I saw more types of sweets than savoury dishes. It’s an intimidating constellation. Here are a few of my favourites and where to find the best of each.

Sahlab

A deceptively simple blend of milk, sugar, corn starch and rose water, it’s thick, warm, and more comforting than your mama’s hot cocoa on a winter night. When cooled, it congeals like gelatin and can be spooned as a dessert. Get creative with toppings: cinnamon, crushed nuts, shredded coconut, etc.

Best one: El-Mina, Lebanon
This seaside suburb of Tripoli has a little shop that specializes in warm liquid treats. Go to the Christian souk and ask around for it.

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Kneffeh

The edible equivalent of an oily four-hand massage given by two Arab beauties with roses in their hair. Fresh cheese is baked under semolina cake and the whole thing is drowned in sugar syrup. Served on a plate or to go in a sesame flatbread, it should be classified as a dangerous substance. Thankfully, it isn’t.

Best one: Jenin, West Bank
There’s an unassuming sweet shop called Shalhoub in the central shopping area of Jenin. Unlike regular knaffeh, they bake it in vermicelli pastry. The cheese is fresh  and gooey and the outside crispy.

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Halawet al-Jibn

It’s not a cannelloni, it’s akawi cheese and semolina flour pressed into sheets and rolled with ashta cream. Although bland on its own, it resembles a lighter cheesecake once you douse it with sugar syrup.

Best one: Tripoli, Lebanon
The Hallab family of Tripoli is famous for sweets. Lore says that after a nasty fight, the three Hallab brothers split up the family business, each running their own sweet empire. They are all fantastic, especially their cream-based sweets like halawet al-jibn.

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Halva/halawa

Whether in the Hebrew or Arabic domains, this dense, crumbly sesame paste is delicious on its own, topped with nuts or as a sweet dip with pita bread. For my money, the Israelis do it best.

Best one: West Jerusalem, Israel
I don’t like endorsing rude pricks, but one seller in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market makes perfect halva with a scary flavour variety:  coffee, passion fruit, pomegranate, and nuts are just a few. Must spend a minimum of 40 shekels. Look for his stall near the wine shops. And brace for hostile service.

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Arabic ice cream

On the first spoonful you notice that the ice cream of the Arab world is different. It’s gooier and gummier, almost like a taffy. A key ingredient is Arabic gum, a resin form the mastic tree (not to be confused with gum arabic, with is derived from the acacia tree). Try the Arabic flavour, which tastes of nuts, rosewater, and sesame.

Best one: Ramallah, West Bank
There are many reasons to visit the Palestinian capital. The ice cream is just another. Try Baladna on Main St.

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Kataif

It looks like a turnover, but it’s sweet and creamy. A crumpet-like pancake is filled with ashta cream, fried, and doused in syrup. Crispy on the outside, cool and buttery inside.

Best one: Damascus, Syria
Jasmatiyeh Street, which I dubbed the Las Vegas of sweets, has a line of shops offering fresh kataif. Try any of them.

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Namoura

You can spot this simple semolina cake in any sweet shop by the almond placed atop each cut square. That’s the traditional way. Some shops, however, add their own poetry by tinkering with the density and toppings.

Best one: Aleppo, Syria
The Aleppan version of namoura is the closest you’ll come to dark matter. You could power a hyperspace engine on it. It’s impossibly chunky, gooey, and layered with pistachios and cashews.

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We wanted to watch the sunset from the Bedouin camp, but it was only 2:30. We had our fill of Roman ruins and citadels in Palmyra and a still had a taxi driver for the full day.

“So I pick you up in one hour,” he asked when we drove to a Bedouin family’s desert home. No we want to stay until sunset, we told him, for the fourth time.

The reason for his insistence became clear. The family doesn’t speak a word of English. Not the father, with his leather jacket, gold rings and red-and-white keffiyeh. Not his wife who served us tea repeatedly. Not their four boys.

Fifteen minutes of “thank you” and “beautiful” in tourist Arabic and it started getting awkward.

Their boys kept shyly looking at us. Suddenly I realized how the next two hours would be spent.

Step 1: Candy

We pulled out a bag of Vietnamese guava drops and the boys advanced like hungry cats. The littlest one had a hard time untwisting the wrapper, which was an opportunity to test his hand-eye coordination: he had to fetch the candy from my rapidly-moving hand.

We won our first giggles, and consequently, their trust.

Step 2: Soccer

Their home is a tent pitched on a cement foundation, about the size of a transport container. Inside are just cushions and an oil stove. Beside it is a cooking tent, a bath tent, and several meters away the corral for the sheep and a pigeon coop.

There’s a satellite dish for the TV and a diesel generator that powers it. All around them are acres and acres of dry, desolate desert. The nearest water pump is 100 meters away.

It was the biggest backyard I’d ever seen. You can kick a ball as hard as you can and it would still be in their property. So that’s what we did.

A little clumsy dribbling around it and some shots at an imaginary goal had them in snickers.

One hour had passed since we arrived. We didn’t exchange any mutually intelligible sentences.

Palmyra, an oasis in the Syrian desert once ruled by Romans. Click photos for a gallery.

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Step 3: Ruins

A few hundred meters from their tent are the remains of an ancient Bedouin home made of mud. The boys led us there while kicking the ball back and forth.

“Snick!” the oldest one, about 12, yelled when we walked over some burrows in the sand.

Snick?

“Ey, snick. Snick.” He clamped my arm with his fingernails. He bared his teeth. He picked up a bush twig and scratched two dots on his arm. He hissed.

Oh, snake! A snake hole. And so we spent the rest of the walk trying to scare each other with false snick alarms.

Step 4: Toys

We took lots of pictures and videos and showed them the results on the LCD screen.  They watched themselves on the tiny monitor like they it was the latest Disney movie. When we taught them how to take pictures, they couldn’t wait for their turns.

A length of rubber tubing was found and fashioned into a swing when I held it from both ends. It later became a spinning swing when I rotated in place.

A lot of talking. No one cared that nothing was understood from either side.

Step 5: Sheep

Dusk approached and it was time to round up the sheep and put the young in separate pen. If they sleep with the adults, they’ll drink all the milk, leaving nothing for the yogurt and cheese the family sells in Palmyra.

The lambs are quick, but the third-youngest boy is quicker. He lunged at a baby one and grabbed its tail, pulling it in. “Baby,” he said, and brought it within petting range. He’s dealt with enough tourists to know this is a crowd pleaser.

The taxi driver arrived and asked us, as we said goodbyes, if we had brought a gift for the children. That’s what tourists are expected to do. But all we had was the guava candy and some money for the parents.

Judging from their grins, I don’t think they minded this one omission.

Some photos of our afternoon with them:

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Syria is a nation of kindness. Hospitality is a sacred duty. If a visitor does not feel welcome, it’s seen as a collective failure. It’s impossible to feel lost, confused, or ignored in Syria; a willing helper is always the closest person.

And Syrians like everyone. Unlike many in the West, they know how to separate politics from personal. As people who have lived under repressive regimes themselves, they know that governments doesn’t always represent their people.

Here is a selection of our best photos from the country. Click on “Show info” to read the captions.
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In Syria, Facebook and Youtube are blocked. But everyone knows how to get around it.

The word “proxy” is common knowledge. Most Internet cafés have proxies – servers that rout Internet traffic through other countries – already configured into the web browser. Some have anonymous surfing tools like Hotspot Shield installed.

Even the less tech-savvy know that simply putting an “s” after the “http” gives full access to Facebook.

Which all seems to beg the question: if the Syrian people flout the restrictions so openly, why does the government bother having them at all?

Different opinions

No one citizen, of course, knows for sure, but that doesn’t stop them from guessing. Although politics is a topic better left untouched, the Syrians who volunteer their opinions reveal a wide gamut of views.

“It’s part of the government’s plan to keep the people from realizing how bad their lives are,” said one dissenter, whose dissenting is usually done to visitors around a shisha.

Part of that stratagem, he says, is to keep people poor with exorbitant taxes. If they’re busy thinking about food, he posits, they’re not thinking about free speech.

Another Syrian, one who hangs the picture of the president on his wall out of pride, not obligation, looks at it differently.

“When new technologies appear, people use it for bad,” he says. A scorned lover, for example, may use social networks to distribute nude pictures of his ex-girlfriend, disgracing her and shaming her family. Honour killings, he claims, have happened because of this.

The government is simply protecting its people, he argues.

Another Syrian, one who was educated abroad and works for an international organization in Jordan, offers a third view: the government is protecting the people, but not from naked pictures. “It’s to keep the uneducated masses from being recruited by radical Muslim groups,” he said.

A secular country, Syria works hard to prevent the extremist violence that plagues other Arab countries. And it does this via some censorship.

Then why does the government allow people to circumvent the blocks so easily?

“Only people who really know about computers know how to get around it,” the first apologist offered. In other words, the government tolerates sedition only by a geek minority.

Slow openings

The first two arguments don’t really hold water. You don’t see people starving in Syria, and just about every urban dweller under 30 – those most likely to use technology subversively – know their way around a web browser.

What I think is happening is that a new generation of connected youth is dipping its toes in free expression and seeing what happens. And the government is probably observing.

Syrians still live with the slight suspicion that the government is listening to everything they say, a paranoia inherited from the 30-year rule of Hafez al-Assad, father of the current president and a hardline strongman.

But his son Bashar, a reformer and former computer nerd, was the one who brought the Internet to Syria. A society that lived under closed socialism for so long can’t be rushed into democracy, and the country is taking baby steps – some of them backwards – towards a more open society.

A half-hearted block of a few websites is one of them.

For the first time in my life, I really wanted a time machine. Not for minor things, like correcting regretful memories or killing Hitler, but to see what life was like in these incredible castles peppered all over Syria.

As a strategic point between Europe and Asia, Syria was a sought-after domain for Western merchants and other invaders. It was also a handy base for Arabs to swoop down on Crusaders strongholds in the Holy Land.

The result is a ton of awesome, well-preserved fortresses.

See our selection of photos from four major ones:

Krak des Chevaliers

Lawrence of Arabia called this the mosrt admirable and best-preserved castle in the world, and it’s crammed with medieval awesome: a moat separating the outer walls from the inner fortress, round defense towers, an elevated gate where a drawbridge once stood, and lots of crannies for archers, catapults, and boiling oil dispensers.

Built for the emir of Aleppo, it was later captured and expanded by the Knights Hospitaliers during the Crusades. It resistedseiges for two centuries, until it finally fell to the Mamlukes.

Highlights: the massive oven used to make break for 2,000 soldiers, a Gothic church converted to a mosque.

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Saladin’s Castle

This one goes back 3,000 years to the Phoenicians, who, legend says, crumbled under a magical gate-crushing club wielded by Alexander the Great.

The Byzantines eventually took it and built the massive defense structures you see today, like the 28-meter ditch dug around it. A tall rock needle, used to support a drawbridge, is testament of that.

It fell to the great Muslim invader Salah Ed-Dine, who gave it its modern name.

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Citadel of Aleppo

It towers over the old city on a hill surrounded by a wide moat. Mostly ruins remain among a few surviving structures: the Ayyubid Palace and the adjoining bath, populated with dismembered mannequins in bathing attire, an amphitheatre and a mosque, and a restored throne hall from the Mamluke period.

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Citadel of Palmyra

Today it’s a tourist hole where the normally kind and helpful Syrians morphed into greedy and dishonest touts. But Palmyra was once a bustling caravan oasis in the middle of the desert.

Like most places in Syria, it underwent successive reigns by Greeks, Romans, and Arabs. From the citadel you’re treated to sweeping views of the desert, avenues of Roman columns, and tomb towers for noble families.

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If Las Vegas dealt in baklavas instead of money, it would look like Jasmatiyah Street in Damascus.

Everything is big and flashy. Nut-filled pastries are stack higher than people. Rolls of pistachios in vermicelli dough thicker than a forearm beckon stares of disbelief.

In one of many shops, bakers in ethnic headdress prepare halawat with ashta cream. A giant LCD screen above him plays a making-of-sweets promotional reel.

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Across the street, another store competes with human numbers. Counters with trays filled with evert kind of dessert spill onto the sidewalk, each manned my large, bearded, jolly men. They each offer passersby a free sample. It’s all delicious.

And in the middle of it all is one shop that stands quietly with the dignity of its name. “That’s Daoud Brothers,” our host told us. “They make the best sweets in Syria.” The interior decor alone should earn it UNESCO World Heritage status.

Dieters and diabetics: you have been warned.

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The inside of Daoud Brothers sweet shop on Jasmatiyah Street.

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When we told our Couchsurfing host in Damascus that in Canada it’s customary to bring your own drink, and sometimes even food, to a party of barbecue, he looked shocked.

“What would you do in this situation,” I asked him.

After a hearty chuckle, he responded,” I would thank the invitation, but I’d stay far away from that party.”

In Syria, hospitality is a sacred thing. It’s a code of honour that runs in their blood for generations. The traditional Syrian home, from simple abodes to sprawling palaces, has a room dedicated to guests. It’s usually decorated with the best furniture in the house and its door remains unlocked.

According to tradition, anyone passing by could come in and stay for one day or one year. And, historically (but not really practiced today) the host would ask the stranger who he is and why he came after three days.

It’s hard to spend one day in Syria without being disarmed by her people. Only two hours into Damascus, our first stop, we bumped into Aesha, a girl we briefly met in a bus in Beirut. “So luck! So luck see you”, he gushed as if we were old, long-lost friends.

Mixing pantomime and English Level 1 vocabulary, we ambled in the city’s crowded streets, armed linked with Aesha as she paid for our snacks and our nuts before we had a chance to reach for our wallets. “You my visit, my guest, I pay for you, please!”

We didn’t resit too much, since it’s all very cheap. But hours later, we ate at a restaurant. Aesha didn’t eat and only helped herself to some water. But before I could swallow my last forkful she was before the cashier asking for the bill.

Roberto couldn’t let a 22-year old student pay a relatively high bill and ran after her

“No no no no no, you don’t have to pay, plese, you student, no need”, he entreated.

“Yes, yes please, please, my pleasure, please”, she responded.

Long, awkward minutes passed with slight variations in vocabulary and progressively grander gestures from both parties. Aesha finally gave up when the restaurateur advised her, with a defeated demeanor, to let it go. We picked up one Arabic word from his speech: amerki. They’re Americans, we assumed he said. They’re like that.

To be in a country where stores are decorated with fountains shaped like Arabian coffee pots, the local symbol for generosity, makes us reflect on our own attitudes back home. Where we eat alone in front of the computer, or feel slightly offended if a guest doesn’t bring a wine bottle. Where each one pays, to the nearest dollar, for what he consumed at a restaurant.

Short of cash, you say? The buying power of the average Syrian is far, far lower than our own.

Wajdi, our host in Damascus, spends many days fasting, Ramadan or not. “I don’t like to eat alone. I prefer to wait until I get home at night to eat with you.

“Food is something to be shared,” he said, night after night, in a fabulous restaurant or with a package of warm takeaway shawarma at home. And he always insisted on paying. And we, irreversibly Westernized, had a monumental difficulty in accepting.

Post Scriptum:

This post was published in an Internet café in Homs. After we sat down, without warnign or request, we were given a bottle of Syrian beer by the owner. “Welcome,” he said, a word we hear constantly, even by those who don’t speak English. As we prepared to pay for a combined total of six Internet hours, a scan and several printed pages, we were surprised again.

“How much”, we asked.

“No, free”, the owner replied..

“Free? No possible, free! 6 hours Internet, printing, scan, no free!” we protested.

“Today, first day business. Thank you, thank you very much, please welcome”,he said, handing us his business card.