Yesterday, I set out to visit St. Simeon which isn’t as close to Aleppo as I thought it was. Someone told me it was about an hour away, but I thought it was only 15-20 mins from here. Shows what I’ve learned over the past eight and a half months.

Anyway, not only is it farther away, but there’s no bus that goes there. You have to take a sarvees - something I’ve never done. I didn’t know where to find the sarvees to St. Simeon (and had many problems trying to find out where to go with my lousy American-accented Arabic), so I just went to the garage and hopped on a bus to Tartous.

By this time, it was already 1:30 - not the best time to start a 3-4 hour journey down south, but hey. That’s how I roll. (read: stupidly) Since it was so late, I only spent a couple of hours in Tartous, but I didn’t really care. All I wanted was to see the Mediterranean. Tartous didn’t disappoint and the weather was fantastic. It wasn’t even crowded (except on the buses), so that was swell too.

The rocks of Tartous