Beirut Report VII

Originally written on Monday, 7-15-02.

Chapter I, In which I am speechless, but still manage to say a lot.

.........on Saturday night Dalia, and a lot of other family and friends, ate over my cousins' place, and I chatted with her a little. That night I asked Gaby if he thought it would be OK, he said "well, her father's a priest, so you might want to ask my sister Genie, because she knows Dalia better." The next day, yesterday, Dalia et al came over at 3 or 4, because the first D'hour- Shweer Beer Festival was going down that night. I never got the chance to ask Genie anything, but I talked politics, religion, and relationships with Dalia on the back porch, on the walk down to the D'hour "saha" (town square), in the local pub where we all downed excellent al-Maza pilsener, enduring a Lebanese heavy metal band, enjoying a Lebanese rock band, cheering D'hour's own Miss Lebanon, and watching the fireworks (which went off directly overhead).

She initiated conversation as much as I did, and I wouldn't have turned the conversation to dating and relationships - which she did while the second, much better, band was playing. I think it was when she finished telling her second "this-guy-liked-me-but-it-didn't-work-out" story and said "I would never go out with a guy I didn't like" that I casually said, "Well, I'd like to take you out sometime, for coffee or dinner or something...etc.". She said, "What was that? I couldn't hear you." Gulp. Is that a polite "no" in this culture? So I repeated myself, in slightly simpler terms, and over the music. She blushed slightly, turned her head, and murmured something to the effect of "that would be nice", and was clearly quite pleased. She then surprised me, saying "The first time we met, I saw you, and I thought 'why is he looking at me like that?'"

I guess she now knows why.

In other news, it was a great weekend overall. Thursday night I went to a bar on Rue Monot with friends, had a couple al-Maza's, and enjoyed the European atmosphere, American classic rock, and lively Lebanese crowds. Friday afternoon I sunned on the beach with classmates, and relaxed at home.

Saturday was our weekly field trip, and 25 of us piled into the tour bus at 9:00 and took off across Beirut. The mountain starts the moment you leave Beirut proper. By the time the bus, which had a fine interior but a weak engine, crawled to the top of approximately 4,000 feet of switchbacks it was easily an hour later, though we'd only gone 25 or 30 miles. We rumbled down the other side, and made our first stop at Ksara winery, on the western edge of the flat and fertile Beqaa Valley. The winery, or it's storage caves, more precisely, were fascinating: thousands of barrels and bottles of aging red and white Ksara were nestled into centuries-old corridors and chambers in the cool underground honeycomb.

After a few sips of a fruity white wine, we got back on the bus and drove at higher speeds up and across the valley to the ancient city of Baalbek. Honestly, the ride there interested me as much as the prodigious ruins. Most of the lampposts all the way across were decorated with Hezbollah flags and posters, and Lebanese checkpoints were intermingled with Syrian. Like the PLO before it, Hezbollah has built a state-within-a-state in southern and eastern Lebanon. Sponsored by drug sales, Iran, wealthy Arabs, and probably outsourced terrorist training, Hezbollah has the funds and organization to run the schools, hospitals, and public works in a large part of a very small country. Lebanese freely admit that their own army - which can be seen everywhere, like in front of McDonalds, where there are always two MP's with automatic rifles - is far inferior to the Hezbollah force, which could turn the country into a Shi'ite Islamic state if Syria ever let it (which it won't, in the foreseeable future). In the past two years, Hezbollah has made only token attacks on Israel, content to be a pest and to draw a few soldiers away from the Occupied Territories. However, they know that Ariel Sharon has no qualms about coming into Lebanon to destroy parastate enemies if they're too dangerous, and they're apparently working on a massive image campaign. They don't want to fade from relevance now that Israel has ended it's 18-year occupation of South Lebanon, and their reportedly growing ties with the European Union are designed to ensure the organization's place in Middle East geopolitics for years to come.

Needless to say, we took a tour of the stunning Baalbek ruins, where the annual "Baalbek Festival" is ongoing. Three temples - Jupiter's, Bacchus', and Venus', are still identifiable. Jupiter's is largely ruined, but was of phenomenal size in it's day, stretching easily across four acres, by my estimation. Bacchus' is the most intact, with all four walls standing, with the magnificent lintel reinstated by Kaiser Wilhelm I, because it is adorned with a carved eagle, a symbol the nationalistic Kaiser was loathe to see lying on the ground.

After all the walking, we were quite hungry, and by the time we had retraced our steps across the valley to Zahle, we were really hungry. Incidentally, Zahle is the culinary capital of Lebanon, and indeed of the Middle East. We ate in one of the famous outdoor restaurants stretched along Zahle's small river in the center of town, with steep foothills rising behind us. We paid a third of that establishment's "good price", as suggested by the Lonely Planet guide, thanks to our large number. A three-course meal of more hummous, tabouli, kashka, kibbe, stuffed grape leaves, labneh, fried cheese sticks, garlic mashed potatoes, baba ghanough, spinach turnovers, roasted onions, lamb pastries, chicken kebabs, beef kebabs, kafta, fresh peaches, pears, plums, grapes, apples, kiwi, bananas, and vile-tasting arak than you could possibly eat if you sat there all day, all for $8.

Well, you can chew on that for now; I'm off to do laundry, homework, and find some postcards.