Sham City Center

Hello everyone,

I've heard there have been some problems finding the photos I posted yesterday to my blog. If any of you have been successful in finding them, please forward your methodology to the rest of the email list. As I have mentioned before, blogspot is blocked in Syria. You might question the soundness of my logic in using this host site then, but as I have also mentioned, I still have to take "Introduction to Logic" this summer at Towson and furthermore, I think it adds a dimension of excitement otherwise absent in travel blogging to have only intermittent access to my blog. If this seems very silly and rather stupid to you, my sympathies. It is quite silly and even quite stupid in my opinion as well. But nothing of the sort has ever stopped me from doing something.

Take for example, my shopping expedition yesterday, during which I purchased a $12.50 digital radio, manufactured in China for a cost of $3.00 at the most. But it was marked with a price and I did not consider trying to bargain with the shopkeeper, especially when he popped in a battery and began to dance to the music station he had tuned it too. How could I? It was a worthy purchase, though, I think, because now I can further improve my Arabic listening skills by tuning in to the vitriolic sermons that abound on Damascus radio for the benefit of taxi and bus drivers the city over. I also bought a promising book, "The Art of Damascene Cooking" and a chess board, so my tutor and I can play chess at a reduced price, which, he tells me, we may attempt tonight! He needs to beat me, he says.

In other matters, I am about to acquire a cell phone. I literally swore to my tutor that I would do so today. And so I will try. I also have chosen a spot close to the office for Turkish Airlines, so that I may make it there before they close today to discuss a much desired alteration to my itinerary. In sha' Allah, as they say here, "If God wills". We shall see.

I hope you are doing well, and I'm sorry that there is nothing I can do at this point to look for my pictures on the blog, but regardless, I am posting new pictures to it. I hope they will reveal themselves in due course. I have a suggestion in this regard: my profile picture is a photo of part of the Golan Heights which also appears in the "album" I have been posting the new pictures too. So if clicking on this picture, which should be readily visible to all visitors, yields a photo album, you have indeed uncovered these heretofore mislaid pictures. Good luck.

I'll try to find them this afternoon though, accessing the blog from a computer better endowed than my own. Sorry about the confusion.

Talk to you all later on. To those of you I got to talk to at the Browns' Easter gathering, it was wonderful to see and talk with you all. I really hope I'll be doing that in person on May 15th.

Alphabet soup,

David