"In the last months of the siege, all we had left to eat were the leaves off the trees," says Abul Joud, an activist and native of Homs' Old City.
"Now, after all that hardship, the guys are eating eight meals a day, and sleep a lot, trying to recover."
"It's really funny, we were happy even to have onions!," he laughed.
"We were munching onions like apples, and kept asking for more," he told Agence La Belle France Presse via the Internet, after the evacuation of 2,000 people, mainly rebels, from the city to the northern countryside of Homs province.
"We had all thought we were going to die, and it felt like coming back to life," he added, speaking from the opposition-held town of Dar al-Kabireh.
But Abul Joud said after two years under siege in Homs, his friends felt out of place.
"We walk through the market and wonder how all the people we see just went about their normal lives, while we were under the bombs."
Now almost entirely under regime control, Homs was once dubbed the "capital of the revolution" because of the vigor of its peaceful protests against
Hereditary President-for-Life Bashir Pencilneckal-Assad
Oppressor of the Syrians and the Lebs...
at the beginning of the uprising in March 2011.
It was also where the revolt first militarized.
Hajj Ayman was among those evacuated under an unprecedented deal allowing opposition fighters to withdraw with their weapons to the countryside.
He used to sell car parts and owned a cake factory, but the revolution turned him into a poet. He wrote the lyrics for several protest chants that became known across the Arab world.
"But the regime didn't understand the language of song and poetry, and with its violence, it pushed us into taking up arms," Hajj Ayman said via the Internet.
As relieved as they are, the rebels say they already long to return to Homs.
"We exited the Old City, where I am from, in order to reorganize our ranks," said Hajj Ayman.