Tuesday, July 10, 2007

No Problems (Afish Mushkaila)

Maybe two miles before you actually reach it, you can tell that you're coming up to the Turkish-Syrian border. Large trackor trailer trucks wait in line on the right lane of the road, one after the other, kind of like cars on an enormous cross-border train. The line is so long and slow moving that the trucks are actually parked right in the street, and the drivers have all gotten out and sit on little stools in the shade the trailers make, drinking tea and playing cards.

cars and minibuses (like ours) move to the left, but things get awkward when cars try to come in the other direction. There's a lot of honking.

When you finally get up to the leaving turkey border, the structure is new, but it lacks a little in traffic planning. the closest thing i can compare it to is this: it looks like a set of two tollbooths, but instead of just going through, you have to park in the middle of the highway (no parking lot), go up to the tollbooth window, and fight the other people to get your ticket stamped. while waiting in this pedestrian tollbooth line, you have to be very careful not to be run over by the people who have already gotten their tickets (ie, passports and papers) stamped and are now driving their tracker trailers through the road about 3 inches from where you're huddled against the wall.

once you get your stamp, you go back, get into your car/minibus, and drive through, trying not to crush the toes of the new batch of people huddled in line to get their stamp.

the syrian border has no such pretentions that the system might one day be efficient: everyone has to park and go inside. once inside we had to be bounced from one person to another to another all of whom poked and prodded at our passports and asked us the same questions over and over. the first guy looked at it for a while, sent us to a side room to a guy who took our passports asked us a number of questions (and who was also highly amused that my last name is Jordan and Dan's can be transliterated as Arrabia if you felt like it), wrote our answers diligently down on a piece of paper, gave us our passports back and then sent us back out to the main area. it was only once we were back in the main area that we realized that he had not marked or stamped our passports at all, so we got back in the big shoving line, gave our passports back to the first guy, who then looked at it for a while and began to have issues with the same things - at no point did side room man and front room man have any kind of contact to let each other know that we were ok, and yes we already asked about the new pages in the passport. i started to shout afish mushkaila afishmushkaila and point to the side room where the jolly man had asked us all kinds of questions. this was apparently enough, and he stamped our passports and we were on our way.

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