Introduction

This is the daily diary of a two week visit to our son Matthew in Damascus. I am not naturally a traveller to foreign shores, preferring caravan holidays in the UK to hotels abroad. However, it is important to understand the lives your children lead so when we realised Matthew was to be in Syria for more than a year we knew we had to try to join him at some stage in order to understand his world and meet his friends. This account is purely personal and is likely to contain inaccuracies (not least in the names and spellings of his Arabic friends) so I apologise for those in advance. The diary was not designed to be a report, just a series of hooks on which memories could hang.

I would like to thank the people of Syria for inventing (among many other things) the concept of writing and being gracious enough not to claim intellectual property rights on the invention. It is arguably the most important invention in the entire history of the human race.

Image - the Cham Palace hotel at night. We stayed in a cheap and cheerful backpackers hostel but the Cham palace was a really useful landmark for orientation! Cham is a local name for Damascus.