April 5 to April 6 ----- Sydney to Aleppo, Syria

THE OUTGOING PASSENGER CARD
The conflict for me had already begun by the time I reached the airport and started to fill in my Outgoing Passenger Card to get through customs.
'Country where you will spend most time abroad: ___________'
Palestine or Israel?
My immediate impulse was to put down 'Palestine', after all, that is where I'd be staying for the longest time - in the West Bank in the Palestinian Territories. But 'Palestine' is still not an actual sovereign country, it does not officially exist. To post a letter to Palestine, you must address it to Israel (which I consider akin to posting a letter to Iraq to the USA)! So, what should I write? It was such an absurdly political question! Whichever country I put down I will be making a powerful political statement, and at this very first point in my journey I didn't really want to do that. So, I rang dad.
"Just put down Israel, it's only to get out of the country - you don't want any trouble."
And that's what I did - I wrote 'Israel'.

DAMASCUS AIRPORT - five hour stop-over
First impression - cigarette smoke. Everyone here smokes! Even mothers with young children and babies! Ironically, in some areas people are smoking directly below large signs telling them not to!
Second impression - men. There are so many of them! The only women around are with men and/or with children.

On the plane I got talking to a man who is from Damascus, he was returning home from Dubai. He asked me a lot of questions about why I was coming over. I told him about Follow the Women and suddenly the man became quite intense. He said - "don't get involved with politics or the government. Syria is not like Australia". I assured him that the ride was not making any political statements about the Syrian government, but he unnerved me. It also made me feel suspicious of the Syrian government, and ignorant about the fact that I knew almost nothing about it! All I know is that the US places it in the 'axis of evil', and that tells me nothing.

FOLLOW THE WOMEN
Women everywhere! How can you find your way through all these women?? Especially as a team of one! But I didn't have to worry long. I was asking someone in a corridor where I should go now when a European/Canadian voice called out 'is that an Australian accent I hear?'. I had met Cathy - coordinator for Canada, Belgium and Holland! From then on, she also took me under her wing, letting me know what was happening and where I should be.

That night, my first night with the cycle, I sat in my room (which I had to myself) and looked out the window, thinking to myself - 'well, there you go, you're in Syria'.