The Blog and the Shower

Yesterday was the beginning of a much-needed break for me from the immensely stressful experience that this semester has proved to be so far.  After plenty of confusion about who I might be traveling with over our week-long break for the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, and even more confusion about who actually wanted to travel, I decided to go back to Latakia –which I didn’t really see on my earlier visit–with a friend who was planning to stay with a Syrian family there that she’d met on her earlier travels.  We made plans to arrive at the bus station at noon today in order to buy tickets; I assumed that since today was the first day of the holiday, people should be at home with their families and we should be able to hop on a bus leaving around 1 o’clock…right?  Nope.  The bus station was mobbed with people, and standing in line at a bus company kiosk, I heard the ticket-seller say that there were no bus seats to Latakia available until 6:00.

“Did he say 6:00?!!” I asked the young man standing in front of me, just to confirm.

“That’s what he said…God only knows,” he replied, looking dejected as well.

I left the kiosk and asked at another company, only to be told they weren’t running any busses to Latakia today.  I walked out and felt slightly discouraged as I stood surveying the masses of people running about in the dusty yard lined by ticket offices, each probably trying, as I was, to find the earliest ride available to the town of their choice.  I was wondering how I should decide which of the many offices that listed Latakia as a destination would actually be running buses there, when the young man I’d spoken with in the first office appeared at my elbow.

“I think Hasn is the only other company with buses to Latakia today,” he said.  “Let’s go check.”

I followed him to the Hasn offices, where we were told that their earliest free bus was leaving at 5:00.  We left the office and I waited for my friend, who had just arrived at the station, to find me, while he went to ask around and find out if there were any earlier buses.  He returned just after my friend and I had located each other in the crowd and reported that he hadn’t found any earlier busses, so we resigned ourselves to leaving at 5:00 and returned to the Hasn offices.  As we handed over our passports to the employee so he could take down our names as he sold us the tickets, our new Syrian acquaintance began to push the ticket-seller very quietly.  “Are there any seats at 4:30?” he asked.  “What about 4:00?”

The ticket-seller seemed to relent.  “Three-thirty, god willing,” he said, writing that time on our tickets.  I was completely bemused as to how three seats had suddenly opened up on an earlier bus, but I decided not to question my luck good luck.  Instead, my friend and I turned to pay our Syrian helper for the price of the tickets he’d purchased for us, but he refused to take our money and began to walk away from us quite rapidly.  We followed and attempted to toss our bills into the bag he was carrying, but he grabbed it and handed it back, reminded us to be back at the station at 3:30, and disappeared into the crowd.

I think I’ll spend at least one night in Latakia with the Syrian family, and then travel on to Aleppo, a city in Northern Syria I’ve wanted to see for a long time.  My plans are up in the air, though–who knows where I’ll end up?