Castles in the air

The fair maid Katarina walked down the vaulted corridors of the Castle Crac de Chevalier. As she gracefully walked past,the Templar knights got up respectfully and watched with obvious admiration the swish of her heavily embroidered hem and the flutter of the dainty veil attached to her pointy hat...

That was me in a previous reincarnation. In the current reincarnation I have read my Sir Walter Scott (a very popular writer in Victorian times, who wrote romantic adventure books, which usually involved fair maids and Templar knights returning from the Crusades). Therefore I was well prepared to return to Crac des Chevaliers - the best preserved fortress left from the time of the Crusades (built around the year 1100). Crac des Chevaliers is big - oh big! Too big to fit into one photo, so when I find a computer that will allow me to load pictures, I will instead place above a photo of the miniature paper model of the castle (as some may notice, I finally found that computer). It took me over two hours just to walk round the whole castle. It's also amazingly well preserved and the views opening up to the surrounding valley are just wonderful! This is a working fortress that has seen serious action, including months of siege, not some decorative fantasy like the castles mad Ludvig of Bayern built hundreds of years later. And yet for all its functionality the forms and proportions are very elegant and they even got round to carving some dainty details like vines and flowers into the stone walls.

Someone claimed that Ridley Scott's movie Kingdom of the Sun and the Nordic Crusader film Arn were both filmed here. If they weren't, they should have been! A fortune in set design would have been saved. You can practically hear the clinking of weapons and the hum of voices as you walk past endless corridors and decorated hallways, past the ancient latrines (coyly averting your eyes) and into the kitchen with its huge oven, into which you could easily fit a herd of cows.

Apparently the problem with loading photos on my blogis from Syria comes from the fact that, in theory, this blog site is blocked by the government - as are some other notoriously dangerous political sites such as YouTube and Facebook.

Other than that, the famous hospitality of Syria continues. I just got a cup of tea handed to me as I was writing this, and earlier on I got a complimentary 10-minute Beduine head massage from the owner of the restaurant we were having dinner in. (Stop that giggling in the back row! It was nothing like that, all very honourable and above-board. However this was the strangest massage I have ever had, since it included novel moves such as his squeezing my cheeks with his forefingers in my nostrils and also a lot of sticking fingers in the ears and wriggling. I'm not quite comfortable with these beduine massages and only thanked allah, that I had washed my hair and behind the ears this morning...)

Salam alekum