Travel Tip Number 37
Posted by shockedandawed on March 13, 2007
Some sage advice from Time’s Lebanon correspondent, Andrew Lee Butters:
The two French students who live next door to me returned home to Beirut today from a 24-hour jaunt to Damascus, and promptly began vomiting strawberries.
Apparently, the problem wasn’t so much that it is still a little early in the season to eat a kilo of Syrian strawberries. The problem was all the whiskey with which they washed them down.
It also didn’t help that they were arrested, beaten and thrown in the trunk of a car.
For the record, I’ve spent a total of about six months in Syria and have never been arrested, beaten, or eaten a kilo of strawberries.
But I do feel like a few words of caution might be helpful to those of you who are of university age who may have heard that Damascus is the new Prague and who may be thinking of going there to study Arabic and hang out in the bars and alleys and courtyard houses in the Christian Quarter of the Old City and wear scarves and smoke hubbly-bubblies.
1) Don’t get drunk and disorderly in a Ba’athist security state.
2) When in doubt, if someone is chasing you in Syria, they are probably secret police.
3) Don’t try to run away from them.
4) Don’t talk back to the secret police. And don’t yell: “What are you gong to do? Arrest me for drinking? This is a free country!”
Shocked and Awed 
HaiaBne said
Is this “travel tip” meant to be funny?
“Don’t get drunk and disorderly in a Ba’athist security state”
That’s hysterical in its Orientalism. Yes, Syrians (and people in the region generally) don’t take kindly to tourists condescending to them as they frolic wastedly in Damascus. That has nothing to do with Ba’athism – tell me, do Syrians imprison and torture people on account of their religion, like the Americans and the Zionists do with Muslims, any Muslims? Do they run detention camps in Cuba? Do they maintain a presence in territory that IS NOT THEIRS?
And I dare the two Frenchmen to engage in that kind of behaviour in front of an Israeli settler – see how long they stay alive after pulling a prank like that.
Go to Israel, go to America, and throw out a line like “It’s not just that the Zionists have expelled over A MILLION people from Palestine”. See how long, with the Patriot Act in force, you’ll still be a free man before Bush and his ZioNazi cronies arrest you.
But running amock in an Arab country – that’s okay.
toriepartridge said
Benaiah doesn’t change 🙂
When are you going to start blogging again? When are you coming to see me in Montreal?