Back in Damascus, Roommate and I met up with our host - the friend of our buddy in Tunis. Upon meeting him, however, it turned out that he and Roommate knew each other from their Arabic program in Oman! This sort of recognition was repeated throughout the weekend, and during our conference in Jordan we discovered that almost everybody was connected in two steps or fewer. The world of Americans who study the Middle East is quite small, it appears. And since I just met about 60 more people who belong to that group, it is growing increasingly smaller.
Ours was the perfect host - he made ample room for us in his spotless apartment, spent every evening with us for dinner and drinks afterward, and connected Roommate with another friend of theirs from Oman. The four of us set out one afternoon to climb one of the hills that hover over Damascus.
The way was steep. Roads were streamlined into stairways, and then the stairways dissolved into gravely hillside. We scrambled up, much to the amusement of the waiting Damascenes - everyone else had arrived at the summit the normal way: in a car.
The views are spectacular up there, and the cafes more than willing to overcharge for the privilege of sitting, looking, being. So we skipped a cafe and instead got ripped off, to a lesser extent, by drinking coffee from a nearby coffee cart.
Across Syria, I had been tracking the glorious imagery of the president. His face crops up all over the place, on pins and mugs (puns abound), and even in mosaic form. The pantheon of leaders is augmented by representations of the president’s father (former president himself) and the bearded head of Hezbollah. In some instances, the president of Iran even made an appearance, although this was much less common. All these amazing images increased my excitement to visit Damascus’s Panorama - the Syrian version of my favorite sight in Cairo. I was not disappointed.
Roommate and I took a cue from the feat I’d managed in Cairo and, upon reaching the Panorama’s ticket window, passed ourselves off as Tunisians to pay the Arab price. This deception resulted in my favorite quotation of the day: when a guide ran up to assist us, the ticket taker scolded him (in Arabic, of course), “No, they’re not foreigners, they’re Arab!”
We then were taken on the Arabic tour with a group of Syrian teenagers. Thus did we learn about Syria’s triumphs in the 1973 war, after which the country regained the Golan Heights. We were treated to a film and visited the spinning rotunda of the Panorama. Then we were lead into a room unique to Damascus.
Here, a wall-size mural depicts all of the ethnic minorities of Syria taking part in a harmonious parade, with the (former) president and his family at the center.
Nearby, viewers are treated to an image detailing Queen Zenobia, beautifully appropriatedas a symbol of Syrian mastery. 
And, facing the wall-sized painting, was one of the finest works of Korean artistry I’ve ever seen:
In this image, we see the former president of Syria, Hafiz al-Assad, participating in a triumphant fist thrust with one Kim Jong Il. Unfortunately, I was unable to purchase a poster-sized reproduction of the painting to hang in my home.
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