Day 12: Aleppo/Latakia - "Writing?"

Amir and I both overslept and missed the 06:45 train. After getting up I had breakfast with Ahmad and then walked to the train station. I bought us tickets for the 15:45 express. On the way back to Bab al-Faraj, I cut through a lovely park set in the middle of Aleppo's always congested streets. The park opens up into a wide plaza with huge fountains, all very beautiful, but not before giving the unsuspecting promenader a bit of a shock.

Strolling down the tree-lined path through the centre of the park, enjoying air that didn't for once in three days, smell like diesel, I came upon a cage set off to one side. There was a group of teenagers gawping at something in the cage. Being curious by nature and prone to falling for nasty surprises, I went to join them. The cage was actually a cage within a cage, and inside the cage within a cage was a single, solitary baboon, sitting in a pile of plastic and styrofoam trash, staring sadly into the middle distance as teenagers poked fingers through the mesh and made faces at him. The cage he was in was probably twenty feet by twenty feet and apart from a concrete block in the centre of it there was nothing lese there, other than the pile of trash in which he sat. Reminded of my friend Dan's experiences in a Chinese zoo, I moved on quickly, but not fast enough to escape the expression on the baboon's face being seared into my mind. Having seen them in the wild, I think of baboons as very proud, even aggressive creatures. Seeing such a creature so patently robbed of its dignity and freedom, reacting to it in such a human manner, displaying all the signs of a despair that we so often fool ourselves into believing is solely the preserve of human suffering brought on by consciousness - it was horrible.

After packing, drinking a hot sweet cup of tea and arranging to meet Ahmad in Damascus on our return from Lebanon, Amir and I went to the train station and boarded our train.

I promptly busted out the AlphaSmart to catch up on my notes and, about fifteen minutes after pulling out of the station, a man stopped by our seats.
"You don't remember me?"
Amir recognised him and smiled uncomfortably. I was studiously ignoring him (and everyone else) in order to catch up on my notes before getting to Lattakia. The guy looked down at Amir.
"Come with me to the dining car." It was not an invitation.
Amir stood up.
"Both of you."
Amir, bless him, said that I would stay with the bags and besides, I was busy. The guy turned his attention to me. It was Baseball Hat from last night.
"Writing?"
Something about the inflection he put on the word coupled with the way he scanned the screen of my AlphaSmart gave me a chill. Amir interrupted Baseball Hat's piercing gaze by standing up and saying he was ready fo some tea. They left for the dining car.

I need to add at this point that even though Baseball Hat had creeped me out, I didn't think anything of it because the AlphaSmart seems to get a very big reaction when Syrians see it. They ask what it does, look at the little display screen, run a finger along an edge. Abdo, one of the guys who works at Ahmad's hotel, even asked me how much it cost and then offered to buy it from me even though he doesn't speak English and none of the keys are in Arabic. As Amir and Baseball Hat disappeared into the dining car, I suddenly realised that since arriving in Syria I had seen not one laptop. No portable computers of any kind. They have everything else, from MP4 players to plasma TVs, but no laptops, only desktops.

With my head down, I was totally oblivious to time passing. Amir sat down and tapped my shoulder.
"That was the guy from last night."
I nodded.
"It turns out he wanted to know what life was like in Turkey."
I nodded again.

When we got off the train in Latakia, Baseball Hat and his friend were extremely nice and gave my arm a squeeze when they said goodbye.