Welcome to 2024
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who left Syria 11 or 12 years ago (during the war), and it hasn’t been lived in since, so we have found some very out-of-date food in the cupboards, and a lot of dust.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