Free Sample
The Purple Culture Guide to Syria
What Syria is actually like, day to day — the real culture, costs, and unwritten rules that no search engine will tell you
by Alumigogo Books
Chapter 1: First Impressions
You step out of the airport and the first thing that hits you isn't the heat or the dust or the noise, though all three will arrive in due course. It's the scent. There's a strange, pervasive sweetness in the air, a mix of jasmine flowers tumbling over walls and the sharp, oily tang of diesel fuel from the ancient Mercedes taxis idling nearby. It's the country's personality in a single breath: soft and generous, wrapped around something gritty and unpolished. If you were expecting a land of stark desert and ancient ruins only, the first drive into the city will shake you. The landscape is muscular and dusty, a hot brown and gold, but then you suddenly pass a field of sunflowers standing at attention, or a patch of olive trees silver-green against the earth, and you realize this place is more alive than you allowed for.
The biggest surprise for most first-timers isn't the ruins or the history, which are as overwhelming as promised. It's the chaos of daily life that runs alongside them. You'll be sandwiched in traffic that has its own set of unspoken rules, where a lane is a suggestion and the horn is a language. A driver will lean out of his window to shout a greeting to a friend in the next car over, all while navigating a roundabout with one hand and holding a cellphone to his ear with the other. You'll see a man carrying a tiny