I spent my late teens and early twenties absorbed in a deep depression.  I know I’m not unique in that.  During a particularly low period, both for my psyche and my weight, I remember sitting, curled up and dressed in black, on the couch of a college counselor, looking out the window at the rapidly turning October leaves and thinking I could run away to Prague.

Strangely, when I finally got there five years later, it just wasn’t the same.  Perhaps the world had changed.  I had definitely changed.  I’d been in Morocco for nearly five months at that point.  I’d figured out the basics of cooking for myself, had navigated the medina to buy a bed and a living room table, and had traveled to Marrakesh and back by myself, twice.  By the time I got to Prague, I was more excited by how western it felt than by its own place in the world.  Mind you, I didn’t miss out entirely.  Thanks to a nasty ATM in Plzen, I had only 200 euros for the whole week, so I checked into the cheapest of hostels and explored the city by tram (the only way to do it in the freezing January cold).  I traced my steps through the first few pages of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, drank beer for breakfast near I.P. Pavlova and memorized the voice on the metro: Ukončete prosím výstup a nástup, dveře se zavírají.

My eyes were still wide the next year when I spent Christmas in The Netherlands.  I blushed and laughed discovering my cab driver at the airport was Moroccan.  He wanted to speak English, but I tried to speak darija to him, only to discover that our vocabulary was a generation off.  Two years later I made it to Budapest, where the building of Parliament seemed somehow smaller than I’d imagined and capitalism had made its way just enough to disappoint me.

Perhaps my eyes should have been wider this past March as I landed in Damascus.  Preparing for the trip, it felt like perhaps the last frontier…not because of its foreign-ness, which I hardly felt, rather, because of Syria’s tenuous relationship to the United States.  Even applying for my visa felt like I was doing something wrong (the FedEx employee who helped me mail it raised his eyebrows, breaking character long enough to let me know he disapproved).  Traveling to Japan and Malaysia a few months later, I was hardly fazed.

Lest you think of me as jaded by the opportunities presented me (at least lately), rest assured I am not.  In fact, that might just be my greatest fear.  Some of my friends are travelers to envy, having seen half the world’s nations at least.  I, my friends, am not.  According to my passport, I’ve seen 18 countries out of 195.  While that might seem like a lot (even to me), placing them on a map reveals that I’ve seen hardly anything.

But let me not stray further from the point…I began writing this post because I remember the precise moment that I snapped out of at least one period of depression.  I’d spent the fall of 2001 in a fit of desperation over a breakup of a romance that I hardly remember now.  Like many young women, I was starving – for food, for attention, for excitement.  And I was hit by the latter shortly after the start of my fall semester.  I’d attended a study abroad fair in the university’s gym, wandering from table to table with little aim or intent, when I stumbled upon a table advertising a spring semester program culminating in a trip to Senegal.

Dear readers, in that fall of 2001, at 19 years old, I couldn’t point to Senegal on a map if you begged me.  Looking back, I’m not even sure I knew what continent it was on.  I’d been to Canada (for which, at the time, you didn’t even need a passport) and to England for ten days.  And yet, talking to the doctoral student leading the trip – Ms. Barrel Gueye – I suddenly felt a sense of excitement, perhaps even purpose.  I signed up for an interview (which I barely remember), and the next thing I knew, I was getting a call inviting me into the course and the trip.  I remember telling my parents, who were excited – and a little peeved, knowing they couldn’t afford it – and my friends (who thought I was crazy), but I barely recall the semester leading up to the trip itself.  When we finally flew into Dakar, I remember so clearly looking out the airplane window onto the city below and its bright lights.  I remember the sun setting as we drove from the airport to Université Cheikh Anta Diop, and I remember that first night as sleep came, relieving us of our sheer exhaustion.

The rest is fuzzy – I have photographs and vague memories, friends I’ve kept and friends whose names I’ve forgotten, but the biggest piece is how I changed.  At twenty-seven, looking back with clarity, I see that as the moment my life changed, the moment my world opened up.

But with a tinge of sadness and a certain amount of nostalgia, I look now toward a December trip to Beirut with the sense that the world will never seem that big again.  Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing?

And yet such are the woes of my generation: as Rebekah Heacock and I have mused, we are indeed “the first globals” whether we like it or not. We are caught up in this world where borders seem thinner than they really are, friends in faraway places can become real with just a few clicks of the keyboard, a visa application, and a trip to the local airport (okay, perhaps it isn’t always that easy, but you get my drift). In the past year, I have met over fifty people that were previously only avatars and blog URLs, but who have become best friends and loved ones. Becoming attached to people so far away can hurt desperately; it can also demonstrate the true power of this new world we live in. It can also change your life.

But this post is supposed to be about Syria. Syria, just the name of which causes raised eyebrows where I’m from. Syria, which people assume to be this country on the axis of evil, this dark place hidden away from the world. Syria, which causes people to somehow forget thousands of years of history in remembrance of the past fifty or so.

In reality? I loved it. Along with Prague, it’s the best place I’ve ever traveled, only better, because the people match the beauty of the place (not the case in the city of a hundred spires). And having gone in with no real magical expectations (I admittedly did most of my reading on Wikipedia, which is fine, because I know who authored most of Syria’s Wikipedia entries), any that I did have were far exceeded.

But of course a country seems perfect when you’re only there for eight days. I don’t want to give some magical perception of the place, because I realize that I barely dug beneath the surface. I spent all of my time with the inimitable Anas Qtiesh of Global Voices, and we were often joined by the lovely Sarah, and occasionally by the beautiful Razan. I ate fetteh and cherry kabobs (which my dear Syrian Bostonian friend told me this morning are not in fact an Aleppine tradition at all), and drank countless glasses of the lemon-and-mint-smoothie that is polo. I rode on the nicest train I’ve ever been on in my life (only the German route from Munich to Prague remotely compares), countless incredible Syrian buses (including once in a VIP section in the back that reminded me of the mob), and plenty of taxis and services (microbuses). I visited the Citadel of Aleppo, the Khan Asad Pasha and Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, the Mediterranean coast in Tartous, and the ruins at Bosra. I drank countless cups of strong black coffee, plenty of Barada beers, and copious amounts of homemade Syrian wine out of a gasoline can.

People keep asking me how my trip was – some with amazement that I went there at all, others with the same curiosity as if I’d just returned from Paris or California. Others still ask “why on earth would you want to go there?” Still others are surprised I managed to return at all. I don’t really know how to answer these questions – If I say it was incredibly safe, I was never bothered once, and it felt like home, they either don’t believe me or are shocked. If I say things seem to run so smoothly and everyone is perfectly kind, I feel like I’m betraying Syria’s reality (which is to say that of course it’s not perfect, but a tourist can’t see below the surface). So when anyone asks, I just say I had the time of my life.

(Photos are mine and Creative Commons except the one of me, which is CC but by Anas Qtiesh)