Two guys, two mosques and a smoky nargileh

After arriving early evening in Damascus we dumped our stuff and headed off to see the sights. I particularly enjoyed the Souq Medhat Pasha (the covered souk) because of its vibrant yet suprisingly hassle free atmosphere - the first souk we'd been in where we weren't overly harrassed with calls of "Pretty lady, look my shop!" or "Hellloooo, where you from?". Don't get me wrong, we did still get some of these, but no where near as much as in previous countries.

We made our way down the souq towards the Umayyad Mosque, one of the largest mosques in the world. As we stood at the entrance contemplating whether to go in, two young guys came up to us and started talking to us. They told us that we needed to go get the special robes so we could visit the mosque. And what sexy looking robes these were too - communist shade of grey Ku Klux Klan kits, complete with pointy hoods that cost us 50 Syrian pounds to hire and made us look like Obi-Wan Kenobi gone horribly, horribly wrong. We thanked the guys for their help in finding the robe place and thought they would then go on their way.

Of course not. Who could resist the chance to show two charming grey shaded damsels around one of the most interesting sites in all Damascus? So suddenly we found ourselves on an impromptu tour around the Mosque. Actually this paid off somewhat, because we were then taken to a big shrine which supposedly contains the head of John the Baptist. This trip has become a bit of a 'find the bits of John the Baptist' thing - as we saw his right hand (mummified) in Cetinje, and now his head in Damascus. I wonder if they dug up his grave, would they find his right hand and head missing? I mean, I know Salome got him beheaded - but did Herod go get it mummified and then hang on to it?

After this we thought, surely the guys will go now. But no, they wanted to show us a shi'ite mosque - so we went off to this Iranian mosque which supposedly has the body of one of Mohammed's granddaughters. The Iranian mosques are much more elaborately decorated than the sunni ones, and it was actually quite interesting to see this mosque. Again we had to do our ku klux klan impersonation though.

The mosque is separated into male and female sections where they can view the mausoleum of Ruqqaya, the granddaughter. So we went off to the female section to have a look. This thing is huge, for someone who supposedly died at the age of 4 - its 8-10 foot tall and surrounded by a gilded cage. We were intrigued when, whilst we were looking at the grave, a woman came over and handed us a sweet. Except that I didn't realise it was a sweet, and then didn't know what I was being given it for, or why. She kept pointing at the cage, where I could see some ribbons or something tied and then indicated the top of the grave, and I thought that she meant that I was to somehow fling the lolly up at the grave and have it land somehow the other side, or I was to tie it to the cage. Luckily I didn't do either of these things, and I found out later from Wissam that she gave me the sweet because its what you do in this mosque. Agnieszka wasn't sure about the lolly either, and she gave hers away to another woman. We then left this mosque and realised that we weren't going to be rid of the guys any time soon, and they seemed nice enough anyway, so we went for a coffee with them. Now of course going for coffee actually means, have a cup of thick, undrinkable mud and smoke a nargileh (water pipe). Me, I'm not interested in either. Fortunately the restaurant we ended up in (after our tour of the souqs) served a reasonably drinkable nescafe. Agnieszka decided to partake of the water pipe this time, mixed with a fruity flavour. It smelled ok but there's just no way that I would smoke one of these things.

Actually the guys really were very nice and spoke excellent English, so we were able to find out quite a lot of things about the Syrian culture, but as the evening went on, my eyes were watering from the smoke and I was soooo tired. They wanted to stay out longer but seriously, it was already 1am and I needed to sleep, so we finally bid them farewell, thanking them for the lovely evening, and made our way back to the hostel.

Alas, my sleep was not that of the fair. One of the things about the Middle East (well, actually, we'd noticed this since, to be fair, Croatia) is the large number of feral cats. Everywhere you go, there's homeless cats. And in Serbia, homeless dogs too. You don't want to get bitten by one of these dogs, they'll give you rabies. Anyway, I had just managed to drop off to sleep when suddenly, out of nowhere, there was an almighty bang (I thought a gun had gone off or something hey) followed by the most unmerciful screeches and yelps - two cats fighting right outside our room! I actually think one of them might have fallen off the roof onto something, that bang was so loud. And this was no little playfight, no, it was on for one and all. Went on for several minutes, and believe me, it was pretty ferocious.

Was relieved when it was finally all over... after all, I needed to sleep, we have to get up very early tomorrow and go to Bosra...