"It is holiday. But normally more people. Many, many more people." said Ahmad, a watermelon vendor who was setting up his street at 8am yesterday, when the summer sunshine was already blisteringly hot. "But now people stay home or they go - Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, all these places. My family have gone, it is the only way."
It is not just street traders who are packing their families off to safety. For all their tough public talk about "beating the terrorists", many senior regime officials are quietly installing their wives and children with friends across the border in Lebanon.
Overhead most days, a bulky Russian helicopter gunship now slowly patrols the skies, circling over the dusty concrete suburbs and even the city centre. In the district of Dariya there are permanent-looking machine gun rests sandbagged into the ground, along with tanks and armoured cars at key intersections.
This weekend, one helicopter has also been firing in to the heart of Mezzeh, a district of the capital that is home to many Alawites, the ruling minority sect of President Bashar al-Assad. Mezzeh is full of security installations and a place where many senior military live and retire to. To have the need for such overt defence of such a loyalist stronghold would have simply unthinkable until a few days ago.
Even up to last week, the Damascene business and political elite still seemed relaxed, dining in the restaurants and cafes. The men in smart suits, the ladies in big hair and obvious gold bling, they were either oblivious or impervious to a war well beyond their city. But that was until Thursday's bombing of Damascus's national security building, which killed four of the president's inner circle, and sent out a message that nobody in the ruling clique was invulnerable anymore.
Now, the top figures in the regime are gone from the glitzy new arcades of the central districts. The restaurants are shuttered - partly due to lack of demand, and partly because the staff cannot safely travel home after work.
There are also odd and unpredictable power shortages which seem to come and go without warning. A note passed under my hotel room door tells me that I should not use the steam room during the twice-daily scheduled power cuts. The curtailment of steam-based therapy, it explains, is due to the "national energy crisis". This is a new and unusual term for what the Red Cross now calls "civil war".
Equally, on my phone, a welcoming message happily pings in every day telling me that I can call 137 for tourist information. I have seen no tourists.
We came into Damascus overland from neighbouring Jordan, along a motorway that is now rutted by tank tracks. The drive to Damascus from the frontier used take no more than 90 minutes, now it takes hours, going through perhaps 20 military roadblocks. Crossing the border took eight hours, as anxious Syrian border guards checked everything from the chassis of our vehicle to mobile phone serial numbers.
"I am so sorry" said one captain, shaking his head as he poured us tea during a wait at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Damascus. "The terrorists are everywhere now". And then the familiar mantra of the House of Assad. "Only President Bashar al-Assad can hold Syria together. Only he can do it."
Both government and rebels in this conflict routinely plead with visiting journalists to "tell the truth of what is happening here." But for both sides, their respective "truths" are so very different. As we tour the city, I am reminded constantly of the last thing a customs official told me as we left Jordan and entered Syria.
"Be careful, sir," he said, shaking my hind. "In Syria, there are good people, but now, many angry people and many different sides."
Alex Thomson is chief correspondent for Channel 4 News
