80 miles from Iraq in a Bedouin tent smoking nargileh

Here's update #1 (of many, many to come) regarding my trip to Syria. I have an enormous amount of great stuff to relate, plus I want to keep you all interested, so I'm going to do it in daily batches of descriptions, pics and videos (new!).

[[NOTE: I HAVE BEEN EXCEEDING MY DATA TRANSFER LIMIT RECENTLY, SO PICS/VIDEOS MAY BE TEMPORARILY UNAVAILABLE WHEN YOU VISIT THE SITE. IF THIS HAPPENS JUST COME BACK IN AN HOUR, AND PLEASE DON'T HIT REFRESH AT ALL. I'M WORKING TO FIX THE SITUATION. THANKS!]

First, I'd like to thank everybody for being so interested in my blog. I really appreciate the readership, and it motivates me to keep writing this. Rock on!

Second, a big welcome to my parents and sister who are now among my readership.

Anyway, on to the trip. One of the things I forgot about going to Syria is that it's right next to Iraq. So there are lots of signs in central and eastern Syria that point you in that direction, for example,


We went far east on Saturday night to visit an old Bedouin town called Palmyra, which has supposedly existed since before the Arabic language reached the region ("Palmyra" is impossible to spell with Arabic phonetics). Palmyra, as well as the road we traveled along to reach it, is only 80 miles from Iraq at the most. And unlike Lebanon and western-central Syria, it's close to a desert. This was the typical landscape driving there:


Here's a picture of the landscape along Palmyra taken at sunset, it was really nice there:


Here's a picture of a roadside reststop we stayed at during our trip to Palmyra, about halfway through, in the middle of the desert. It felt a lot like Tattoine... the people who run the store live in the Luke Skywalker-esque buildings behind me.


In Palmyra we had dinner in a traditional Bedouin tent... it was awesome!!! Here's a pic:


And finally, the best part of this post: I took a video of Bedouin dancers inside the tent!!! This is incredible. Click here to view it - (PLEASE don't download the photo more than once because it is large and I have limited bandwidth! It's ok if you play it more than once, but don't click on the link again if you close the window. You might want to just save it to your desktop)

That's all for now! I'll post another update in about 24 hours.


PS: Two housekeeping comments for you : First, note that sometimes I respond to comments, so you might want to check back if you asked a question or something. Second, I still haven't gotten around to sending invitations to the remaining ~150 people, but I hope to do that tomorrow now that our trips are becoming fewer and farther in-between.