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Back to Nottingham

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Hello! It has been a long time since our last post (sorry), and we are now 1 week away from heading home.  Our time in Aleppo has been unforgettable. The opportunity to become emerged in Syria for a  year is an incredible blessing, and there are so many moments and people we will remember  with a smile. Farewell meal with friends by the Citadel The country is very different to other places we have travelled to – a desert country that comes  alive in the winter months when the ground finally gets enough water to turn green. But primarily  a hot country where people endure long summer months.  Aleppo is a city that retains a huge amount of beauty and charm, and yet has evidence of  devastating fighting in many parts where buildings are abandoned to ruin and formerly busy  streets are now silent. Even in the parts that the war did not reach, the economic downturn has  taken effect. The poverty of everyday people is severe, a lot of businesses have long since gone,  and people struggle for
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From Cyprus to the Citadel

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By Lindsay We were fortunate to go on holiday last month, taking a week of ‘R&R’ in Cyprus and 2 weeks annual leave back home in Nottingham. After travelling from Aleppo to Damascus, we crossed the border into Lebanon by road, and had a lovely afternoon, evening and morning in Beirut before flying to Larnaca. Beirut is beautiful! A hilly city on the coast, with snow-capped mountains in the background, and we were really delighted to enjoy some sunny and warm weather after the chill of Aleppo. The history is reflected in the architecture – with a lot of new, very smart skyscrapers along the coast, interlaced with bullet-ridden buildings, a legacy of the civil war in the 1980s, which have long since been abandoned. Cyprus was wonderful – we spent the first few days in Nicosia wandering around the town straddling the Green Line between the Greek and Turkish sides of the island. Steve found his long-awaited really good pint of beer, and we both ate as many pork products as we could fin
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Welcome to 2024

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  Happy New Year!     We hope that you had some good time over Christmas, and have started 2024 well. It turns out that New Year is a bigger celebration than Christmas in Aleppo, although we celebrated as well as we could on Christmas Day. We opened presents, and Steve cooked a fantastic lunch, and we spent the afternoon in a café with 20 others playing silly games.          Our amazing colleagues , Ahmad, Ammar and Hasan , helped us to move from the hotel into our new apartment a few days before Christmas, and we are enjoying the new-found space. The apartment is huge! It belongs to a family who left Syria 11 or 12 years ago (during the war), and it hasn’t been lived in since, so we have found some very out-of-date food in the cupboards, and a lot of dust. But it has almost everything we need – a lovely kitchen crammed full with crockery and pans etc., a cosy (cow print themed) living room, 3 good bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. There’s also some fancy rooms like a formal salon and
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