Bizarre ... But So Delicious

I've always been an "extreme" person, oscillating from one extreme to the other of the scale quite easily. In many ways nothing has changed over time. So when people called me bizarre I could very well understand why :-)

In Aleppo I stayed in the dirtiest place so far in the Middle East. The toilet, filthy and stinky, with the overflowing garbage bin - only used toilet paper :-) - not emptied in days was not quite a highlight. Not in a positive way, anyway. The place was also the cheapest I had stayed in at 175Syrian pounds per bed in the dormitory - less than 4USD. But I made sure I made up for this in other ways :-)

How do you go to a top-end restaurant dressed in your most miserable clothes? With confidence. Put on a nice smile, have your pockets prepared to pay and you can fine-dine out here.
That's at least how I did it. Wearing my not too clean trekking pants with their black ugly stitches on my bum ( but no new hole anymore!) and the black fleece I had now worn for weeks and slept in several nights in a row. Tiny down flakes were sticking to it. But who knew all this except for me and Pepe ?
It was a real treat. The mid-Eastern cuisine is fantastic but, unfortunately, you don't have a large selection on the streets. To only feed on falafel, shawarma and other street food and miss out on the truly delicious dishes would be a huge mistake. You would miss an important dimension of the mid-Eastern experience. And so I alternated cheap and expensive dinners, making the best out of both.

Cooked corn cobs and tea on the street in Hama? Awesome. An assortment of mezze in the top restaurant in Aleppo? Exquisite. Popcorn worked for dinner as well as falafel countless times. But those made the delicately spiced dishes in the fine restaurants even more outstanding.
The fine-dining experience is not just about food, though. It's the setting that makes a difference, too, as those jasmine-fragrant inner courtyards are simply lovely and the architectural details of the nicely restored buildings fabulous. There's also no rush. You can sit around and sip a coffee or smoke a waterpipe for hours. You can read or dream in between as well :-)

Rest assured I didn't go out to restaurants every other day, but over the weeks spent in Syria I've been 5 times out and indulged myself in some of the most delicious dishes I've had in the last couple of years. And if you wonder how much such an eccentricity costed I might disappoint you. It was about 10USD, at most 15USD, and then I pigged out completely. But hey, in comparison to the 50 cents popcorn dinner it was a small fortune.