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More Than Just Islam and Spices
Words Dania Akkad
Photos Adel Samara
Karin Palo
Estonia
Journalism student
THE COUCH SURFER
When Karin Palo, 26, and two graduate school friends from Estonia planned to crash on a couch in Aleppo, they didn’t realise they would get an unofficial tour guide thrown into the deal. Through an informal hospitality website, they were put in touch with a young Aleppan who offered to let the three backpackers stay at his house. By the time they reached Syria – and dined on a feast of lamb intestines with a local family they met through a chance taxi ride – the guy was unable to host them. Instead, a friend of his let the three sleep at his place.
The original host slept over too: if he couldn’t host, the least he could do was sleep near them, he said. Soon, he was making phone calls, arranging meetings with his relatives and acting as their impromptu tour guide.
“I have never seen anything like it in couch surfing,” Palo said. The three, who decided to come from snow-covered Georgia where they are studying during an exchange semester, hadn’t known what to expect in Syria. “No one in Estonia really has an idea of Syria. They know it exists. It’s something really exotic,” she said. “You think Islam and spices, but you don’t really know.” After five days in Aleppo and Damascus, Palo said the souqs were her favourite. “It’s just different from everything I’ve seen. You feel how old it is.” Still, it was Syria’s hospitality that made the biggest impression: “People treat you like you’re a long-lost relative.
Sung Hee
South Korea
Works in music management
THE SOCIOLOGIST
Sung Hee, a 50-something music industry maverick, admits it: she came to the Middle East with some preconceived notions about women in hijabs. A short and spry world traveller with an equally short and spiky head of hair, Hee just couldn’t figure out why women would cover up. After a stop in Cairo and before making their way to Tehran, she and her husband, a professor in their native South Korea, revelled in the culinary delights of Aleppo. Now, browsing in the shops around the Umayyad Mosque, Hee had some new ideas about the Islamic head covering. “It’s like a high school uniform,” she said.
While the act of covering oneself still felt a bit foreign to Hee, watching women in Syria made her realise that there wasn’t just one kind of veil. They were colourful, loose, even beautiful. Like a uniform, Hee said each woman had made the veil her own with an individuality she hadn’t expected. The experience made her wonder about the status of women in South Korea. Maybe, said Hee, there were similarities she hadn’t considered.
Aziza and Fadhel Ali Khan
Kuwait
Statistician and Engineer
 THE BELIEVERS
The thought of visiting Syria scared Aziza Ali Khan, a 29-year-old statistician from Kuwait. As Shia Muslims, Damascus to Ali Khan and her family is first and foremost the site of the shrines of Saida Zeinab and Saida Ruqayya, two members of the Prophet Mohammed’s family who died in Damascus. As Ali Khan tells it, it’s one of the most depressing places on earth she could visit. “I have a sad feeling when I am here,” she said, standing outside the Saida Ruqayya Mosque.
Despite the doldrums, the family said they took the trip to feel inspired. “It’s like we live in the story,” Ali Khan said, surrounded by her children, sister and her 60-year-old father, Fadhel Ali Khan. “We enter this door. We walk down this road. We feel like Saida Zeinab.” The family huddled together, ready to explore more of the Old City. Ali Khan started to walk away and stopped, looking over her shoulder. “Tell the world our story.”
Naoko Shimizu
Japan
Photographer
 THE WORLD TRAVELLER
Sandwiched between Chile (#46) and her next stop, Jordan (#48), Syria is the 47th country 25-year-old, red-headed solo traveller Naoko Shimizu has visited. Slowly wandering down Straight Street, the photographer who makes money snapping shots of children in kimonos said she hadn’t anticipated the fun she would have in one of the world’s oldest cities. “Before I thought Syria was very serious and many Muslims live here,” she said. Instead, she was surprised to find Muslims living alongside Christians and several watering holes where she saw locals happily wetting their whistles. The fun would continue, she said tugging on her backpack strings, in Palmyra. But before leaping to yet another destination, Shimizu lingered, watching two old men in the street play a game of late-afternoon backgammon. The joys of travel.
Ali Alhasnamy
Sweden
Sports psychologist
 THE SEARCHER
More than 25 years after leaving his native Iraq for Sweden as a result of political discord, 54-year-old sports psychologist Ali Alhasnamy wandered the streets of Damascus as a tourist, alongside a football player he was training, wondering whether he might be able to bring his three children to live in an Arab world they had never known. “We would like to bring them closer to our original society,” Alhasnamy said. But with Baghdad still a dangerous war zone, he said he was considering Damascus – which he visits occasionally to discuss concentration and motivation tactics with football coaches – as a possible landing spot for his family. “When I moved from Baghdad,” he said, “I felt that I left my heart behind.”
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