You may have noticed there was something of a blank here at Lucid Ephemera for a few weeks while I went off and did festive things and had a holiday. More details on Italians in puffy jackets and wild boar salami follow in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I hope all of you [...]
Archive for the ‘Syria’ Category
2010 and 2011, thank you and hello
Posted in Aleppo, archaeology, architecture, Australia, autumn, Berlin, bread, British colonial mansions, cathedrals, chocolate, Christmas, churches, Crete, Cretins, Cyprus, Damascus, day trips, deer, Dodgy taxi drivers, driving, elbow, England, expat, fleas, food, Germany, Greece, history, Italy, Liverpool, manor houses, markets, Morocco, mosques, museums, odd hotels, Ottomans, Phillipine overseas domestic workers, post offices, Recalcitrant stereos, rowing, shopping, singing, smuggling, summer, Sunday, Syria, The Cyprus Question, The Mediterranean Middle Lane, tombs, tourism, travel, Turkey, Uncategorized, Venetians, Volkswagens, Volkswagons, weather, winter, wordless, work, working from home, Xania on January 4, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Wordless Wednesday
Posted in Damascus, Syria, wordless on August 11, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Wordless Wednesday
Posted in architecture, Cyprus, England, history, Italy, Syria, Uncategorized on July 21, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Strolling in the Souq
Posted in Aleppo, food, history, Syria on August 21, 2009 | 3 Comments »
Syria is largely unwesternised; it is the unadulturated Middle East, fresh, raw and pungent. Where Lebanon has cosmopolitan Beirut and other Arab states have big glitzy cities, Syria went into a period of economic decline in the 19thC and missed the rampant development that blighted many European cities, who bulldozed their heritage and created modern [...]
How do you say ‘football’ in Arabic?
Posted in Aleppo, archaeology, Syria on August 16, 2009 | 2 Comments »
You can take the Beloved out of England, but you can’t take English football out of him. We’d just returned to Syria and I was so excited about exploring Aleppo that I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. But the Beloved had other things on his mind, namely Liverpool FC’s first match of [...]
Smugglers and Traffic
Posted in Dodgy taxi drivers, smuggling, Syria, travel on August 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
We didn’t plan to hitch a ride with smugglers across an international border. But we needed a taxi for the two-hour journey from the excavation site that we’d been visiting in rural Turkey back to Aleppo in Syria. Our host archaeologists said the best way to cross was to go with the smugglers who needed [...]
Grazing in New Pastures
Posted in Damascus, food, Syria on August 14, 2009 | 3 Comments »
They say that life is what happens while you’re making other plans. So it was that my tour of Syrian food happened while we were trying to equip ourselves to see Damascus. We’d arrived with little cash because Syrian pounds can’t be taken our of the country, so we had only what we could exchange [...]
Ode to Syria
Posted in Syria on August 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Driving into Damascus from the airport at night is slightly surreal. There’s a huge Aladdin’s lamp over a carnival that’s sparkling with bright colours. The city rises up against a steep hill and the apartment buildings look like a forest of white lights. Mosques are everywhere and their minarets are lit with coloured light; one [...]
