For Good Friday, we had a big lunch planned at Josyan’s with the whole family. First, however, we had to visit Byblos 1) for the ruins but importantly 2) for the hand-made embroidered tablecloths and also 3) so Jean Paul and Uncle Henri could drive the 30 minutes north to Tripoli to check on chocolates they had ordered and to buy sweets for lunch (from the same place I went to with my mom, aunt and Marisa when we were in Tripoli, I remembered it well).
Before we left, Henricitocito fought with his parents so he could wear his brand new bright green soccer cleats that he had bought at the mall two days earlier (refused as he would ruin them on the cobblestones) and Juan Andres fought with his parents as he didn’t want to go to a library for the day (Byblos-bibliotecha). However, they were both placated by their handheld PSPs and played their Star Wars and FIFA soccer games all the way there and back.
The ruins were just as I remembered them; not too much had changed in the last month, only more wildflowers and more visitors. Still, it is difficult to get tired of such a picturesque place, ruins on the edge of the sea, overgrown with yellow, white, purple and red flowers.
We made it back to Josyan’s by 430, more than a few hours late to lunch. Still, Nagibe and Chantal didn’t arrive til an hour later and our lunch became dinner—the food was well worth the wait. Nagibe had made the traditional Good Friday foods: makhlouta (a mix of beans in a soup that the cousins referred to as ‘automatic boomboom’) and kibbe b-zjlunt (which I thought meant pumpkin kibbe but it was just vegetarian, stuffed with spinach and leeks, aka one of the best things I have ever eaten), along with a spread of artichokes with a lemon garlic sauce, avocadoes with hearts of palm and olives with a mustard balsamic sauce, eggplant dip, hummus, mashed potatoes with coriander, french fries, fresh vegetables….For desssert we had the sweets Uncle Henri had bought from Tripoli—kenafe and cylindrical crispy pastries stuffed with cream whose name (znood sitt ?) translated to “ladies’ arms,” aka hairless on the outside and soft on the inside. How appetizing, to think of old women’s flabby arms while eating your sweets! Also the usual fruits: strawberries, pineapple, grapefruit, a hybrid between grapefruit and oranges, green unripened almonds, kumquats, and a new fruit called akademi, which came from the trees in their garden. Nilda had also made chocolate chip cookies (!) and an orange cake. Thankfully I had my appetite back from the day before.
Mealtime conversation always required a bit of linguistic gymnastics (aka code-switching for all you linguists); in addition to the usual French and Arabic with English for my sake, now Spanish was added to the mix. There was also no common language between our group: the kids only spoke Spanish (though they soon left the table for their PSPs and to play soccer outside), Andreina, Uncle Henri, Tante Nagibe speak limited English; Henricito, Jean Paul and I don’t speak French; Eli, Nagibe and I don’t know Spanish; Jean Paul, Henricito and Andreina don’t know Arabic…Only my aunt Renee could speak all four languages fluently.
Still, that didn’t keep the family from communicating. For the most part, conversation revolved around comparing life in Venezuela under a ‘united’ Chavez to life in Lebanon with their fractured political scene. My uncle Henri has been in Venezuela for 51 years, moving there soon after studying electrical engineering and finding no jobs in Lebanon, later starting his own company which has grown to a family business with his three sons (Jean Paul started his branch of the business when he was 19 and had 11 employees by the time he graduated from college).
Jean Paul characterized life in VZ with the following joke: a family awakens in the night to hear someone breaking into their house downstairs. They call out, “Who’s there?” The people downstairs respond, “The thieves!” From upstairs, “Oh thank god, I thought it was the police!” And this joke was further expounded upon by the story of his friend who lost his car and went to the police station to file a claim for his missing car. While he was at the station, his friend saw his car drive past the window, so he chased it down and saw the car crash into a taxi, then the thieves got out of the car and ran away, abandoning it on the road. The friend returned the car and said ok, nevermind, I got my car back! The police told him that he had already filed a claim and would have to pay $2000 to retract it, otherwise let the police complete their investigation, thereby dismantling the car.
Jean Paul had his own story, where several years ago he was driving with a friend and they were kidnapped in his own car. He was forced out of the car and abandoned in a dangerous neighborhood and his friend was taken further and later left somewhere else. Jean Paul walked and walked (at 2 or 3 in the morning) til he found a military compound and tried to explain to the guard on duty what happened and that he needed help to find his friend. The guard told him to leave military property. Three months later his car was spotted on the military compound in an officer’s driveway. That was the old kind of kidnapping. Now they take you to the bank, force you to withdraw money, threaten your family, etc etc. Needless to say, the family works hard and travels a lot. Luckily they are in the upper-class and can afford to find ways to enjoy life, even if it isn’t safe to leave the house at night or pick the kids up late from school for fear that they might get kidnapped.
That night Henricito and his family had a 4 am flight out of Beirut for Rome, where they were going to spend Easter weekend, so we stayed up with them after dinner until they left for the airport. I pulled out my laptop to check my email and Juan Andres talked to me voluntarily for the first time—apparently I became much more desirable with a computer in my hands, then he proceeded to type the word “luser” in the middle of my emails. Kids are so cute.
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Saturday was sleeping late, eating breakfast late, having lunch around 3 with Jean Paul, Josyan and Eli where the topic of the day was finding Jean Paul a Lebanese wife, with a little bit of the usual “Maggie don’t you want to meet my friend’s son/daughter so you can go out this weekend?” thrown in there as well.
We left Josyan and Eli at the house, working, and Jean Paul and I went to meet his parents for a trip to the mall to find him an extra suitcase for the ten pounds/kilos? of nuts they bought to bring home to friends. I was just happy that we could walk for a while instead of sitting in a car or eating. While we were at the mall, Chantal, who had been working all day (and would continue working throughout the holiday weekend), called to see if we wanted to meet for dinner. We responded with a unanimous no but compromised to meet for drinks in the mall instead. We met her and Michel in a bookstore on the top level and ordered teas, juices and beers, while they got into a heated discussion about Lebanese politics and the upcoming election in June, which was further encouraged by the arrival of Josyan and Eli. When the bookstore closed for the evening, Josyan and Eli invited us to join them for a movie at another mall, so all of us except Michel left to go see The Wrestler.
I never would have seen the movie voluntarily, and it was full of the gratuitous violence that gives me reason enough to not watch wrestling in the first place, even if/particularly because you know it is all staged. Still, there was a moving story behind it all, if a little predictable, plus Marisa Tomei, so I lasted the movie and after it was over I was surprised how much everyone else enjoyed the movie. At this point, it was after midnight, and J & E pushed to continue the evening and go get dinner. And by pushed I mean required. Chantal managed to get out of it since she actually was working the next day, but the rest of us continued on to a Mexican restaurant called Havana. We made it there just 15 minutes before the kitchen closed so we ordered what food that we could and a round of margaritas and stayed until 2 am—and by we, remember, I mean my great-aunt and uncle, in their 70s (?), my cousins, in their (early) 60s, and the ‘younger generation,’ myself and Jean Paul. As my aunt Renee put it, they were making up for all the times they couldn’t go out to restaurants or cinemas back in VZ. Originally I think we were planning to go to midnight mass, but instead we ended up celebrating the end of Lent and the end of fasting (for everyone else, at least) from drinking and eating bread, meat, and sweets.
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