Easter Weekend, Part One: Making a Great First Impression

I left on Wednesday to visit Beirut for the Easter holiday. My great-aunt and uncle had come from Venezuela for their annual two month visit, and two of their sons (plus one wife and two kids) also came from Venezuela for Easter, so I was anxious to get there before the holiday in order to have to some time with my cousins that I hardly know. When I told my host family that I was leaving, yet again, to travel to Lebanon, my hostmother seemed sincerely disappointed that I would miss out on their own Easter celebrations. I was a little confused by it, as Syria celebrates Easter on April 19th with the Orthodox Church and the rest of the Eastern world (which Lebanon is apparently not a part of) (even though their own church is Protestant), but it seemed that I would be missing out on a church pageant with my hostmother’s Sunday school class, and all kinds of special foods. In order to make up for it, she invited me to see a street parade celebrating Palm Sunday on Sunday the 5th (again I don’t understand if their Easter is the 19th…) but I ended up disappointing her again when I missed it as I was distracted by the aforementioned Doha Debates that were broadcasted from Georgetown on BBC and the subsuquent speech by Obama from Prague where he pledged to end nuclear warfare.

I made it out to their church in time to see the streets filled with families, dressed in their Sunday best. The weather was pushing upwards into the 80s and I was relieved to see that with the first signs of spring also came the first signs of bare skin! Sleeveless tops, knee-length skirts (albeit with stockings underneath)—perhaps I won’t have to spend May and June in jeans and long-sleeved sweaters as I feared (although as soon as I left the Christian neighborhood it was back to floorlength coats and wool sweaters). The best part, though, was the little girls in princess dresses. Literally. I saw a 5 or 6 year-old wearing a pink costume dress with a tiara.

My hostfather, when he heard about my plans to travel again, called me “a sister of men” (meaning I was competent enough to travel without a male companion—it was a compliment—I quieted the roaring feminist within) and was only worried that by leaving on Wednesday I would miss the big lunch Leila was preparing for our Finnish neighbors. I promised to leave in the late afternoon and considering the fact that I got to help make the food (to some extent) and then later enjoy the fruits of our labor, it was completely worth it; still, the guests didn’t arrive til quarter to 3 and so I nervously checked the time throughout the meal, finally leaving before dessert. It was the latest I had ever crossed the border and I didn’t want to arrive too late in the night, plus the bus station was 30 minutes from my house, the bus left 20 minutes late (as we were pulling out a woman stopped the bus and tried to get on with her cargo of rugs), it took twice as long to cross the border with all of our passengers… thankfully the bus dropped me off somewhere where I could get a taxi to my aunt’s house without having to go all the way to the bus station outside of Beirut and then back across town to her house, so in the end I arrived before 930.

The door was answered by my eight year-old cousin, Juan Andres, who I have only met once before (a few years ago at a family reunion in Mexico) and he didn’t speak to me then (he hates girls, plus I don’t know Spanish) and when he saw me at the door his face dropped and he walked away in disappointment. He had decided to stay home while the rest of his family went shopping so I think he was expecting his parents. Eventually the rest of the group arrived back to the house and by 11 pm I was squeezed into a rental car with my cousins (technically my mom’s cousins, aka my first-cousins once-removed) Jean Paul (40, unmarried), Henricito (42) and his wife Andreina and their two kids Henricitocito (9) and Juan Andres. We were all staying at Josyan and Eli’s house since my great-aunt and uncle (aka my grandmother’s brother and his wife, aka Henricito and Jean Paul’s parents) Henri and Renee were staying at my great-aunt Nagibe’s house. So.

The next morning Henricito and Jean Paul had to leave early in the morning to go with their father to go to the passport office (they were applying for Lebanese passports), so they told us to sleep in and whenever we were ready we would go for the day to Byblos. So after a long and leisurely breakfast around 1130, we piled back in the car to pick up Tio Henri and Tia Renee and go out for the day. However, as soon as we met them at Nagibe’s house, we were told we were in fact going to Renee’s cousin’s house for lunch, regardless of the fact that we had just finished eating breakfast (it was, after all, almost 130).

It turned out that I actually knew her cousin, Agnes, as I had met her two months earlier at Sr Agnes’s funeral. She is Renee’s only relative still living in Lebanon and she lives alone (with her maid) in the same apartment that she has lived in for decades, through the civil war and beyond. She showed us photos of the damage to her apartment from the war, with the missile-sized hole in her library wall, broken furniture, destroyed heirlooms and walls torn down (she was lucky that no one was in the house when it was bombarded; she was staying with family in the mountains and since she was from the same town as some politician they were looking for, she would have been tortured for information (like her sister was) if she had been found); today of course her house is restored back to its original state and looks perfectly untouched. She also showed us pictures of parties that they had in the bomb shelter, which is to say you would never know they were hiding from a war by the looks of the ‘guests’ happily stuffing their faces and the size of the buffet table.

There was a huge spread awaiting us in the dining room and we all sucked it up and made room for the lentil soup, fattoush, spinach and meat pies, green beans, fish with tahini sauce, breads and veggies that covered the table. I was sitting next to Agnes, our hostess, and she assured me that I wouldn’t have to eat anything I didn’t like, that she always hated when she was forced to eat. Despite the fact that I was still full from breakfast, I told her I never have a problem with Lebanese food, but after the first course of soup I began to feel sick (aka chills, nauseous, dizzy, stomach pains) and couldn’t even look at the food on my plate. My hostess, of course, despite her early assurances of democracy at the dinner table, did not accept that I wasn’t feeling well and worried that I didn’t like any of what she had offered and so I was forced to continue picking all the way through the dessert course to appease her. I didn’t want to worry everyone else by telling them I wasn’t feeling well, but I had already risked offending the cook by not eating anything, so finally I excused myself from the table and tried to rest on the couch, politely refused Agnes’ offer to lie in her bed, tried walking around the living room but the pacing just made me dizzier, so I resigned myself to the bathroom and eventually returned my entire meal, from soup to nuts (I am only going into the gory details in order to emphasize the awkwardness and perhaps irony of my situation as a victim of the Lebanese excessive hospitality and how great it was that my first day spent with my distant family was them worrying about me and me being really sick). So I spent the rest of our visit lying on Agnes’s bed with my feet elevated and a cup of hot anise tea on the bedside table. At least I could assure her that it wasn’t her food that did me in, just unfortunate timing and the fact that I had left my medicine at the house.

After lunch we went to the mall so Henri and Andreina could go grocery shopping. The supermarket looked like any other American grocery store, but was impeccably clean, with entire aisles just for yogurt or cheese, olives or fresh spices. Still, looking at all the food churned my stomach a little so I left with my aunt and uncle to go back to Nagibe’s house and rest up for our next big meal. Jean Paul and Henricito showed off their Lebanese passports and we celebrated their new citizenship and official membership in the evergrowing Lebanese diaspora.