tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-364393352011-07-08T08:04:53.421+02:00wanderings in the eastJames Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.comBlogger221100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-52663152954347586992007-06-18T20:27:00.000+02:002007-09-15T23:45:55.479+02:00

Good old Elton. I think this probably is my last post on this blog, unless something extraordinary and thoroughly worth sharing happens in the next five days as I am heading home on Saturday.I just wanted to clear a few things up (well one actually). I only spotted the spelling mistake in the title a month or so after I started writing, but by that time pride dictated that it remained as is,

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-39960030496031862032007-06-14T20:29:00.001+02:002009-09-18T14:31:03.441+02:00

So is the incessant banging of Lebanese politics, the numbing repetition of a poem-noir that has rocked and crumbled the country since the eighties, the sixties, or even (for the pedants amongst you) the forties. It peaked briefly last night with the murder of Walid Eido and his eldest son along with eight other members of the public on the seafront, around a mile from the site of the bomb that

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-83860900166040417442007-05-21T18:14:00.001+02:002007-05-21T19:44:04.788+02:00

Sunday was a day of eating for me. No rest for the wicked and all that it was an early start, and up the mountain for some breakfast with my Aunty Victoria. Typically I turned up starving and left feeling fuller than would be advisable. Having spent a few days before with my bottom doing a sound impression of its forward facing counterpart (after an absent-minded washing incident involving some

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-87426155153139122452007-05-16T16:57:00.000+02:002007-05-16T17:29:56.934+02:00

I've been in Beirut a little under two weeks now, working at the Daily Star having bunked off the last week at university in Damascus in favour of some work experience in Lebanon.This is to be my final staging post in rehabilitation into the Western World, and just as Damascus proved hard to leave so Beirut is already infecting me with the same excitement. I have been living in an apartment

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-48639517851119452052007-04-24T15:39:00.000+02:002007-04-24T16:00:32.269+02:00

As a footnote to the below I have just read on the American Blogger David Kenner's website that voter turn out for the elections on Sunday were four to ten percent. Perhaps old Damascus will have to wait a day or two for its new cobbles and trendy restaurants.

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-16556874243449208032007-04-23T15:50:00.000+02:002007-04-23T17:14:30.488+02:00

There was a certain festival air to Damascus yesterday as the banners that have adorned roadsides and sprawled between lampposts for some weeks now realise their ultimate purpose. It was voting day, and not just in France. Young children were doling out lists of candidates in the streets around our house, beneath the bunting and the banners and the strings of fairy lights that have mingled into

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-8111586196550388632007-03-31T10:00:00.000+02:002007-03-31T11:07:07.523+02:00

The Ommayad Mosque seems to be full of Iranians on pilgrimage at the moment. The picture above, of a young boy watching a group of pilgrims in the main chamber of the Mosque, was taken a week or so ago but since then then the flow has been pretty heavy. As I understand it the building itself has a particular Shia'a significance, having been built by the under the Shia'a Ommayad Caliphate under

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-70863800091877679462007-03-20T13:36:00.000+01:002007-03-23T13:05:11.674+01:00

After a quiet few weeks, a visa run and a smackeral of work, it seems like we have hit the final straight. With approximately six weeks of university left and May approaching very rapidly it feels rather like we are being slowly rehabilitated into English society. A steady trickle of visitors, girlfriends and friends bringing with them Sunday newspapers, sausages and Pimms and taking home in

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-68882526674068212142007-02-28T21:00:00.000+01:002007-03-06T22:18:12.029+01:00

Last weekend, in an attempt to understand the Lebanese 'situation' better and to see my aunt and cousins in Beirut I popped across the border on thursday night. A day or so of eating and relaxing in the mountains and I was keen to get on with the task in hand. Marwan, my cousin, was game to go out on the Saturday night and, wanting to do some research before hand we struck off for Solidaire -

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-31721866596535457222007-02-21T22:22:00.000+01:002007-02-23T12:04:53.042+01:00

A quick google search for “Dahab, Egypt”, produces a mixed haul of watersports, hippy and package dive holiday results. The entry for hippy.com suggests that it would be easy to find “recreational drugs” in Dahab and one reviewer scores it three out of five stars for hippy friendliness. The Watersports pages are dominated by tales of the Blue Hole and the three hundred days a year of force four

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-86364523578592546982007-02-16T11:00:00.000+01:002007-02-16T12:47:21.285+01:00

Powered by a growing dose of the gold-rush syndrome (that is: realising toward the end of something that you have so much left undone) and keen to pack my last four months in Damascus with as much eastern travel as possible it was with some flippancy that I booked myself a one-way flight from Heathrow to Cairo from behind a settling pint of strongbow in a quiet, rain-swept, Lake-District pub. As

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-88991426085112398142007-02-07T00:18:00.000+01:002007-02-07T00:22:07.859+01:00

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-76038450546164678102007-01-24T15:33:00.000+01:002007-01-26T10:50:24.390+01:00

And so the day after I eulogised about an easy weekend skiing in Feraya the soft concrete of Lebanon's new foundations are already cracking. Fisk, writing in the Indepent, described it as "a sectarian battleground" and the Times ran the headline "Beirut burns as national strike explodes into sectarian violence." Suddenly plans for the weekends are changing, to the west the chastened silence of

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-3869350433759998922007-01-23T14:00:00.000+01:002007-01-23T16:04:44.210+01:00

Damascus hasn't changed particularly in the three weeks that I was away over Christmas and New Year. A housemove and a new resolve to change a rather boring timetable into an opportunity for adventure was spark enough to reignite an interest in being back here though. Christmas in Dubai was alwasy going to an undefying experience and in the gentle balm of a Gulf Christmas it was easy to see

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-57983400421558809682006-12-19T14:09:00.000+01:002007-02-19T14:22:20.561+01:00

In the previous few weeks I have discovered several things. Firstly, it is always going to be harder to return to Damascus than it is to leave it. Secondly it is going to be much harder to continue learning Arabic in the West than it is to study it here. And finally, the Syrian national grid was not equipped for Christmas.After the most wonderful weekend in Paris celebrating my nearest and

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-31198293191296201792006-11-25T22:04:00.000+01:002006-11-30T22:12:18.911+01:00

Despite all warning, Baalbek was a surprise. As our taxi rounded a bend in the Chouf Mountains and five sets of groggy eyes widened at the ruins that had replaced the drop to the left, none of us were prepared for what we saw. To say that the five twenty five foot, freeze topped, marble Doric columns that can be seen from the road are an understatement of the beauty and size of the temples at

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-85866624726871988092006-11-18T14:47:00.000+01:002006-11-18T14:52:14.373+01:00

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-72365907578481754012006-11-11T12:26:00.000+01:002006-11-19T16:14:13.302+01:00

Contrary to all expectation Damascus is getting cold.  I saw my breath condensing as I was waiting for a bus last night, and suddenly I wish that our lovely old Damascene house was a lovely new house, with lots of lovely insulation and central heating instead.  Abu Michelle has very kindly installed a remarkable stove in the sitting room and now we can huddle round our can of fire in the evenings

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-4771339887284396672006-11-04T14:22:00.000+01:002006-11-05T19:44:56.355+01:00

Joseph Heller once defended his novel 'Catch 22' with the line, "I haven't written anything better, but nor has anyone else." Its difficult not to feel the same about Istanbul, sitting across two continents, being a great mixture of the two cultures, Middle Eastern and European. In essence it has the salient elements of Middle Eastern culture executed with a more European efficiency. One of

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-82038108260331847442006-10-27T09:29:00.000+02:002006-10-27T09:34:56.072+02:00

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-10551922181812447242006-10-25T02:07:00.000+02:002006-10-26T18:07:50.376+02:00

Just returned from a most fantastic weekend in the north. We (Will Clem and I) started off in Tartus at lunchtime on Sunday (which although was beautiful in places turned out to be a little limited). Our trip to Arwad island three kilometres off shore returned mixed results. The island itself is quite beautiful with plenty of archaeological remains scattered about (including a well preserved

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36439335.post-1161528769691507812006-10-22T16:50:00.000+02:002006-10-22T17:07:46.451+02:00

Just a quick first blog to christen this site. This is an experiment to see how useful this will be to stay in touch with people so bear (bare?!) with me. Photos and tales from Tartus and Lattakia will be first to follow in a few days...

James Farhahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04880999153891065815noreply@blogger.com1