addendum

my friend, levi, who is male, jewish, and american spent this past weekend in damascus with two of my other american friends, zoe and brennan, neither of whom is jewish. unlike zoe and brennan, who got syrian visas while they were in the us, levi just showed up at the border hoping he wouldn't get turned away. in an attempt to prevent this, he put $50 in his passport, but the border guard merely handed it back to him. according to zoe, they hung out at the border for 4 hours, but none of them were hassled at all.

"we smiled a lot. they smiled a lot, too. the whole country smiled at us, actually. everyone was trying to guess where we were from since we obviously were't syrian, but no one guessed american since syria doesn't exactly have an abundance of american tourists. one guy asked us if we were british, and i said, 'no, american,' and he said, 'great! i'm iranian!' but the conversation didn't go much further than that because we were trying to get somewhere."

i ran into the syrian girl studying hebrew on my way to class. she was really excited to hear the story.