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We stayed the night in the port town of Lattakia and took the opportunity to buy a Syrian SIM, which are really cheap here, to ease the problems with our mobiles.Easy!After wandering around town, having been guided by a student of English who walked us to practice his English, we arrived at the only retailer of local SIM cards for foreigners - Syriatel!Yes we can buy a SIM but in 3-4 days as they were out of stock - b*****!They kindly pointed us to another 'legitimate' shop around the corner - closed.But the very helpful Syrians pointed out a shop just up the street.And then the real issues began, but in a nice, administrative, bureaucratic kind of way.We eventually established that a Syriatel SIM would work in Maria's mobile but not mine so we went ahead and bought the SIM and some credit but needed to complete some paperwork.Maria kindly produced my passport and the data therein is transferred to the purchase slip...name, DOB, passport number, inside leg measurement...the works.Then the kindly shop keeper produced a purple ink stamp, daubed my thumb in the stuff and then stamped the paperwork with it! So that's me on the Syrian watch list for life now then.
All done so off we trot in the most elaborately decorated taxi known to man to what we have been advised is a lovely, traditional Syrian restaurant on the Mediterranean sea front.We get a good omen when we arrive as the menu is only in Arabic and the only diners are all natives.Big thumbs up and 'God' is finally looking down on us.Again, an extremely kind waiter comes to translate the menu for us and tells us we can eat pizza, beef burger, spaghetti...you get the gist!The only thing missing was Big Mac and fries!!We do manage to order something local so we just take in the view and watch the 2 girls on the table next to us get stuck into ice cream first followed by pizza with lashings of Tomato Ketchup!During dinner Maria started getting Arabic text messages so, knowing that we hadn't yet sold her off to a local goat herder, figured we needed to get them translated...when we did they went along the lines of 'if you do not register this SIM immediately you will be disconnected'.This meant that the man in the shop had not yet sent the paperwork details to Syriatel for registration which could mean only one thing - he was a cover for the government collecting tourist thumb prints; or he had just ripped off some more gullible tourists; or his admin was rubbish.Okay, so that's more than one thing...we're more worried about our SIM card right now than counting!
We subsequently ran Hussein Bolt style to the shop (thinking he had probably locked up by now and done a runner) to see what was going on.Turns out his IT was down but since we're still using the SIM we guess he got it sorted.
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