Day One

May 15, 2007

Today we flew to Damascus, Syria by way of Paris, France. Our stopover in Paris was after a night of flying which allowed for only a couple hours of restless sleep. We ran around the quite confusing Paris airport for two hours and then boarded the Air France jet for the five-hour flight to Damascus.
Looking out the window of the plane as we left Paris, I couldn’t help but notice the green flowing countryside, even close to the city. Everything was so logical and orderly; the farming plots were even and lush; the residential areas were carved very carefully around the farmland. The houses seemed charmingly close together. It was a beautiful sight.
As we proceeded westward from Paris we passed over the lovely semi-mountainous terrain of Greece and all at once directly above the abyss of the Mediterranean Sea. The water seemed bluer than the ocean in a Disney movie. The sun bounced off the water as if it were causing the water to simmer.
A few minutes later we left the Mediterranean Sea to fly over Turkey. The topography of Turkey looked much different than that of France or Greece. There were no green fields; there were no houses or roads. There were only deep, treacherous, snow-covered mountain ranges as far as I could see. The mountains were bronze in color, seemingly void of life, and they came in wave after wave from the horizon. It was a desolate place. It looked like the other side of the world from Greece and France.
It seemed like we traveled over Turkey for a long time. Finally we came to
a last mountain range which looked to contain sand pools on it, and not snow patches. There were the Anti-Lebanon Mountains that serve to a separate Lebanon and Syria. Once past the mountains, the land instantly flattened into desert. There was nothing but flat sand as far as can be seen. Once again, the change was dramatic. As we flew towards Damascus the sun settled into the horizon; in the shadows we could see the familiar twin towers of a nuclear power plant in the vicinity of Damascus. We landed at the Damascus airport, had to wait an hour and one-half at customs because of a typographical error on our list of trip participants. Finally we arrived at 10:00 pm (3:00 Atlanta time) at our hotel for the evening, the Cham Palace (Cham is the name the Syrian's use for Damascus). The hotel is a five-star hotel with gorgeous marble walls in the lobby, vines growing up the interior walls of the atrium, marble vanities in each room, and they provided a phenomenal Syrian meal, served buffet style, for our group. We had a feast and then walked around the city a little before going to bed. It was a long day!