?



Sat behind a filthy desk, smeared in what I assumed to be oil, sat a rotund man who knew a man, who knew another man that owned a shop nearby in which sat a dusty and forlorn looking Canon digital camera.

After some equally smooth haggling, we took the replacement camera baby to explore the new city of Aleppo. I say new city, but what I actually mean is ‘newer city’.

Aleppo is reputedly one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world and the Al-Jdeida quarter was built during the Ottoman era, which makes it approximately 600 years old. Pretty old for a new guy.

So fuelled by a novel breakfast of fava bean soup and raw onions with flat bread, we set off down the crooked alleys to find an almost indecent abundance of photography opportunities.




It was a Friday so the streets were shuttered and peaceful; devoid of women, pavements dotted with turbaned and sleepy men languishing in the shade.

The covert operation

We’ve finally arrived in Aleppo, Syria. A country where Facebook is illegal, the women are veiled, yet you can buy fluffy, pink nipple tassles in the street. A perfect combination some might say.

Let me tell you how we got here. After surrendering my broken camera baby to Murat the Mullah’s capable hands for a couple of weeks, we left the sumptuous gaiety of Akdeniz Otel, Adana, and ventured east towards Syria.

The Turkish border guard swept us through, no problems. I cynically wondered what would happen next... and then, during a toilet stop at the duty free shop between the Turkish and Syrian border posts, we hear a very strange noise indeed. Much like a thousand people furiously wrapping and un-wrapping Christmas presents. Surely not, it’s only June. And isn’t this a Muslim country?

We moved a little closer to investigate and spotted a darkened room at the end of the entrance hall (I say room in the loosest sense of the word: It was actually entirely made of cardboard).

A woman in full Syrian dress waddled out of the “door” towards us, walking as one would if one was hiding a sumo wrestling suit underneath a burqa, eminating an odd rustling sound. Curiosity wetted, we move closer and our eyes were met with a wondrous sight.

It was like a cigarette factory in rewind. Giant cartons of cigarette boxes lay across the room, with thirty, maybe forty, people frantically grabbing and taping single cigarette cartons, and even entire boxes, around their arms, legs and torsos, before replacing their clothes, picking up their luggage and casually strolling towards the Turkish border.

Brilliant. It literally made our day, as we stood there with our ice-creams and sun hats watching them execute the most ridiculously overt smuggling operation known to man. Although, it has to be said, we probably looked equally as ridiculous.