Goodbye Syria.. and thank you

So, we come to our last day in Syria, as we have bought tickets for the bus tomorrow to Beirut, leaving at 1 pm, arriving at 4 pm. We toyed with the idea of extending the visa for a few more days and made our way to the Immigration Office. However, it was such chaos, that we decided instead to go straight to the bank and then the bus station. As it was the ticket to Beirut cost only SP 200 each, which is about 3 euros, but we needed money anyway for the hotel here.
In most countries you hear about black market rates for foreign currency being higher (better) than the official bank rate. This is not the case in Syria, where the bank rate is 54 SP to the USD against a black market rate of 50. This is becuase the black market cuts out the bureaucracy of teh bakn and gives you cash on the spot. Banks in Syria are amazing places. Lots and lots of people, mainly women, sitting around, busy chatting or filling out forms. There are a few forms but each one seems to have 10 copies. Despite al this, there is only one person who really matters and that is the cashier. He is always a man and each bank has only one, which means large queues of people jostling for attention. Today, in a transaction we found hard to understand, two men brought briefcases ful of money to the cashier who passed it through his machine, only to give it out to another man in a double strength pastic bag. At least SP 500,000 (or USD 10,000) passed ownership in this way. maybe the men were only using the bank as an independent counter.
As we come to the end of our stay here, which we have greatly enjoyed we have a few observations about how Syria could boost tourism (much as we have enjoyed seeing so few tourists here - although now it is August, there seem to be lots of Italians).
Some ideas:
1 extend the tourist visa to 22 or 29 days, to allow more people to explore the country at a more leisurely pace
2 tidy up the plastic bags
3 make it easier to change travellers cheques
4 make a better effort to label items in the musuems in English
5 discourage traders and restauranteurs from charging ' tourist' prices
6 ban anti-Jewish literature from kiosks in museums
7 produce better quality postcards
8 create a clean beach resort somewhere, somehow (ambitious, I know)
Otherwise, Syria has great potential, its friendly, culturally diverse people, spectacular landscape, delicious fresh and available food, a wealth of historical sites, good transport infrastructure and so on.
But mainly it is the people here... and one is always being told "Welcome to Syria" - our abiding memory of this country.