We headed back down to the Mergee while the sun set, and from here I popped into a couple of Travel Agents’, and managed to secure a flight from Beirut to Cairo at 5am on December 23^rd for $220. With this peace of mind, I checked my emails, then headed back to the French Palace to change into my night out gear.

I went back to Old Damascus, and I found the cobbled streets that were bustling before eerily quiet and poorly lit. I passed a few humble-looking doorways that promised restaurants, and tried my luck with one. It was like opening the door of the tardis, or to a secret society gathering. The restaurant was cavernous, filled to the rafters, full of dressed-up locals and a few clued-up tourists. The manager of the restaurant greeted me like an old friend. “Welcome back” he said, shaking my hand and motioning the the waiter to ‘take special care of him’. I’d never been there before, and had obviously been mistaken for someone else, but I went along with it anyway. I was shown to a table fit or six, and sat alone. I ordered hummus and chicken cordon bleu, as well as a mixed fruit arguila. In front were a new couple, a Middle Eastern-looking girl and a guy from Spain dressed in a bedouin-style red and white checked headscarf. He was trying to be funny, and the girl was in fits of laughter – and that was on non-alcoholic beer,  clearly having an effect on the Spaniard, who kept shouting ‘Viva Espana!’ rather embarrassingly.  It was amazing to watch, and gave me something to listen to.  My waiter kept coming over to chat, and winking at me, smiling, and producing the menu, cutlery etc with an Arabic flourish. A Kurdish waiter kept stoking my arguila with more charcoal, and I wondered why I’d ordered an arguila with my meal as smoking and eating surely don’t go well together and I could feel my stomach churning and my head spinning, and the manager kept coming over and announcing that I, his friend, was ‘a good man’. As a result of this mistaken identity I was given free dessert, a chocolate pancake, which I half-heartedly refused, and then a whole bowl of fruit, which I again refused only for the charming waiter to take a banana, open it, peel it, cut it up, and place it on my plate with a flourish. I felt obliged to eat it, even though I was stuffed to the point of bursting.