LEBANANON and other fruits

The Shamaal. Parents included!

I’d been feeling a little homesick, which caused me to spend more time on facebook than writing blog posts, and now I’m contending with finals, BUT I have been slowly ticking off all of the remaining things on my bucket list for this semester. Lebanon is such a nice size to see pretty much everything in 4 months.

A couple of weeks ago my parents stepped off the plane and into Beirut. I had a rigorous program for them for the first weekend while they were here. Maybe a little too rigorous, I had forgotten how grumpy jet lag makes people.

First stop was Jeita Grotto, caves dripping with mineral richness to create an alien landscape of stalactites and stalagmites. My mom was highly enthused. Pictures inside the caves were disallowed, so I have to provide you with some stock photos. 

The upper cave had evidence of inhabitants from Neolithic times, and a solid floor. The lower cave (shown above) involves a little boat tour, where you pass claustrophobically close to other boats and the ceiling. My dad pointed out he would be nervous but driving in Beirut is pretty much the same deal. Weapons were hid here during the Civil War, apparently, but I’m not sure why that’s special because weapons were everywhere during the Civil War. 

I liked it as a first destination in part because it proved to my parents that LEBANON IS NOT A DESERT!!! If any of my readers still think that, it’s not true. It’s actually the one country in the Middle East that contains no desert whatsoever – though the Bekaa is admittedly pretty arid. You take a tiny telepherique through this incredibly lush forest before your descent into the caves, and we paused next the greenery for a lunch overlooking this:

Next stop was back to Byblos, Arabic name Jbeil, what was originally my first tourist destination in Beirut. Second time around, I spent a lot more attention on the pre-Roman dwellings, pretty much now just the remnants of the foundations scattered about the grounds of the main castle. People lived here thousands of years ago. Actually seven thousand years ago, and fished and ate and swam and boated and pooped and courted and generally enjoyed the bounty of the sea. They’re still doing it today. 

The next day I gave my parents what I could remember of the tour I took of Ras Beirut and downtown my first week. Then, absurdly, I ran into the original tour guide later that week at a restaurant where I was attending my friend’s birthday party. And he remembered me! Felt a little guilty about not sending my parents his way and giving him more business, but I wanted to feel like I had graduated to the rank of Beirut expert. I did remember to tell my parents not to take pictures in the Jewish district, which is under surprisingly heavy security, but only my dad heard and my mom was the one with the camera… so we got to meet the security guards for a while as they copied our IDs and looked through and deleted the photos.

Other things I managed to check off my bucket list:

1. Visit the public beach in Beirut, Ramlet al-Baida, or White Sand-ish in English (the sand is pretty pebbly). A place where the crabs come out when they think no one is looking, shirtless men and dogs wander about, and women swim in full clothing and hijab. Not the cleanest but spacious and free.

2. Go to a pub in Gemmayze, one of the other nightlife districts, older than Hamra (where I live near the university) both in terms of its history as a locus of alcohol consumption and clientele, so a good place to bring my ‘rents. The bar was elegant, the drinks tasty, and the company good but I have a hard time dealing with the kids who try to sell you stuff and people with bodily impediments of various kinds who sit on the street asking for money. 

3. Visit the AUB archaeological museum, which despite a humble facade is surprisingly badass. There are relics of the first writing systems, including what is basically Arabic written in a script older than the current one. And cuneiform and Phoenician and Greek. My father’s favorite part was the collection of pre-historic tools, fertility charms, pots, etc, but I find things like that uncompelling out of context. 

4. Qadisha valley!

Valley or crevasse? It’s a fine distinction. Either way people had to farm on two-meter-wide terraces, which were built by hand and make all of Lebanon’s mountainous regions look like corduroy. This is the heartland of the Maronite Christians, a sect formed in the 5th and 6th centuries following the ways of St. Marron, though it is ultimately under the umbrella of the Roman Catholic church. Maronites are the biggest Christian group in the greater Syrian area. The patriarch was hid in the valley’s caves when the Mamlukes tried to ransack everything. 

North and a little inland, the lush valley floor - or actually landing halfway to the bottom - really could be anywhere in the north eastern United States.

We also stopped by the Khalil Gibran museum, if that’s a thing that you’re into. He was an artist and writer of some renown, who procured an old cave/monastery as his final resting place. 

Arabic is all about 3 letter roots. A basic idea usually corresponds to a three letter verb, like 3-L-M => 3alam for to know (3 is called ‘ayn, in my opinion the hardest-to-pronounce sound in arabic. Convulse your throat a little like you’re struggling to get a sound out and there you’ve got it). 3-L-M can then be manipulated into the reflexive, transitive, whatever forms: 3allam is to teach, t3llam is to learn.  Further extrapolation yields noun forms like active participle and passive participle, for example ma3loom is information, m3llam is an honorific meaning educated-person.

Well, according to Wikipedia the L-B-N sequence in Lebanon comes from the Semetic root for white, possibly referencing the snow capped peaks of Mt. Lebanon. It also happens to lend its sounds to the word for yoghurt (I suppose because it is usually also white, but I would like to think that Lebanon is just named after yoghurt) => laban or lebne depending on the type.

Lebanon has excellent cultured dairy products. Along with being a mountainous, tiny, and a cultural and banking center, the cows are one comparison that can be made with Switzerland. I am a dairy product fan. Typically I will have two kinds of yoghurt and three kinds of cheese in the house at all times. This post is a list of cheese and yoghurt specific to Lebanon, and why I love them.

The basic laban. A little watery or at least prone to separating from the whey, very tangy, and served as a condiment to savory dishes.

Lebne. Thicker, close to greek yoghurt, and a bit salty. Spread on sandwiches or just sprinkled with za3atar. You can also buy almost identical lebne baladiya  and the only difference is slightly more salt.

Goat lebne. I only had this once in a sort of fancy restaurant, and I don’t know how normal it is to eat, but damn was it heavenly. In general fancy lebne can come in balls suspended in olive oil.

Kashkaval. My day-to-day favorite. Its melty like mozzarella but a little piquant like swiss. Put it on your pasta, your grilled cheese, and your man’usha. A block is always available to be grated in my fridge. Originally eastern European. 

Jebne baida or feta or Greek white cheese. Its like the feta you know but creamier and moister. A favorite for salads.

Akkawi. I don’t have that much of a taste for it, but its consistency somewhere cottage cheese and Lebanese feta, and its pretty strong.

Shanklish. I think its sheep cheese (a lot of these cheeses can be made with multiple kinds of milk), but it comes in a ball, and is rolled in a spice mix of varying heat. There are also little red pepper flakes mixed in. Its strong and therefore best served in sparing amounts, mixed with fresh veggies like tomato or bell pepper. 

Everybody’s favorite: Halloumi. It’s squeaky, it’s springy, it’s salty. It’s like no cheese you could expect to love. But fry it in a little olive oil and eat it with cucumbers, and you’ll be convinced. 

So it turns out the world outside the US has Labor Day on May 1^st. I didn’t know this until last Monday, when a friend suggested we skip Monday the 30th from class and fly to Jordan for a long weekend. I’m going to be way over my travel budget for this semester (the Jordanian Dinar is valued about the same as the Euro and they sure know how to squeeze money out of tourists), but it was absolutely worth it.

Starting from the beginning: the Dead Sea. Yum, look at that salt.

Since we got up just a little too late to take the bus, we had to contract out a taxi for the trip, a harrowing process involving a lot of bargaining and the meddling of a random older Jordanian woman who seemed to think we needed to go to the tourism office. Our driver was honest but honestly a bit of a jerk, and it’s always difficult to tell when someone is trying to pull one over on you because you’re foreign and not fluent and Arabic, and when the price is just the price. Thankfully, I had one friend who is quite facile with MSA, and two who together were willing to drive a really hard bargain, so I could just step back and watch them work.

I recently ended up looking at a list of the world’s most alien landscapes, and the Dead Sea was one of them. From far away, the rings of salt around the edges of a blue pool in red rock may make it look Martian, but on the public beach (where foreigners pay 4 times as much as locals to get in), it had all the same annoyances and endearing points of the Levantine culture I am used to.

In a one piece bathing suit I was certainly the least conservatively dressed woman swimming. Some submerged themselves in super salty water in the full ankle-length jacket that conservative Muslim ladies wear over their clothing in public places. One family was have a great time playing tabla drums, dancing and singing in a circle in the water. There was nargile. There was plenty of trash around. I had been warned about burning on any scrapes or abrasions on my body, but it wasn’t too bad, even after I banged my knee failing to accommodate for my sudden new weight after I got out of the water. Our cab driver, who originally said he was going to nap, also took a dip, and then made some coffee for himself before the drive home. Halfway back, he stopped veggie stand on the side of the road and made us wait while he bought potatoes and a melon. So basically we financed his day at the beach and shopping trip…

Upon return, we looked at the ancient buildings of Philadelphia and failed to get into the Roman amphitheatre before it closed.

After months of looking at awesome ruins in Lebanon, though, they really couldn’t measure up. Then we cleaned up and went out for some hard-earned Jordanian food – mensef, ouze, falafel, knefey. The cuisine shares some things in common with Lebanese, but is heavier, more meat-intensive, spicier, and served with lots of buttery rice.

The other thing is that Jordanians love tea sweetened and flavored with mint.

We had it maybe 6 times over the course of the next day, which we spent riding camels in Wadi Rum, the preserve in the very south of Jordan where a body of water used to sit, carving beautiful sandstone rock formations, which now look like artisanal blocks randomly scattered about the desert. Our lack of planning showed itself. We had to be in Wadi Rum by 9:30 am, and the trip is usually about 4 hours from Amman, where we had already booked a hotel for the night before. So, we saw the sunrise (were even awake for the early-morning call to prayer) and the spectacular sunset in one day.

We mosied about on our camels at about 2 miles an hour, while our faithful hound tried to chase lizards out from under the bushes. We stopped to climb one dune and then to see carvings in the walls, and then had a lovely picknick in the shade of a mountain, and then fell asleep for a bit. Everyone snacked and napped, even our guide Mohammad, who turned out to be an immigrant from Darfur, and the camels, to the best of their abilities considering their front legs were tied together to prevent escape.

I am impressed with camels. They are really pretty cool animals, and their feet spread out and act like suction cups on the shifting sand.

Of course, the landscape was also like cool you know. Having recently visited Barcelona, I could really see where Gaudi got his inspiration. The sand-beaten rock looked like layers of melting, dripping wax, replete with holes.

The number of colors in the minerals was staggering, in warm hues like fuchsia, orange, and purple. Each rock formation colored the surrounding desert, and there were swirls where the red sand of one mountain mixed with the golden sand of another.

We reached the encampment not too long before sunset, and then were driven out to an overlook to appreciate the disappearance of the sun. Saudi Arabia was only a dozen or so kilometers away.

The day was capped off with more tea, chicken roasted in the ground, live ‘aud music, and a walk among the stars. The next morning, after sleeping in tents and showering in the cold, the dark, or not at all, we were driven in about 20 minutes in a Jeep the same ground we covered in 7 hours the day before (thought the camel route was more circuitous) to catch a bus to Petra. 

Petra. Famous. Expensive, at $70 or so for one day’s entrance. And legitimately breathtaking. We couldn’t find a place to store our luggage, so we basically backpacked up and down the rocks, carved by nature and by the Nabateans.

And it was a pretty steep climb, but you getting some exercise to see ancient tombs carved into water-rippled rocks is fine by me.

Petra these days is run sort of like a less-depressing version of a theme park . After paying a lot to get in you’re still bombarded by people trying to sell you something. Jewlery, donkey rides, kohl, refreshments. The Bedouins who run these little businesses apparently actually live in the caves in Petra, shepherding the noisy goats that run all over. (Goats don’t say mehhhhh by the way they say bleghhhhh). Bedouins on the whole seem to value a sense of humor, when we stopped for a rest, one guy started to chat with us, explaining how he and his camel drink beer together, then gave the camel a drag on his cigarette. He knew an impressive number of English sayings, mostly about how a lighthearted lifestyle is the best way to live. “No hurry, no worry, no chicken to curry.”

It became incredibly clear why I was discouraged by my Arabic professors from studying in Beirut rather than Amman. Jordanian Arabic is widely agreed to be the closest to Fosha, the language of international media and American Arabic classes. I would have done better in Jordan a year ago, when I was still taking Fosha and remembered how to pronounce things without the lilting, softened, frenchified Lebanese accent. I heard the “th” and “q” sounds for the first time in months, and words like “jalas” for ‘sit’ instead of “’a3ad” (nice because that second one is impossible to pronounce). For my one companion, who confuses the Lebanese population by speaking excellent Fosha on the streets of Beirut, it was a revelation. He carried on a 3 hour conversation about politics and current events (the exact topics that MSA is made for) with our cabbie on the way back to Amman from Petra. For me, it was frustrating, because I could recognize a lot of what they were saying – and there were amusing illustrations and analogies like “if Silvio Berlusconi were a dictator and you saw him in a restaurant” and “if I was Saddam Hussein and I was driving a car.” But 80% of the attempts I made to say something in Arabic to a Jordanian, they gave me a blank look, much higher than my recent failure rate in Lebanon. 

But, while Amman is pretty in a jumbled heaps of greyish buildings on a rolling hillside sort of way, and much bigger, it’s not quite as pretty as Beirut. (Amman below, to be clear)

I learned while on a trip to Jordan that a sophomore Swarthmore student died after being pulled out to sea while swimming off the coast of Costa Rica on his semester abroad.

Ravi Thackurdeen, our lives must have brushed past each other when I went to visit friends in your dorm last year. I kept your facebook friend request pending until I got to know you better, and now I never will. Most of what I know about you was read after you passed away, but thank you for showing that curiosity does not have limits based on academic discipline. I get plenty of questions why I chose to go to Lebanon as a natural sciences student. You are proof that the desire to study chemistry can be part of a larger drive for knowledge and context in this world - culture, medicine, nature.

I only wish that all dangers were foreseeable and that we as human could evaluate them perfectly, so I might have connected with you while you were still alive. But nature is strong, ultimately stronger than any single or group of humans, for all the turmoil that we cause ourselves, and life is unpredictable. I hope you enjoyed your time here on earth; from what i have heard you are dearly missed.

In the little city of Barja.

I had meant to write this post while the experience was still fresh, but with schoolwork ramping up for midterms, trips to plan, and housing to finagle back at Swarthmore it never occurred.

However, on, March 31 2012, I woke up in the morning with the intention of going to meet a bus full of other AUB students to Tripoli to pack and distribute food for Syrian refugees. Tripoli is both supposed to be a beautiful city and is close to Homs, the heart of the Syrian conflict. 

When I arrived, I found out that we switched locations to Barja, a largeish village only a half an hour south of Beirut. Tripoli, unsurprisingly, had been experiencing increasing violence. It’s hard to tell what that means exactly, or how careful one should be; many Americans here agree that Beirut is and feels much safer than the worst American urban centers. Traveling outside Beirut is more of a gamble, but also the most rewarding part of my stay here. I haven’ts seen anything reported in the newspapers about increasing tension, but by no means is journalism in Lebanon completely free of outside pressure, in addition to the financial issues facing media in a new digital economy. 

I try to take every opportunity to take the temperature of Syrians here in Lebanon regarding the uprisings – and I have paid much attention to this issue that when a friend recently asked me what my fellow students think about Hezbollah, I didn’t have an answer. So while I was disappointed not to be able to see Tripoli (and probably not for the rest of my semester here), and to not be serving the group that seems most in need, I did get a chance to talk to many more Syrian students at AUB and see the living situations of some refugees, though they were likely among the best served in the country. They were living in apartments that are nicer than a lot of the poor areas of Beirut.

We arrived to a house apparently owned by a religious figure (after stopping for a breakfast of kaak and nutella), and were shown to sacks full of dry staples – sugar, rice, chickpeas, lentils, coucous. With one American friend and one newly met Syrian AUB student, I scooped the food into family-sized bags, which were then put into color-coded shopping bags. 

 I really lucked out with that second partner, because she turned out to be both studying political science (unusual in a society with an  emphasis on education that will earn you good money) and from the al-Atassi  family, a clan well known for opposition to the Baathist party. Two former Syrian presidents are among its members, and many more had been jailed or killed in the last several decades for dissent. Her controversial and privileged position meant that she couldn’t pursue her studies in Syria – the universities simply wouldn’t have accepted her in poli sci. If they did, it would be all pro-Assad propaganda anyway. Indoctrination goes all the way down public highschools, and even in her private high school are all required to take a civics class beating the drum of Assad policy. Unlike pretty much any school in Lebanon, the public schools taught math, science and history in Arabic rather than French or English – which i was told with a clear sense of distaste, something that odd to me since learning everything in your mother tongue is the American standard. Examples with Assad regime’s mighty feats or pictures of Hafez or Bashar are reportedly plastered all over the textbook in any subject.

Barja was gorgeous, and after the initial sorting and packing was done, my American friend and I joined a different Lebanese AUB student and a middle-aged very sweet local woman named Imm Rami (mother of Rami) to deliver bags of goods. I was too nervous to take pictures of the insides of the homes – I think mostly apartments given to them by Lebanese families, and densely occupied – or to talk much to the refugees themselves. We walked up the steep hill and many flights of stairs (Barja is perched on the side of the slope down to the sea) to deliver one meager grocery bag of food and one of medical supplies per family. One apartment had five atomic families living in it, and after we deposited the goods in the kitchen, I noticed an adorable toddler peeking out through the doorway.

Let me just say that I spend an embarrassing amount of time here trying to sneak pictures of Arab babies. Maybe it’s just that I’m 20 years old and my hormones are crying out to procreate, but they seem cuter than any babies I’d seen before. There turned out to be two more toddlers, all of them playing in a room next to a man laid up with a leg in a cast (the story of which I kick myself for not trying to find out – my arm was even grabbed to direct me to see him lying in the corner). I was offered to hold them and take pictures, which was typical of the extremely generosity that people in the village show strangers and either even or especially foreign strangers.

Barja seemed to be vast majority Muslim, and in general villages tend to be dominated by one sect or another. Every woman above 30 or so wore a hijab, and people were clearly familiar with and totally at ease with each other. Imm Rami kissed hello everyone we passed on the street. Instead of a second round of deliveries, we were taken out of the apartment district to her household, where she made us pick green almonds and lemons from her little garden for ourselves, and then help carry back a feast to the volunteers. The house was large and lusciously decorated, and full of pictures of the family and the family themselves. The sons and their wives all live in the same building, and one son’s medical practice is even in an adjoining room. Among the lemon trees:

When we returned to the volunteer house, I didn’t think twice about stuffing my face (it was the best and most home-cooked feeling food I’ve had in Lebanon so far). In the afterglow of the meal I began talking to another Syrian AUB student. He asked how my day was, I said that Barja was beautiful and I enjoyed the food and seeing village life. He responded that it was hard to see his countrypeople so bereft and dependant. I found out from a mutual friend that he also felt uncomfortable accepting the lunch, when we had done so little for the actual people in need.

Yeah, that was a reality check. It’s hard to remember that not everything exists for my own personal education and enjoyment as a temporary visitor from the stable and over-developed Western world. There is this tension between feeling moved to do something real and valid to try and fix things, and the stultifying realization that I am so green and needy that in doing something more daring than this trip I would be an impediment. That’s in addition to pressure from my parents to keep away from risk of all kinds. So this is as far as I go. My friend Monica, me, and Imm Rami:

Of course, the people I talked to in this circumstance were very much comparatively anti-Assad. Now that I’m done with mid-terms, I might seriously try to interview students here and get the spectrum of views. 

To the Beqaa. BAHAHAHA. This pun only makes sense in a Lebanese accent where the ق (qaf) throat-click sound is swallowed. Beqaa => Be’aa.

Sheep may have been among the few farm animals I did not see  in the one-time war-torn fertile valley that lies 3,000 feet above sea level, in between the Lebanon and (get this) Anti-Lebanon mountain ranges. Even the mountains were zebra-striped with snow. This is looking west towards the Mediterranean:

To the east there is less remarkable precipitation (spotted gazelle maybe?), but just beyond those peaks lies Syria. At closest reach, in Anjar, we were about 10 minutes away from the border by car. This country is damn small.

The Beqaa can be exquisitely agricultural and relaxing. I personally enjoyed being woken up in the morning by chickens crowing the sunrise, though some of my companions didn’t. We spent two nights away, for less than $20 a person each night, and really hit the jackpot the first night by staying in a place  called the Tanaayel eco-lodge.

It’s a traditional-style adobe complex with mattresses on the floors, hens laying eggs, and puppies and cats being fed raw meat scraps in the morning. The eco-lodge is connected to a quite decent Lebanese restaurant, where we were served omelettes and fresh veggies and yogurt for breakfast for a few dollars a person. It also helped support a community center, where youth can play basketball and use the computer, and disabled people can work in textiles.

The valley is also very small-town. I felt like I was in a narrower, somewhat poorer, Arabic version of Eastern Washington, with the similar dusty little towns and rows of crops. Just like in Washington, we has a choice of places to go wine tasting and ended up at a vineyard called Kefraya. 

In this occasion the lack of population density was fraught was with some stress. Making it to destinations off the main roads without our own car, we were subject to the price whims of what taxis we could find. In general, “service” vans run from Beriut all the way to Damascus and then north to south through Zahle and to Baalbek, where you can reliably flag one down within a few minutes for a couple thou a ride (maybe $1.5 - $3). We asked one van to convert into a taxi, and were mildly ripped off on the way to the chateau. After a tour of the caves and a lot of lounging on the grass, we asked the staff there if they knew a cab driver’s number. One guy tried to convince us he had no numbers and we would have to pay him $50 to get to our hotel, with an older man in a captain’s hat playing bad cop to his good cop and exert further pressure. They would not leave us alone to confer. Thankfully, we snuck off and found another staff member who stepped in and found someone who would give us a decent price. 

Small-town also means not much excitement after dark. But after a day of climbing on ruins thousands of years old, we weren’t too averse to staying in. Our first destination was Anjar, Ummayed period ancient ruins from the 7^th century, comprising a big palace, a little palace, and the common people’s lodgings. The big palace:

Right next door there was an allegedly famous restaurant called Shams, where we had goat labne, which should be translated as yogurt but was more like a very soft cheese. Now its pretty much my favorite food. We also experimentally ordered what was listed as “lamb eggs,” actually meaning testicles, which were disconcertingly soft and had little flavor other than saltiness:

Our second day was devoted almost entirely to Baalbek, where lie massive Roman temples built of slabs of stone 400 or more tons, and rolled by slaves on logs vast distances to erect gorgeous buildings devoted to Zeus, Venus, and Dionysus. The carvings weren’t completed before the Romans became Christian, so the temples were converted to churches by the Byzantines. A few centuries later, with the advent of Islam, they were transformed to mosques. All of this was visible from the hotel window.

Some of the visitors at Dionysus’s temple. 

Our original plan was to progress to Qadisha valley from there, which is 30 km northeast from Baalbeck, but the roads were closed from snow. Instead, we went to visit “the world’s biggest rock”, one of the impressively large components of the ruins, but mysteriously left in the quarry.

And then we went home. 

The things I found remarkable about Istanbul were definitely framed by my previous month and a half in Beirut. The streets were clean and large, the public transportation existed, and the traffic could actually reach  30 or 40 mph. We (remarkably) met three other Americans-in-Beirut in our hostel, and all of us kept trying to play chicken with the cars - something we’re used to winning because the difference in momentum in Beirut isn’t so insurmountable. I’m not proud of it, but Beirut has taught me to disobey almost every dictum from my parents when I was 8 years old. I don’t bat an eye at smoking (at less than 2 dollars a pack, the whole country and most of its visitors are addicted), I don’t wear a seatbelt (most of the cabs don’t have working seatbelts anyway) and I look maybe one direction before I cross the street (because most streets are one way, and the interaction between pedestrians and motor vehicles is more like a precarious dance than a directed flow).

But enough about Beirut.

Istanbul is big. Real big. Thirteen million people means several bustling city centers, ranging from the touristy but cute historic Sultanahmet where I stayed, with the Blue Mosque in between me and the tram station (photo taken before we even found the hostel):

to the intense shopping and pub/club district of Taksim Square and Istaklal street:

I don’t even think I saw the business district, and barely stepped foot on the Asian side.

And there were specialty bazaars for almost everything: areas devoted to basic textile components, spices, pots and pans, or seeds and beans.

We even found one shop with all kinds of live birds. If there is one less stereotypical reason why I would want to live in Istanbul it would be to get to cook with the really delicious looking spices, nuts and cheeses available in the bazaars. The food I ended up buying was fairly good – there are new flavors applied to familiar concepts like a chicken shawarma (here called doner) wrap or kofte (meatballs), and really good fish sandwiches purchased on the street for very little money. Deserts don’t seem to be possible without either rose/orange-water flavored simple syrup, i.e. baklava and cakes, or pectin i.e. Turkish delight, pudding, even ice cream.

Mmm, kofte and Turkish coffee.

Also, I would bet a lot of money that Istanbul has the most waterfront of any city in the world. After a day and a half of intense sightseeing – the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, Grand Bazaar – we went on a incredibly relieving hour and half tour of the Bosporus. The city manages to be effortlessly beautiful, there are the obvious gorgeous mosques and old walls, but the jumble of apartment buildings seems to be color matched to the grayish blue water That’s another easy point of comparison with Beirut – the water and the sky are a deep blue but steely instead of a jewel turquoise. The first time I looked at the panorama of water and land with boats making their way across the straight in the slight mist, it really did not look real. Later, I noticed an additional yellowish brown glow of exhaust and pollution right above the water level.

I guess there are repercussions for population density.

As I sit here in the airport waiting for my flight back to Beirut, hearing a little Lebanese Arabic is a relief. Listening to families argue over silly things like phone games and whether food is good, I understand 60% of it and know where the holes are in my vocabulary. Though in written Turkish I can recognize some words from their Latin roots and others (particularly food and religious words) from Arabic, I have so little experience with the actual phonemes and cadence that it all sounds like a mush – especially because sh and ch sounds are very common. I got by on gestures, bills used for demonstration in bargaining, and English.

I definitely need to come back to Istanbul, or at least Turkey. As a destination I would put it on par with Paris or London. I keep hearing about more awesome things I could have done – Cappadocia, the aquarium, the archaeological museum - and really I would go anytime for the lively music and art scene, food and pleasant walks through back streets and corniches. And the ubiquitous beautiful blue tiling and ornamentation.

Really the only downside of the whole place is the culture of overly aggressive maitre-d’s and salesmen.  But here are a few choice quotes that were used to entice me into a store or restaurant:

“Let me help you buy something you don’t need”

[After I lick the remnants of a snack off my fingers] “Can I lick your finger too?”

[To me and female friend] “For you, half price” [to male friend] “For you, double price. I’m sorry you’re not my type.”

[To male friend] “Excuse me, I have a question… Is she your girlfriend?” [We say no] “I was just going to say, if she was your girlfriend she looks like she wants to go to a nice place with a view for a drink.”

“Hello, cheeks.”

Since I didn’t do a whole lot this weekend, I think I’ll post pictures of the other awesome thing I did last weekend: a voyage south!

Before I start, though, I did have a highly enjoyable American culture night on Friday. It began with a trip to the candy store for some concessions to sneak into the theater. It continued with the Hunger Games with French and Arabic subtitles (people went “tut tut” with their tongues at moments where things go wrong and there were a couple of claps every time characters on screen kissed).

After, I went to my first punk concert - sparsely attended, low-fi, and held in the basement of a theater. It was everything I wanted it to be. I kept forgetting the other audience members weren’t just like the Americans I know who love headbanging and noise music and shoving other people in the mosh pit. Then I would hear “khallas” (stop, wait, hold up) or “yanni” (a pausing word like like that means it means) - the two Arabic words Lebanese people can’t stop using. Also, mosh pits really remind me of gasses in a confined space - the moshers have collisions that are more inelastic at greater speeds, and more complex forces are at play when their nucleuses/torsos are close. Raise the temperature/tempo, and the molecules travel faster.

Here’s Saida.

It was a really pleasant and relaxing trip on a gorgeous day, no big stories to tell, just a lot of awesome things to look at. When we left from AUB, we did have to stop and ask a guy on the sidewalk to translate “Kola bus station” to “Wi’if bus Kola” for the non-English speaking taxi driver. Some people just assume you’re speaking a foreign language when you look white and don’t have a perfect Arabic accent. 

First stop: Falafel

LL3,000 and really tasty.

Then the Sea Castle, built by crusaders or someone like that:

A little boat trip around that harbor. I only steered for 5 seconds.

Then up to the souks. With the encouragement of a friend I bargained a shopkeeper down to LL40,000 for a backgammon set that was originally quoted to me as “LL55,000 but for you, I give a discount.” Much of the roofs were arched an built of fascinating orangey stone like this random back corridor.

There was an artisan woodworking alleyway, an I regret not getting a wooden spoon. On the main street, brains were for sale, next to butcher shops with whole seemingly unrefrigerated cow carcasses, sweet shops, lots of produce and really cheap clothing. 

Then a restored ottoman house chock full of beautiful old instruments, furniture, and with tastefully ornate decor and the soap making museum, where you can see where ancient emulsifiers were produced and buy your own aromatic jasmine-herb olive oil soap for $2. And then, if you’re me, drop it in the toilet a couple of days later. Finally, a bit more walking on the corniche and playing on the rocks (admittedly pretty strewn with trash, because this society operates on paying people to pick up garbage instead of supplying receptacles) and in the tidal pools.

Spot the crab:

Trickier still: spot the horse. 

I had a pesky exam Saturday from noon to 2, which precluded doing anything too distant, so I puttered round and then took a run at about 4 pm. Because we aren’t quite on daylight savings time and Beirut is far to the east in the time zone, the sun rises and sets here early. This meant I was treated to a spectacular sunset.

I ran along west and then south along the Corniche – the seaside walkway

(the waves were pretty small)

and then past a dilapidated amusement park

to a geological formation called the Pidgeon Rocks:

.

The hillside leading to the bluff overlooking the rocks were speckled with small children and couples having romantic evenings together. After appreciating the expansive blue Mediterranean nearby me for a few minutes, a man in a crisp white shirt asked me, “May I take a picture for you?” I kept declining because I was in gym clothes and sweaty, and figured I’d come back when my family visited and do a portrait then. He persisted, and I finally gathered he wanted a picture of me, and I let him take one with me looking off in the distance, my face mostly obscured. He turned out to be a former Internal Security Forces member and current body guard for the Bulgarian ambassador. I did not take him up on his offer to email me the photo.

This is what it means to be clearly foreign and female in Beirut. Strange men under the age of 35 or so will see you in any state – in a tshirt leggings and shorts, in jeans and sweater, or dressed up nicely - and if not very often heckle you like in many Middle Easern, Latin American, and Mediterranean countries, then at least be overly willing to strike up a conversation or say hello as you pass on the sidewalk. They’ve heard Americans are less religious and more promiscuous, and figure they might as well try to pick you up. I have gotten a couple of catcalls from cars, but they consisted of “I like your skirt” and most recently “Can I have a bite?” when I was eating a crepe and walking along at night. In less well educated or English-speaking areas than Hamra, white friends and I often hear the word “ajanib,” which means foreigners, directed at us to a varying extent.

Anyway, the clear weather and the deep azure blue of the Medditerranean made me feel intensely alive. I think that a proper sunset looks like an egg being cracked in reverse. First, the warmth of the light is diffuse, like a yolk punctured and spreading, seeping through the sky.

Then it slowly gathers into a pool of yellow light

And then the now-whole sun is swallowed into the safety of the sea

About 3 minutes elapsed between these two photos.

And I don’t mean the body part.

From what I’ve seen, the Lebanese relationship with the means of violent force is both a little neurotic and very cavalier. I don’t know if  I had seen over 10 guns before I came to Beirut (once, a friend interrupted a cop in conversation to ask him to show her his pistol and the rest of the gear in his belt), but their presence in my daily life has increased by many factors of ten since coming to Lebanon, mostly in the hands of security guards.

Cavalier: Today, hanging out in a restaurant near AUB with some members of the salsa club, I learned that most Lebanese households, especially in the countryside, have their own little armories. The word for gun in Arabic is “farid,” and in local Lebanese slang something like “Klishy,” because old Russian Kalishnikovs are so common. I also learned that martial arts is a pretty big thing here (all three of the Lebanese people I was talking to had some experience with it), and that if you have a black belt you must legally inform anyone you are about to fight. Which is important, because random macho antagonism seems to be a more explicit part of daily life than I’m used to. One guy showed me a knife he pulled off a cab driver who tried to rob him, and the other said he had a scar from being stabbed inn the knee during a fistfight with an angry stranger. I think this is guy thing, though.

Neurotic: Mostly the military. If you take photos of them, and they catch you, you can get into big trouble. A friend did by accident, was held for a couple of hours while they called the university to make sure he wasn’t a spy, and then was made to delete a lot of innocent-seeming pictures from his camera. The military also has thier own ski slope up in the Arz aka the Cedars. It looks like this:

Actually they only have control over one of those lifts. I love a country where they teach privates how to ski and shoot. I know this because this weekend I went on a ski trip with a group called Chabab Loubnaan (youth of Lebanon), who had mysteriously made a deal with the army to take 150 students to use their equipment for free. This backfired completely - we spent hours waiting around for the army to approve our arrival, and when we got there it wasn’t working anyway, so we just skied on the rest of the hill for about 2.5 hours before it closed, but enough time for me to get pretty sunburned. Waiting, though, involved looking at things like this:

Yes, that is the sea in the distance. I think all the ripples in the hills are man-made terraces, used possibly for agriculture. A little farther up and looking the other direction, you see this:

The sights, the I’ve-been-skiing-in-the-Middle-East cred, and the excellent dinner afterwards made the cost worthwhile, despite relatively little skiing and and skis that were six inches shorter than me and at least 25 years old. You have to expect any experience in Lebanon to involve some chaos. The little settlement below the lifts also had that signature Lebanese flavor - there was argileh, man’ushe, and the ubiquitous produce truck stuck in horrible traffic: