Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
After decades out in the cold, shunned by Western travellers and overshadowed by its faster-moving neighbours, Syria is - slowly - starting to gain the recognition it deserves as a vibrant, fascinating country. And as the country opens up to outsiders, ways to explore it multiply. I had visited Damascus before, but this time I was going to experience it through the eyes of Anissa Helou, chef, broadcaster and writer on the cuisines of the Mediterranean. A Londoner for 20 years, Anissa grew up in Beirut but remembers idyllic childhood summers spent in the Syrian highlands. Now she has returned to launch small-group culinary tours, taking ingredients, cooking styles and methods of production as a starting point to explore and understand this much-misunderstood country.
NOT everyone enjoys shopping, especially not blokes, and in particular not this bloke. That anyone can wring a scintilla of satisfaction from trawling around a store baffles me. But then I suffer from a rare congenital condition: I was born without a shopping gene. Or at least, I thought that was so. It seems that I've undergone a Damascene type conversion on the road to, er, Damascus.
