Aleppo

Whenever I stop in at a cyber cafe in Syria to work on this blog I keep expecting the workers to tell me I'm not allowed on the Blogspot site because it's censored. Instead it's always the same. Just mention Facebook, or Blogspot, or whatever and they'll access the blocked site within minutes. From Hama I took a train north to Aleppo (Halab in Arabic) near the Turkish border. Like Damascus, Aleppo is very old, and the two cities vie for the title of "the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world." In his book In the Steps of Saint Paul, HV Morton wrote of Aleppo, "No Eastern city has impressed me with a greater sense of its mystery. To drift with the crowds in the bazaars, those vaulted avenues cool and dim as cathedral naves, is to enter another world ..." Aleppo used to be a part of the Silk Road that linked China to the Middle East and Europe, and today it's a good jumping off point for traveling by train to either Turkey (and then on to Europe if you like) or to Iran.