I Heart Lebanon

I had all of a day off for Thanksgiving and decided to take advantage of it by traveling to Beirut for an extended weekend. Roommate 3 and I left Cairo Tuesday evening and only grudgingly returned to Cairo Saturday night. Beirut is beautiful, Mediterranean, liberal and friendly. The air is clean, the night is quiet, the men un-lascivious. But beyond the contrasts with a certain other city that will remain nameless (coughCairocough), the country is beautiful. Where else can you reach the beach and the mountains within ten minutes? How many places boast skiing and beaches within an hour? And I know you want to say California right now, but does California have 10 centuries of history? Shall I use more superlatives? Bottom line: I loved it. I want to go back. I could even imagine living there.

Here's an overview of the trip. We had four days. The first was spent exploring Beirut and drowning in the rain. (Another thing Beirut boasts that Cairo does not: Rain, thunder and lighting! It poured so much that we were stranded in a building on the AUB campus for an hour (I'm sure it's very different in better weather - the campus has a view of the sea, and owns its own beach!), then gave in and ran through the rain to purchase umbrellas and jackets and the AUB bookstore. This weather and the fertile soil means that Lebanon is bursting with delicious vegetables and fruits. Gigantic eggplants, shimmering lettuce. Have I mentioned that I loved it there?). On the first day, after we walked the Corniche, visited AUB along with a lot of rain rain rain, we explored the National Museum in which are many an antiquity. We then walked a bit along the Green Line, staring at bullet-ridden and bombed out buildings before the rain drove us indoors.

The hotel had an excellent TV, god bless it, on which we could even watch The Daly Show! Good for the rest of a rainy afternoon.The second day, we hired a private driver for travel north to Byblos (history's longest continuously inhabited city) and Tripoli (Lebanon's second city). Byblos boasts a crusader castle, Tripoli Ottoman architecture and a huge market. I think. Our driver was not a guide, so my information is scanty. The driver did introduce us to this tree product that looks suspiciously acorn-y and which you are able to eat. It tasted like tree.

The third day, we took a tour south to Tyre and Sidon, but first wove up into the mountains to visit the small towns Beit El-Dein and Deir al-Qamar. Both boast traditional Lebanese architecture: stone houses with red rooves clinging to the hillside and facing stunning views of verdant mountains and, in the not-so-distant distance, the Mediterranean. There was a castle up there to visit too, with a mosaic museum. And in the town square was a fountain whose waters the locals claim will improve intelligence. I have yet to notice a positive change, but here's hoping - I have two final papers to start and a presentation tomorrow!

Sidon is between the mountain towns and Tyre. We only saw a crusader castle in the harbor, and I wish we'd ventured more into the city, but Tyre was the main order of business for the afternoon (that and lunch). Tyre, you might recall, was Dido's old stomping ground before she sailed off to found Carthage, get enchanted into loving Aeneas, and commit suicide. She shouldn't have left; it's lovely there, and full of adorable lizards who scurry across the antiquities (although, in Dido's time, these were not new-ities) Tyre has either the world's largest or the world's second largest hippodrome, depending upon whom you believe, as well as a plethora of Roman, Greek, Phoenician, and I don't remember what-all else ruins. Imagine living in a city in which you can run your daily laps around an ancient hippodrome, as I saw one gentleman doing.The tour was made all the more fun by the strange collection of tourists it attracted. Well, everyone else was strange. I, of course, am fabulously normal. See, as you may be aware, now is not the most politically stable time in Lebanon. But on the ground you wouldn't notice it - except, of course, for the tanks parked on city streets and the giant weapon-toting soldiers everywhere. But you get used to it - there's soldiers all over the streets in Cairo too, although not quite so many. Tyre, for instance, is in Hezbollah territory (it's only 14 kilometers from Israel - or Palestine, according to Lebanese maps), but as far as I could tell life was just carrying on as usual. I didn't really get to investigate that position in Tyre (and I'm not sure I want to), but this was certainly the case in Beirut (my guidebook calls the citizens "Beirutis"). Can you really just get used to strife? I guess, at some point, you have no alternative. Our guide, for instance, was born in 1977 - the civil war started in 1975 (I think). This means that her entire childhood was spent in war. And yet, when I tried to ask whether they had bombing drills the way Californian schools have earthquake drills, she said no. She was never told how to deal with war, she just lived her life. On another occassion, 3 and I were the only diners in a downtown restaurant for dinner, but in the corner a group of Lebanese people smoked and watched the news. After about an hour of current events, they changed the channel and proceeded to watch "Road Trip." They obviously had great taste and laughed uproariously, although I'm not sure they got all the American humor. Do you think they understood, for instance, what it mean when the white guys crashed dinner at a black fraternity and the frat brothers pretended they found white sheets in one of the guys' bags? (It's a hilarious moment, I promise those of you who have not seen the movie.) Luckily for this audience, everyone gets fart and sex jokes.

But I was starting to talk about the other tourists in our group. Besides us two American residents of Cairo, there was a South African couple who live in Dubai, a posh British dude who is a dive instructor in Cyprus, and an Iraqi gentleman who's lived in Germany for the past 37 years (his brother lives in New Orleans). Lots of entertaining accents. I tried to speak Arabic to the Iraqi because it has been my experience that Iraqis (the ones in my English class, anyway) can understand my Arabic better than the other nationalities I've encountered. He was sweet and had a very wacky hair cut, with shaved bits going back in jaunty lines above his ears. Next on his two month tour of the Middle East are Dubai and Yemen. I wonder how different travel is for him, how other Middle Easterners react to someone from Iraq. That sort of question, however, was far to complicated for my Arabic skills. I did manage to inadvertently bring up politics when I was saying one of the few German phrases I know, among which was: "Ich bin eine Berliner" (Sorry for my spelling, German-speakers). "Ah, Kennedy, he died the next year," replied the Iraqi (he spoke a tiny bit of English). "I like him. He was a very good president."

Subtext: Current president is not so good? I wasn't sure if that was what he meant and I didn't ask. Instead I started talking about the Black Forrest in Germany. Trees and cake are far less controversial.

Our last day in Beirut, 3 and I checked out the Pigeon Rocks, which are a gigantic rock formation sitting in the turquoise water by the city. When I live in Beirut, I would like to have a view of them. I will run every morning along the Corniche (on which was a marathon the weekend before our visit), which 3 and I strolled again the last afternoon. We then spent a very entertaining 3 hours at the Hard Rock Cafe, encountering various levels of irony along the way. I liked it enough to buy a tee shirt. The place was completely empty so we got a lot of attention from our waiter, who was super cute. He is half Lebanese, half Spanish, but was born in France and is now doing an art degree in Beirut. With English, I guess that means that he speaks 4 languages. Hard Rock Cafe had everything you could desire for a pleasant afternoon: veggie burgers, music videos, a view of the Mediterranean, and Budweiser.