Secrets of the Nuns

by Anne Rothwell

After the troubles in Lebanon, my brother Freddie was living in Beirut, helping to restore water and sewage systems, so we decided to pay him a visit, knowing it would be convenient to tour Syria and Jordan while we were in the region, as we’re not ones for missing a good opportunity.

Several days after our arrival and having visited Byblos, Tyre, Sidon and Baalbek, we continued the biblical theme by taking the road to Damascus. Freddie recommended that we stay in a convent where he’d stayed in the city, so this we did and found it excellent. Our next destination was Aleppo, and finding convent accommodation a success, we managed to find one there which was willing to put us up for a night. We were shown into a pleasant twin room with a balcony overlooking a quiet and very pretty Italianate square.

Feeling tired after our long journey, we both collapsed on the beds for a rest. Five minutes later there was a knock at the door and two nuns entered, took some clothes out of the wardrobe and left again. We were soon disturbed by another knock and a nun came in and took some shoes from under the bed. Then, oh horrors, it dawned that we had taken the room from the nuns, who obviously had to find another place to sleep. We consoled ourselves with the belief that they needed the money.

The next day, we planned to go south again and stay in Homs, so we made use of an Arabic-speaking nun to phone and book us a room at the Grand Hotel there. On arrival, we discovered that the hotel was upstairs above shops in a small shopping arcade. We entered the lift, the doors closed and we were surprised to hear a seductive recorded female voice purring, “Welcome to the Grand Hotel Basman”. Then the doors opened and there, before our astonished eyes, was a roomful of ladies clad in satin dressing gowns and using hairdryers, playing cards and generally lounging around. This was some culture shock as all the females we’d seen for some time had been enveloped in burkhas or nuns’ habits.

After we’d been persuaded by the pleasant lady in Reception that it was quite normal for hotels and houses of easy virtue to be one and the same thing, we spent a pleasant enough night there; but oh, the amusing irony of imagining the nun’s reaction if she’d known where she’d booked us!


First published in VISA issue 61 (June 2005)