The ordinary and touristy:

My first overnight lodging was old, slightly fusty and on a busy street. It was, however, within walking distance of the Old City and the National and Army museums. Friends who had visited Syria had told me that these, along with the Old City, were worth seeing.

The history-nerd touristy, with a little known piece of Judaica:

The National Museum is particularly notable for an exhibit of the world's first known alphabet, from the 14th-century B.C. in Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast, and for a reconstructed A.D. second-century synagogue.

A stupidity-free and condescension-free accurate presentation of bumping clumsily into ordinary religious customs and tradition:

Although I had removed my shoes and was wearing an ankle-length skirt and a head scarf when I attempted to enter, I was sternly stopped and directed to a cloaking room, where I paid to cover myself with a long gown. In devout Islam, only the face and hands of a woman should be seen outside the home. . . In the cloaking room, a too-eager guide took me in tow. He pointed out the green-domed structure containing the head of John the Baptist — like Jesus, John the Baptist is a prophet in Islam.

And, again that, now about her cross-country driver:

Here and there, we passed a black-robed shepherd tending a few sheep. Once, where there were shepherds' tents in the distance, Mumad-Ahmad asked if I would like to stop to take pictures. . . It soon became clear that he wanted to stop to pray. He scrambled out of the van, went down to a stream to wash and then returned to take his prayer rug from the dashboard, shake it out, and lay it down in the road in front of the van for his prayers.

Absolutely true in this part here about the television on the bus, sadly, in the USA, the closest Greyhound ever came for me was when one wise-guy driver announced that we could "enjoy the Greyhound cross-country in-travel movie which you can see at any time by looking out the windows to your right and left":

On buses — because so much of the travel is through hot desert — a porter fills and refills plastic cups with water at each seat. Seats are numbered, and one must beware of sitting in the wrong one because seats are so scarce. There is television entertainment.

And this type of experience, of which I encountered similar:

There were no street lights and no policemen, only a pedestrian bridge here or there over the highway. However, before I found a bridge, as I stood, immobilized, on a traffic island, a woman took me by the arm and helped me dodge around the cars. As she left me where I wanted to be, she smiled. "Syrian people are kind people," she said in English.

Actually, of course, we are all admixtures of the good, bad, ugly, kind and unkind, but that kind of gesture is characteristic. And so refreshing compared to Egypt, where the same might happen but a tip or a purchase of a tourist-trinket might be demanded in the middle of the road-crossing for doing the favor.