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Today we woke up to rain - the first we have seen on our trip. It has also turned a lot colder. We were off to Boursa - a town south of Damascus that used to be the capital of Arabia in Roman times.
We had a 7:30 alarm and were out for 8:30. We arrived at the bus station to find out that the buses are every 2 hours and the next one was 10:00. Lots of moans from Fran - she could have had another hour in bed! The bus took 2 hours so after organising our return trip, we started looking around the town.
The main site was the citadel/theatre. It was built as an amphitheatre but was converted later to a castle. The result was quite weird - outside the castle but inside a complete amphitheatre. The whole building was built in a grey stone so it all looks a bit stark.
The rest of the old town was a very large site with most of the original buildings in ruins. Other later houses had been built on top of the roman buildings even re-using some of the walls. It is difficult to understand how the site has not been preserved at all. Despite this, the size and complexity of the buildings were impressive. We met up with an American couple halfway round - they had stopped for a tea and fresh pomegranate juice. We were persuaded to try the pomegranate - it was delicious. The lad selling it had clearly met Americans before - he tried to charge them at £2 a drink - street price is 25p. The only drawback for us was that the juice didn't warm us up - we were frozen at this point. We needed to dive into a café for some soup just to warm up.
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