I checked my phone, revealing a ton of messages and missed calls from friends asking about my father and if he was okay.

To understand Damascus, one has to understand the amount of demographic categorizations there are. Class, sect, race, gender, ethnicity, address, family name, job title, degree, and so on. People categorize those around them based on any of these categories and then apply certain rules to how different they’ll behave around them, or how to perceive any of their behaviors.

No city captures the attention quite like Istanbul, a place so good they named it thrice. The city that stretched back to the days of the Greeks, the city that guarded Christianity’s most precious relics during the dark ages, and the city that transformed the Ottomans from a minuscule desert kingdom to a mighty Empire. According to one of her most treasured writers, the only thing she doesn’t like is clichés.