"Service Taxi" Across the Syrian Border: Damascus to Beirut

I recently found myself packed like a sardine with 7 strange Syrian men in a maroon-colored Denali hurdling across the border from Syria to Lebanon. Well, almost hurdling.

To be sure, the driver was speeding and swerving every chance he got, burning similarly overstuffed sedan-size "service taxis" in the dust, but every couple of kilometers we found ourselves stopped at a new checkpoint.

Though I had triple checked that I'd be able to get a Lebanese visa with my E.U. passport at the border, it quickly became clear that the immigration process was more fluid than fixed, more personal politics than national protocol.

Through a series of awkward conversations, in a dismal combination of Arabic, French, English and pantomime (typically the most effective), my friend Tiffany and I were told that we didn't have the appropriate stamps to leave the country.

Apparently the grizzly-looking border guards, who had Pres. Assad's face plastered across their walls like teenage girls pin up pop stars, were totally unamused. One of them handed back our passports with a sneer, clearly taking pleasure in refusing two, admittedly bumbling, foreign girls.

Luckily, a Syrian woman nearby saw this interchange and intervened. With all the frantic hand waving and pointing toward Lebanon that we were doing, it was probably difficult not to notice us.

Though I didn't understand what she said in Arabic, the same guard soon took our passports back, stamped them, and flicked us away with his wrist, overgrown pinky nail and all.

"These guys are ridiculous," she said to us in English with a friendly smile, before getting back in her car and driving off.

Back in the Denali, in-between further checkpoints, the driver and other passengers assured us that the current stop-and-go border crossing was actually much easier nowadays, than in years past. (A Syrian-Irish kid next to me, on his way back to dental school in Beirut, was graciously and energetically doing all of the translating.)

It turns out they were right, and the procedure has been relaxed as part of a broader and very significant thaw in diplomacy between Syria and Lebanon. That Syrian woman knew the guard was just giving us a hard time with outdated procedures.

This past month Lebanon opened its first-ever embassy in Damascus, marking the beginning of formal diplomatic relations. Since the two countries emerged as separate, independent states from the French mandate in the 1940s, their governments were so entangled in each others' affairs that an official relationship was never established.

By 2005, after living through 30 years of occupation by the Syrian army, its plain-sight support for Hezbollah, and the assassination of Prime Minister Hariri, widely credited to Damascus, about half of Lebanon had become outwardly hostile to Syria though. The issue divided the country, moreover the region. Diplomacy soured, damping down both trade and immigration, even a soccer match could become an international incident.

Now four years later, the situation looks dramatically different, both at the government level and on the street: the anniversary of Syria's withdrawal passed just last week with surprisingly little fanfare.

The taxi passengers were reluctant to discuss the tension at all. Among almost any group of strangers, in either country, politics were indeed consistently an unpopular topic. Instead they found camaraderie in their shared frustration over the excessive checkpoints and tricky protocol.

At one point I asked the car if they thought all the checkpoints had anything to do with weapons smuggling to Hezbollah, and unsurprisingly, that one was quickly shot down.

By the time we settled into Beirut, we found a few people slightly more willing to open up. Andre, the bartender at the legendary Captain's Cabin bar in Hamra, captured the mood of the tension best: "The army, we don't like. The regime, we don't like. But we don't have anything against the people."