Weekend Update

Let’s start with last weekend. Thursday evening I went with my host mom, Leila, to a classical music concert in an old Greek church called Church Zeitoon (Olive Church) in the old city. The orchestra performing was visiting from a church in London and played a mixture of classical ‘spiritually-themed’ music and contemporary Christian music, which was overall much more bearable/enjoyable than the previous week’s performance. Some of the songs included audience sing-alongs, for which there was a program on every seat with lyrics in English and Arabic. The crowd was mostly Syrians but there were also a few foreigners scattered, many of whom Leila knew from church.

There was a local Syrian pastor acting as translator for the British pastor, who worked at a local church and was hosting the event, and the British conductor, who was a little crazy and invariably tried to make his speech more welcoming to the foreign/local audience but at the same time made it impossible for the other pastor to translate. I could understand enough of what the translator said to see how much he condensed and simplified the speech of the conductor, and there were times when the conductor would list off foreign cities and composers and the translator would stop mid-sentence and ask how to pronounce something, or try to keep up but then trail off and disregard the rest.

Translation was also a problem when the Greek Patriarch stood up to make a speech and made it in Arabic, and the poor translator was so confused that he began condensing it into Arabic instead of English. Also, when it came time for the audience sing-along, the conductor invited up a man from Leila’s church to lead the Arabic singing while he himself led the English singing, at the same time. Of course the English was drowned out and it sounded terrible. Also I could read enough of the Arabic to know that it did not say anything of the original English lyrics and that they had been completely rewritten into contemporary Christian verse, which was something of a crime for traditional hymns such as Ode to Joy.

The whole event lasted nearly 2 ½ hours, with maybe 17 songs and an intermission, and a lot of prayers and announcements at the end. Afterwards I went with Leila to visit one of her friends that we met at the concert, who lived nearby and invited us over for tea. They lived near the hotel that my parents and I stayed in in the old city, in one of the apartments of an old Damascene house on the upper floor above a courtyard of lemon and orange trees. We stayed for about 20 minutes, until about 11 pm, and it was my first typical house visit for tea, Easter sweets and awkward conversation. Afterwards I walked to my friend’s house in another part of the old city to switch gears and go to a student party in another old Damascene house. When I arrived, the party had already split into the British faction and the American faction. The Americans were greatly outnumbered, there were only about four of us (myself, my friend from class and 2 kids from Princeton, who were exactly what I expected two guys studying Arabic at Princeton to be like). The foreign student social scene is pretty much exactly like it is, well, in America and Britain, except that everyone goes to the same one bar with bad music, lured in by weekly “specials” of free entry and one free drink. However it manages to be a good time regardless.

Who Says You Can’t Talk About Religion and Politics Here?

Saturday I left the house because the cleaning lady was there and returned later in the afternoon to a house cleaned and decorated for Easter. Colored eggs hanging on the wall, bowls of candies, stuffed chicks, ducks and bunnies sitting in various corners of the rooms. I spent some time with my family the only way I know how, sitting and watching TV with them (it really seems to be, unfortunately, the only group activity they partake in, other than eating and church). The past few days, since its been a holiday and my host father didn’t travel to his farm this weekend and I hadn’t started my new class yet, I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time watching TV with them. Sometimes it is good because my host father will watch the news, either in English or Arabic, or maybe Farah will be watching an American movie, so I can justify my television-time as 1) ‘quality’ time with the family 2) creating opportunities for conversation/discussion and 3) listening practice! (this is clearly a good excuse for just about anything I wouldn’t otherwise want to do) or in the case of movies in English, translation practice as I switch between listening and reading the subtitles (mostly paying attention to how they translate American slang into formal fus’ha).

If my host mom is watching, however, or if the family is watching together, the channel is usually on one of the 10 or so Christian channels (there must be some kind of satellite TV programming where you buy the package based on your religion, clearly Muslims would have different channel options), either showing a debate, lecture, preach-fest with a televangelist, musical event, religious film or most unfortunate of them all/my host mother’s favorite, kids’ programming (although my hostfamily belongs to a Protestant church, their religious activities suggest a likening to evangelism).

This particular session started out promising. My hostfather was watching a political debate on an Iraqi news channel between four men (two Arabs and 2 Americans) about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It was most interesting because it may have been the first time that I saw a Westerner/American participate in a debate in the media with Arabs and actually speak to them in fus’ha (the other American spoke English and had it translated). It was encouraging for me to watch as a student, because it reminded me that there may be some purpose to my studies after all; though I may not ever be in this exact context, it exemplified the benefit of being able to have a discussion between Western and Arab perspectives on the same level/in the same language. Likely the other participants knew English well enough, but it was an Arab TV channel with a debate in an Arab context with an American guest—plus, one can appreciate the symbolic gesture/rarity of having an American in this field/in this position of knowledge/power/influence know fus’ha well enough to speak it.

But the channel was soon changed to a religious debate between a priest and a Muslim on the vowelling in the Qu’ran [at the time of the revelation of the Qu’ran, the written Arabic langauge didn’t include diacritics such as short vowels, so there is debate (primarily among Christians, that is) over whether different versions of the Qu’ran exist and if Muslims even really know what their Holy Book says]. Although I’m all for a good religious or political debate, and even though I didn’t fully understand what they were saying, I didn’t like the look of this priest and I didn’t need to hear him to not trust the words that were coming out of his mouth that I couldn’t understand. Plus I don’t trust any of these channels because I figure that anything written by Christians for Christian audiences in order to boost their self-esteem about how much more correct their religion is compared to the Other Religion, is more than a little suspect. It’s like when they bring Muslims on the show who have converted to Christianity in order to explain the differences between the religions and why his new religion/Your Religion is the better choice.

Thus I have realized that not everything can be endured for the sake of language practice (and I now have to leave the room everytime the channel is changed to one of the first 10). There does, in fact, have to be SOME substance in what is being communicated in order to even have the desire to figure out the meaning.

Yet here is an example of the same idea from the other end of the spectrum: I went out a few nights ago to meet Frank and a friend of his to go to a poetry reading. Frank has only studied Arabic for a few months and his friend doesn’t even really study Arabic (I forget why he is here) so we all acknowledged the fact that we probably wouldn’t understand anything but it was worth the visit. But first, we hung out for a bit with Frank’s roommates and their friends and sweets that two Syrian girls had brought from Homs. The group spoke English/French/Arabic/German and it was the first time that the only common language was Arabic (finally!) so I had a good conversation in fus’ha with a friend who is French and Muslim and here to study the language in relation to his religion.

After some time, we left for the reading, which was held in a bar located in the basement of a five-star hotel and packed with locals, cigarette smoke and bottles of beer. Admittedly, it was a little pretentious for any foreigner to go to such an event and pretend to appreciate anything that was being said, but at the very least, it was a great cultural experience—for one, because the poets were definitely local but shared origins from Libya to Iraq to Palestine, and for another because poetry is an important part of the Arab literary tradition and though I’ve had to (attempt to) read some in class this was the first time I ever heard it performed. And though the scene itself was not unfamiliar: the darkened room, jazz posters on the wall and people crammed wherever they could fit: the people showed their appreciation not with snaps or polite clapping but with shouts and raucous applause and calling out or jumping to the podium themselves.

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Sunday was the most important day of the year, again. I slept in again, even did a little (/a lot of) studying in order to prepare for my return to the university the following day. We had lunch again with the family in the garden—this time we had frikie (at first I thought it was called Afrikiye aka African food), a green wheat served with cashews, tender lamb chunks on the bone and a yogurt and cucumber sauce.

During the meal, the conversation was appropriately themed for the holiday and the others tried to bring me into the discussion by asking if I knew that Muslims didn’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus (they believe in him as a prophet and therefore have respect for the religion of Christianity but they don’t agree that he is the son of God and divine in nature) and then a little later if I knew that the Muslims don’t believe in Jesus in the way that he is written about in the Bible, only through the words of the Qu’ran. Yes, that is because they are…Muslims. And they can’t believe in the divinity of Jesus because they believe it is not possible for God to live on earth, and if they believed in Jesus according to the Bible, and took the Bible as God’s Word, well, then they would be Christians. You realize that you are two different religions, right?

Then post-lunch: Ihab started by asking me if I believe in Jesus Christ. He already knew that I didn’t believe in the religiousity of the story, so he clarified it by asking if I believed in his existence from a historical perspective. He prefaced the conversation by saying he hoped he wasn’t offending me, but that there is not much opportunity for this kind of religious debate and he was curious to know what I thought about some of religion’s big questions: life and death, creation, human nature, divine nature, the meaning of life. I did most of the talking, but ultimately I tried to explain that usually I find that in talking with people of different beliefs that we share similar hopes/dreams/fears about life and what it all means, where it all comes from—we just happen to use different words or metaphors to represent our ideas. He responded that this isn’t true because I don’t have God in my heart; I said well you can call it God and I can call it something else, but how do you know what is in my heart? and again that we all share the same questions about life but we have different ways of getting to the answer, but it doesn’t mean any one way is better than the other—and then he told me, no that’s not true, I have the right and the best way. Henceforth the conversation went downhill from there, finally ending with a crash and burn when he told me “I believe that if only you thought about it more, you would see that I am right.”

Wafa in her broken English intervened with, “I believe in the end, we get what we plant and we love you anyway.”

Easter Weekend, Part Two: It may be my Third Visit in Four Months, but this kind of History never gets Old

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.

Roman Ruins and Ancient History? That was SO last month.

The only region in Jordan that is easily accessible by public transport is the north, and there are several sites with ruins and such just an hour or two outside of Amman. I decided to visit Jerash, 45 minutes north, one of the best-preserved Roman cities in the Middle East. Despite the hype about the city, I wasn’t particularly thrilled about visiting another Roman ruin (I know, I am spoiled), but it is the most accessible and the busride cost me less than a $1. If I had left early in the morning, I could have combined my trip with a visit to Ajlun’s Qal’at ar-Rabad (citadel with views) to the north, but by the time the bus was leaving the station it was already quarter to 11.

Back when Jerash was called Gerasa, Amman was Philadelphia and Damascus was Damascus, the cities were part of a collective of Roman commercial cities called the Decapolis; though the name suggests a group of ten, it actually included up to 18 cities across Jordan, Syria and Israel & Palestine.

So what does this best-preserved Roman city in the ME actually have? Generally the same things that other Roman sites have, they just all happen to be in the same place (except for the hippodrome [where you can watch chariot races!]—that was the first I’ve seen so far): arches, temples, plazas, a theater, colonnaded streets, baths, gates, and evidence from more recent centuries and empires including churches and houses. If I sound a little disinterested, that’s because I was. The main areas were overrun with school children, and though I was happy to see that local schools take their kids on such sweet field trips, it made photos difficult and meant that groups of giggling girls would walk around arm in arm going up to foreigners and saying “Hello! How are you?” and make comments on your appearance. It was actually the first time I saw girls harrassing tourists more than the boys—maybe it is the age group, but perhaps it proves that when teenage boys do it they aren’t necessarily trying to hit on you, only practice their English. Maybe.

Anyway. The real highlight of my trip to Jerash turned out to be the wildflowers. The ruins were set into small hills of purple, white and yellow flowers, which made walking around the site much more enjoyable, if you were able to tune out everything else. I didn’t have the patience for a tour guide, though one teenage boy who worked there followed me around for a while trying to give me an impromptu tour, and in the end I think I bypassed most of the significant buildings. I did enjoy a nice lunch buffet at the onsite restaurant, which I managed to bargain down to 4 JD from the manager’s offered “student discount.”

So my history/traveling-overload was the first sign that I should probably return back to Damascus. The second was reading The Savage Detectives, which I borrowed from Rachel, a Mexican novel about lost poets in the ‘70s and the bohemian lifestyle that they led, traveling with no money and perpetually mooching off of friends. When I started pushing back my departure date to accommodate my hosts’ social lives to go to this dinner or that performance or on this trip, I decided that while I’m not exactly on the verge of slipping into bohemianism (I still have my standards of hygiene, a good relationship with my family and haven’t yet joined an artistic/revolutionary movement), and my host had graciously invited me to stay indefinitely, I didn’t want to make a second home of their second living room. Plus, I reminded myself that I had been on the move for over three weeks now and it might be nice to back on my own schedule again, do some laundry, eat home-cooked meals, sleep regularly, maybe study, register for fall classes (!), find a summer subletter for my room in DC, think about my future, maybe even catch up on this, the blog. Really that was the main problem: falling into an unsustainable lifestyle of having too many adventures for weeks at a time and then trying to write about them all at once, with no time to reflect inbetween. So clearly I returned for your sake, blog-audience, because apparently my ability to keep up with the entries reflects my ability to maintain a healthy and balanced pace in life. Maybe.

The third thing was that remembering that Rachel had been in Amman for less than 2 weeks and probably would enjoy having time to figure things out on her own before having the responsibility of figuring it out for a guest as well.

But before I left, we went out that night to the Royal Cultural Center, which was hosting a performance festival. None of the events offered any kind of description as to whether it would be film, music, dance, or theater, so we picked one at random and hoped for the best. After a delicious dinner at another one of Amman’s hip café-restaurants, across the street from a Starbucks (we may as well have been in NYC), Rachel, Sonya and I headed to the RCC to buy tickets and figure out what exactly we were in for. The lobby offered no additional information so we bought our tickets anyway and went upstairs to where the event was just beginning. The room was already dark but I tried to tell if the audience was mostly foreigners, as I had seen in Damascus, or if Jordanians had more of an appreciation for cultural festivals. It soon became clear when the MC came on stage and introduced the performing group with a lot of Arabic that we couldn’t understand and then the words “stand-up comedy!” Of all the possible cultural performances it could have been, comedy was probably at the bottom of the list of things we could understand, particularly for Sonya, who had just begun studying Arabic, but really for any foreigner who wasn’t fluent in Jordanian dialect.

The group was called “Gaza Ramallah” or something along those lines, and obviously had a particular focus on Palestinian issues. We could figure out the general idea of each skit or stand-up routine based on a few keywords (a lot of talk about ard, “land”) and a lot of body language, though the most obvious one for us was when one of the performers made a phone call to the White House to speak to Obama, pleading for attention to the Palestinian cause, and ended the skit cursing at America (we were almost ready to go before the skit and then after that we decided it was really time to leave).

The next day I was in a shared taxi headed north, and made it back home without too much drama.

Travelling in the Eastern Desert (promised to no one)

The Desert Castles, as the name suggests, were very much in the desert. Jordan itself is very much desert, but driving and driving and driving and seeing nothing but signs for Iraq and Saudi Arabia brought home the desert-ness pretty well. However, unlike the name suggests, the buildings are not actually castles, but instead fortresses, hammams, farmhouses, or retreats for rulers from the Umayyad dynasty, centered in Damascus.

Our first stop was Qasr Kharana, which resembles both a fortress and a khan but LP suggests that it was probably a meeting place for Umayyad rulers and Bedouins. The many rooms were empty but well-restored and fun to explore, particularly the closed-off rooftop access, from which we enjoyed a good desert panorama. We figured that since whoever was in charge of the site didn’t bother to get out of their tent/souvenir shop to regulate entrance into the building, they probably wouldn’t pay attention to us checking out the rooftop views.

From there, we visited the 8th century Qusayr Amra, one of the best preserved of the many Umayyad desert dwellings. You can still see and (attempt to) appreciate the frescoes that cover the ceilings and walls, despite the fact that all of them have been ruined by graffiti and also appreciate how unusual it is to see paintings of topless women or any form of iconography in an Islamic building. The building contains a hammam and audience hall for hosting dinners, meetings, parties, exhibitions and entertainment and is generally considered as a “pleasure palace” for rulers who wanted to escape city-life in Damascus and reconnect with their Bedouin roots in the desert.

Our last stop was in the town/wetland reserve of Azraq, a hunting and military base that was occupied by the Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Ayyubids, Ottoman Turks, and of course Lawrence of Arabia (we visited the room where he lived/wrote parts of Seven Pillars of Wisdom). The building is much larger than the others that we had seen and built from black basalt stone and as our guide pointed out, only black basalt stone with no wood or any other materials used (this is probably why most of the building collapsed in a 1927 earthquake).

One of the reasons for the fortress was probably that the Azraq (it means “blue” in Arabic) Basin used to span an area of wetlands larger than Lebanon. Today, LP calls the site an “ecological disaster” which is not a hyperbole, considering the fact that water has been drained from the basin since the late 60s to feed the growing cities of Jordan and by 1991 managed to dry up the area completely. This included fossil water (over 10,000 years old) and the lifesource for the area’s wildlife and vegetation, which has virtually dried up along with the water. The government now pumps 1.5 million cu m of fresh water each year, hoping to restore the wetlands to 10% of its original volume. (Jordan is one of the Top 10 Water-Deprived countries in the world.)

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We returned to Rachel's apartment in the city exhausted and famished from not eating for the last nine or so hours (there are few pit stops in the desert).

Luckily we came back just in time to go out for dinner. One of her classmates, Kitty, was hosting a fus'ha-only dinner at her house, with herself and her two roommates (both American), Rachel, Amy and myself, and her two Iraqi friends who served as moderators of sort / keepers of the Arabic language. The dinner was pretty successful and it was a relief to have a "safe" environment where we could all pretend like fus'ha was a language that we could ever learn/need to know how to speak.

Student Life in Amman

When I met Rachel at Qasid on Saturday, she apologized to me that Amman was fairly quiet, and my time there would best be spent relaxing. I told her that would be no problem for me. Their school schedule consists of two 1 ½ hour classes a day, Tuesday to Thursday and Saturday/Sunday, aka a week with no weekends—which the students consider to be a conspiracy against doing any kind of travel within the country. Thus my list of Jordanian contradictions grew: a country composed of more refugees than locals, a city with a great Arabic program but you can’t speak Arabic in it, and finally, a travelling partner who can’t travel! (though Rachel made up for it by gladly skipping a day of class later on).

That night we went out to dinner with her roommates—one is from NYC (Sonya), a year out of college and starting Arabic for the first time, the other (Amy) is in her 30s, married and on her way out of the Army. We went to a nice Lebanese restaurant with good food; we arrived just after it opened and got the last table (we were also clearly underdressed) and we continued to prove that we didn’t belong there when the bill came and we were so annoyed at being charged 5 JD (about $7) for the vegetable centerpiece that we took it (and the complimentary fruit platter) apart when we left and Rachel filled her bag with lemons, peppers, tomatoes, oranges and bananas though we left the heads of lettuce and carrot sticks.

I spent most of the next day at one of Amman’s hip cafés with Sonya, catching up on the internet, trying to figure out preregistration for next semester’s classes (!) and researching ideas for places to visit while in the country. Unfortunately, only sites in the north were accessible by public transportation, otherwise it seemed necessary to rent a car or hire a taxi, neither of which were likely since I was on my own. Jordan has a large number of nature reserves that would be worth spending a few days at, hiking and such, but beyond getting there, looking at the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature’s website, the cheapest accomodations (ie campsites) were around 50 JD per person, guides could be 105-120 JD for the day, and so on and so forth. The RSCN had an office in Amman where I could ask questions directly about how young students afford something like that, and to spend more time hiking in Petra or Wadi Rum, but the whole trip became increasingly unlikely, and in the end something to return to the region for in the future (GOAT Retreat JO 2010?)

After returning from the café, Rachel and I made dinner for her roommates and two other friends from class, Kitty, just out of the Navy, and Christy (I think, I forget her name) who was out of the Air Force. Clearly the institute has some sort of draw with military kids. Having eaten out in restaurants for the last few weeks and having meals prepared for me the last few months, it was nice to actually have to cook for yourself and others, even with limited/random ingredients, and to sit with friends in one’s own house and eat together. At the same time, I am grateful that at least for now, that is an event out of the norm for me, that most of my meals are ‘from the time of Noah’ and eaten with my Syrian host family, that even if I still can’t really speak Arabic, at least everywhere I go I am forced to hear and see it.

Part 2: Lebanon, the Abridged version.

Lebanon was a week of late nights, leisurely lunches (preferrably with a view of the Mediterranean), long car rides and lots and lots o’ family time. Coming back for my third visit in two months to stay with family once more, I realized how familiar the area had become to me so much so that I almost forgot it was a foreign country (I am spoiled). I found it easy to navigate my way back to the house using strategically located advertisements and I suddenly became the person of experience and knowledge in the group, acting as guide to my aunt Marilyn and cousin Marisa as we visited the various sites that I had seen in my first 2 ½ weeks in the Middle East. My aunt hadn’t been to visit the family in 30-ish years, and Marisa (17) had never been before, so it was good for me to see them go through some of the same adjustments that I had to make when I had first arrived, and to appreciate my new level of comfort getting around Lebanon and Syria (only to be further appreciated when my parents arrived).

That week we went back to Beiteddine in the mountains, to the ancient site of Byblos on the northern coast (Nagibe joined us that day for a seafood feast at a restaurant with a prime seaside location), and to Saida and Tyre on the southern coast. Marisa, who is starting next year at UPenn’s Nursing School, was able to fit in a half-day working with Chantal at AUB Hospital while the aunts and I fit in a hair appointment (much needed and I was not going to do it in Syria). There were several trips to the huge ABC mall included, where we learned that a mall is a mall is a mall but at least now I have actually been shopping in Beirut. In the past the shopping was in downtown Beirut on Hamra Street, but after the damage caused by the war it has been unfortunately centralized to ABC.

Throughout the week there were the familiar proddings from the older generation—don’t you and Marisa want to get out and see Beirut nightlife? Don’t you want to call up so-and-so? Marisa was on her spring break from second semester senior year of high school so all she wanted to do was sleep a lot and not think about homework. I was just happy to be hanging out with my aunts and cousins for the week and didn’t really care about maintaining my Beiruti social life, but either way it was arranged for us in the end. Friday night Eli made a dinner reservation for 10 pm at an Italian restaurant with live music for the three of us, himself and Josyan, Chantal Nagibe and Michel, and his close friend/tennis partner his wife and 19 year-old son. It was clear that the only reason that the son was present was to escort us out for the night after dinner so despite our polite “nothankyous” and “youreallydon’thavetos,” our fate was already decided for us. Luckily he was a very nice guy and easy to talk to (not that we had a choice because we were relegated to the kids’ end of the table) and he promised us Oh it’s not a nightclub, it’s just a pub and it’s just around the corner and I’ll bring you home whenever you are ready to go. In my mind I pictured a regular bar with long tables and music in the background and figured it would be worth it just to go and meet his friends, talk to them for a bit, then get our own taxi ride home so he wouldn’t have to leave if we wanted to go home before 3 am, and it would be fun for Marisa to see a bit of the bar scene before heading off to college.

We left around midnight, the music scene at our restaurant was just heating up. The female singer, accompanied by a keyboardist and signing popular ballads of the West, was going around to each table getting people (including a few at our table) to sing for her (unabashedly and with enthusiasm!), which soon led to diners banging on the table with cups and plates, then leaping to their feet and filling the floor space with dancers. Eli’s friends were the most active of them all and brought their son up to dance with them. Marisa and I were shocked to see that he actually danced with them, rather than scowling and running the other way, as we would have done if our parents were accepting vocal solos and tearing up the dance floor.

The so-called ‘pub’ was just down the street—the whole neighborhood was filled with younge people hanging out in atmospheric bars and to be sure the night was just getting started—but as we descended into the dark smoky techno-throbbing room and saw people dancing on tables and found barely enough room to stand still without getting knocked over by others, we realized that ‘pub’ just means that there are tables one could hypothetically sit at, but it is better served to hold coats/purses/drinks or better yet, as the dance floor itself.

Apparently we were there to celebrate someone’s birthday, and we soon joined a large group of our escort’s (I can’t remember his name but he is named after a saint in the Maronite church) friends from his university. It was impossible to see or speak to anyone properly so we nodded and smiled and danced and had a good time (though one of his friends thought we were 16/younger) and eventually we looked at the time and decided to head home as we wanted to get up early for the Saturday morning farmer’s market. I communicated that we were going to head out but that we would take a taxi home. Of course that was not an option so he left his friends and we went out into the rain. Walking by the restaurant that we had eaten at that night, we ran into noneother than Josyan, Eli and their friends who were just leaving. They looked at us in astonishment and we at them. So I remembered that I am in fact in a foreign country, and not only that but also a parallel universe, where the parents stay out later than the kids and the old stay forever young. At least we could get a ride home with Josyan and Eli and our host could go back with his parents so in that sense our meeting was fortuitous. But then Marisa and I had to endure a carride home of “Why did you leave so early? You didn’t have fun?”

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The next morning it was still raining which dampened our hopes of making it to the farmer’s market. I woke up early, showered, dressed and ate breakfast and was greeted by a sleepy Eli who emerged from his room to get his morning coffee. Oh you know the market will not be open in the rain, don’t bother going, there will be no one there. Even if they have tents? Yes it’s not worth it. I called Chantal who had taken me the first time to ask her opinion, she had no idea, so I called Nagibe’s house and spoke to my aunt Marilyn who had just woken up and we decided to let Marisa sleep and forgo the morning excursion. Around 1030 Chantal called back, said she had just driven by the square and saw tents up, so clearly it was in fact open. Josyan and Eli agreed we should go. I called Marisa, woke her up and said I would be there in half an hour to pick her up. But then came the complications of logistics: calling a cab to pick me up, take me to get Marisa, take us to the market, wait for us, take us back to Nagibe’s in time to leave for lunch (we had all been invited out to lunch by Eli’s brother). By now it was getting late, J & E now said we wouldn’t have time, but the taxi was already called, and by the way it’s going to cost $25 just for the car and don’t be late for lunch!

By the time the taxi arrived (1130) I felt like the morning was snowballing into a disaster that couldn’t be stopped. We would spend a ridiculous amount of money getting to the market, have about 10 minutes to spend there and then have to come back or else make everyone late to the big family lunch. But the car was there, Marisa was waiting and whatever. It was, of course, completely worth it. The rain stopped, we bought fresh maneesh with zaatar cheese and vegetables, tasted sweets olives breads from the different stalls, bought meringues, fresh squeezed orange juices…most of the shoppers were students and if I lived in Beirut I would spend all my food money there—it reminded me of a smaller version of the market in Dupont.

We even made it home again without making anyone wait for us. Lunch, in honor of Josyan’s birthday, was at a country club in Jounieh, a big port city 15 minutes north of Beirut, with views of the mountainside behind the marina filled with yachts and sailboats. By the time we rolled ourselves out of the restaurant, I began to feel the cumulated effects of a week spent eating in restaurants and sitting in cars…

That night my mom arrived at the airport and we went to pick her up with Chantal. Unfortunately Chantal was leaving the next morning for Berlin and was in a frenzy to pack and organize her life before she left, so my mom saw her for a total of about an hour. Even still, how lucky we were that the four of us all ended up in Beirut with the family at the same place at the same time, given how long it had taken us Americans to get there in the first place (Marilyn, 30 years, my mom 12, Marisa, her life). And how lucky that I was living only a few hours away when this all came together, and was the reason that my mom came through Beirut in the first place.

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The next day we had hoped that we would make it to the Mazara’a, the family’s summer house in the mountains, even though it was not yet the season for visiting. Unfortunately Chantal was leaving, the roads were muddy or snowy and not fit for driving, there was no one to show us the way, and the house was too much connected to Sr Agnes for Nagibe to want to visit it so soon after her death (Sr Agnes was the main caretaker of the house and the family’s farms). Instead we made a day trip to Tripoli and spent the day eating sweets and walking around the city’s old markets and back up to the citadel on a hill.

Monday Marisa and Marilyn left for Paris, where they spent a few days before returning to the US, and my mom and I went to visit the archbishop and Sr Julienne. We took them out to lunch and tried to learn more about our family’s Armenian history. I had met a few Armenians at Georgetown who were shocked to know that my family was Armenian Catholic but we didn’t know if we actually had Armenian heritage. To them, being from a nation that has survived an attempt to be wiped off the face of the earth, being connected to one’s history language and culture is vital to keeping it alive in the next generation. So we asked and were surprised to get a fairly straightforward answer (at least in the beginning). Yes, my grandfather’s mother was Armenian, her name meaning “prince” in Armenian, but the family had emigrated a few centuries before so there was no direct connection. So what about my grandfather’s father? Coussa is not an Armenian name. And where does the Armenian Catholic come from—the mother or the father? And why has no one ever talked about this before?

The most surprising thing to me about my grandfather’s family is that 1) there is no one left living in Syria and 2) my grandfather was the only one of 9 ? kids to have children. 3 became nuns, 1 became an archbishop, 2 married without children, and 2 died young. My grandfather was born in 1903 and didn’t marry and have children until his mid-forties, after he had emigrated to New York (alone, at the age of 17 and without speaking English) and built up a successful import-export business, American Pistachio Corporation. What a life he must have left behind, compared to the one he built for himself and his family—Syria at the turn of the century!

So from Lebanon, my mom and I travelled to northern Syria to Aleppo, to visit the birthplace of the Coussas.

From Megadeath to Mega-Dinner! And then more music.

After the concert, we loitered, waiting to gather the 9 of us back again. Ibrahim found us with a poster in his hand and told us we could go back inside and get free posters, then suggested we find the band and get autographs, which we obviously couldn't refuse--though it was a little awkward, since we are no longer in the prime groupie years of 14-16. Then came the inevitable question of, what next? I felt right back at school, my AmeriEuro friends pulled out their cellphones, looking for the next party or whatever, but we settled on finding a nearby restaurant to sit and get something to eat. Ibrahim's friend suggested one with a live singer, so after shedding a few from our group, we walked around the block into the old city.

The restaurant was called "Narcissus Palace" and was in a renovated old Damascene house, with a large courtyard (the ceiling was covered for the winter) filled with long tables of families. We sat in the back, with the groups of men, where apparently they put all the 'rowdy' folks who might not be family-appropriate (I was the only female back there, not that it was weird but still.) The waiter informed us that it's necessary to order the full mezze menu, and then if we wanted to add anything else, we could. Our table was soon filled with small dishes of hummus, labne, muhammara, tabbouleh, fattoush, arugula salad, kibbe, chicken, etc etc and so on and so forth. I tried a drink made from fresh lemon juice and mint (it came out green and delicccccious) I think it was called something like popo.

Dinner conversation morphed from one topic to the next, though I won't record them here. Suffice it to say it was very interesting and thought-provoking. By the end of the meal, a few of our friends were anxious to move on and continue celebrating the end of class at a friend's house, but Paolo and I decided to stay for the music with Ibrahim and his friend.

The music was the same kind of music that the band performed at that cafe in Lebanon-- the traditional Arabic songs that everyone in the restaurant knew all the words to. It wasn't quite the same dancing spectacle as in Beirut, though by the end small children were dancing on tables and people were up in the aisles dancing with friends. Behind us was a long table of men and a few of them got up, twisting their hips and shaking their chests, and were met with a lot of cheers and laughter. Though it may not be common for men to dance like women, it certainly wasn't their first time.

But the best part of it all was seeing Ibrahim and his friend waving napkins in the air, dancing in their seats, singing along and wearing their Megadeath t-shirts, the same two who had been jumping around and banging their heads to rock songs just a few hours earlier.

What Rocks? Syrian Punk.

A week or so ago I met Ibrahim at the coffeehouse of unreliable-wireless and overpriced-drinks where I like to study. He was wearing a Harley-Davidson t-shirt and one of his first questions for me, after asking if I could charge his phone on my computer, was if I liked Harleys/owned one in the US. He is studying medicine to be a plastic surgeon, because they actually make money, and wants to work in the US because you can have tattoos and piercings without losing all your clients.

Somehow we got onto the topic of metal music, which is forbidden here because it encourages devil-worship and unproductive behavior, as is rap, which encourages an equally immoral lifestyle, albeit in a completely different direction. He told me that if you have a band and want to put on a concert here you have to register it, and if you register it as a metal concert of course it won’t be approved and you might be asked a few questions. (It is not, however, forbidden in other places in the ME and he told me that Metallica and Megadeath were on their way to play Dubai, and he had been to two metal concerts while living in Saudi Arabia—the first was men-only but the second was on the American compound.) But rock and roll is an unknown here and so he told me about his friends who were putting on a punk concert the following weekend. I had actually seen posters for it around the university campus and had been curious to know more.

So yesterday, after my leisurely lunch with Katherine and Jack, I met my friend Frank and a few of his friends who live in the center of the city (conveniently located to our restaurant) to hang out for a bit before the 6 pm concert. We went to the house of Nanju, who I had met a few weeks ago when we went salsa dancing together. He lives in a house with other foreigners, the rooms are on the outskirts of a nice garden/fountain with tables and chairs and they pay about the same as me for their rooms with shared bathrooms and kitchen.

Just before 530 we made our way out the door, collecting a few more friends on the way—Traviss, from Michigan, and Paolo, from Italy. We were all curious to see what the music/crowd/scene would be like. We met Ibrahim and four of his friends and then found a near-empty mini-bus to take all 9 of us to our destination.

The concert was in a venue called Dar al-Fanoun “House of the Arts,” which we found, as per usual with concerts in unknown locations, by following those who looked most likely to be going to the same place we were headed—the two guys with shoulder-length black hair. The crowd had filled the street outside the door and was waiting to be let in. Ibrahim knew the band and said it was their first concert ever, and that rock concerts only come around once or twice a year, as large congregations of people are considered a little suspicious. By the time we made it inside, there were probably about 200 people inside, from mid-twenties and older down to the young teens. Based on the crowd response, it definitely seems like a scene waiting to happen, and the absence of alcohol or drugs from the venue made it authority-friendly as well.

The kids were appropriately dressed with Vans and Cons, jeans, red black and white checked belts and sweatshirts, black wristbands, neon graffitied t-shirts, black mesh gloves—even a girl in a white headscarf with a skull and crossbones necklace, and the same pattern repeated on her shirt. In addition, there were plenty of people dressed like any other Syrian youth just off the street; in Ibrahim’s opinion this sign of mainstream appeal bode well for the argument that not all rockers/metal-heads are devil-worshippers and depressed drug addicts. They jumped around, cheered and screamed, waved their fists and devil-horns, tried to crowd-surf but were held back by security… just a good old-fashioned rock show.

The band had passed out sheets with their lyrics printed on them while the fans waited outside the door, so some held them up to sing along to the unfamiliar songs. In between their original material, (written in Arabic and including songs about the pressures of graduating high school, girls getting married too young, fathers, unemployment/lack of money/lack of future, general discontent) they played songs from AC DC, Metallica and the Offspring. It was particularly entertaining to hear the lead singer call out “I don’t want to be an American idiot” followed up later with the lyric “I’m not part of your redneck agenda” in a surprisingly accurate American accent. And then later, the last song (played twice, to the crowd’s delight) which had everyone singing along, “We’re on a Highway to Hell.”

It’s interesting to see how rock and metal seem to have caught on here, a few decades late but without the influence of drugs or devils, inspired only by good-old discontent, concern for the future and a need to have fun.

Work and Play

The next day was rain, the first day of rain here since I arrived, for which I was completely unprepared, so I vetoed my plans to find the British Council and cultural center and instead went straight home to take a nap. Wednesday it was sunny again, but this time after class finished, I had to go to the Office of Immigration Services to extend my visa. You get a 2 week tourist visa when you enter the country, then you have to extend it further. The university gives students a letter verifying enrollment in school and in return you get a one month temporary residency permit (called Iqama) that you have to renew each month. I had already heard horror stories about the Syrian bureaucracy, being sent from room to room, from floor to floor and from one official to another, looking for someone to explain to you in English exactly where you should go and what it all means. On top of this there are photocopies to be made, forms to be filled, passport photos, fees, even the presence of the owner of the house you are staying in to prove your residency.

Luckily I avoided this adventure with the advice of a friend who had gone through it the day before, and went instead to a smaller office in the city center where the process was much simpler. I took a bus there and eventually found the office, though I was greeted with much of the same confusion and bureaucracy as anywhere else. Still, it was relatively efficient, and they (that is, soldiers in the office, random people waiting in line or standing on the street) knew to direct me, the confused foreigner, back downstairs to get a form, out to the street where someone filled it out for me, made photocopies, collected his 20 cents, sold me a stamp, sent me back upstairs, where I was stamped, signed, moved from room to room and sent back home again with a 2 month visa. I’m not sure how it worked, but it is good for me because I won’t be a student in March as I am taking the month off to travel (the parents are visiting!) and I didn’t know how I would get in and out of the country.

Later that night I met up with Frank, one of his classmates and a group of friends who are older and not students but instead are working in the city, for my first night out on the town. I left in somewhat of a rush, being late, and failed to tell my family that I was headed out for the night. We headed to Bab-Sharqi, the eastern gate of the old city, which I recognized from my excursion last weekend. We were going to the only salsa club in the city (one of the women in our group, Columbian, teaches at the club) where on Wednesday nights they have classes followed by dancing from 10 pm-whenever. We arrived just before it opened to the public, so we waited in a nearby bar (“Le Piano”) and hung out for a while. Frank’s friend, whose name I can’t remember, is Indian and did his masters at SOAS in London in the Middle East Studies program. His thesis was on gay human rights organizations in the Middle East. Apparently there are only two based in the Middle East (in Beirut and Israel) and the rest are based abroad—Canada, US, etc. For now he is studying at the university and holding off on more research while he learns Arabic. He was impressed to learn I was at g’town, mostly because he said another student in his class was doing her thesis on counterterrorism through relationships in the public and private sector (she was working at Bank of America and realized in her work that banks and other private institutions could/did support government counterterrorism efforts). I told him that sounded very Georgetown.

The salsa club was in a restaurant that is apparently the largest club in Damascus (not that big) but I haven’t been anywhere else to compare it with. There was recorded music playing accompanied by a live drummer and a surprisingly active dancing crowd. Who knew salsa was such a thing in Syria? I couldn’t really tell how many of the dancers were local, but I think a majority of them are, with a few foreigners in the mix. Unfortunately it is not as much fun when everybody else knows what they are doing and you haven’t salsa’ed since ballroom dancing class senior year four years ago, but I managed to get a few dances in with others who knew a lot more than I did, and it was fun regardless. But alas Thursday was another day of waking up at 7 so I found a cab and returned home just after 12. I saw that Laila, the mother, had called me while I was out, and when I was home brushing my teeth, Philip, the father came to talk to me. Oops. There was no big problem, only that I forgot to tell them I was going out, they were worried, I came home late, it was my first time out. The next morning I talked to Laila about it again and she explained that our neighborhood is not a great place to walk around alone at night—and when I explained I took a cab home, she was even more worried. She said next time I should either come home with a friend or have a male take the cab back with me to the house and then continue on to his home. I promised to be more careful next time, but I’m not sure how to convince others to go out of their way around the city just to drop me off at home. I am grateful, however, that they are concerned about me but still allow me to maintain my independence.

Family Outing

Again Saturday I spent the morning with my aunt in the kitchen. This time she let me peel garlic. She was preparing lunch-- Armenian sausage sliced in the bottom of a pan, layered with sliced tomatoes, ground white pepper (I was allowed to grind that too) and sliced green peppers, baked in the oven.

I asked her a few questions about growing up. My mom and my uncle back home had both wanted to know how many people lived in the household, she said 21! 2 parents, 10 kids, 2 aunts, 2 uncles, 2 kids from an aunt with no husband and 3 servants. She said her father loved having people around in the house, family and neighbors alike, and her mother was a very kind woman to allow so many people to live in their house. I asked her if she learned to cook from her mother, and she said yes, but only Lebanese food. But she also likes to cook international foods, which she learned from her 'encyclopedia.' My grandmother, on the other hand, only cooked Lebanese food, which she learned from her mother, though my aunt wasn't clear about if her mother was actually a remarkable cook or not. Judging from the skills of her daughters (Sr Agnes included, our house-favorite dish in CT is 'Sr Agnes chicken': grilled with garlic and olive oil and more garlic; also I remember Tante Therese's cooking from visiting her in Brazil) she must have been.

I also asked her (as per requested by my mom) if she cooked food from Senegal, where she lived for 19 years while her husband worked as a doctor there. She said, cous cous. That's all I got. But more on Senegal-- all four of her children were born there, and they only chose to move back when Josyan, the eldest, was 17 and needed to 'go to school and get married.' It was either France or Lebanon and they returned to Lebanon, where every 4 years they had returned to visit family. I asked her a little about my grandmother, if she had any stories or memories about her, since she died a few months after my parents were married, and she said when they were young, the three oldest girls, Sr Agnes, Nagibe and my grandmother Marie, were always together. Then my grandmother moved to NY to marry my grandfather, Frank/Fathallah (when she was in her 20s) and after the wedding they didn't see each other for 20 years, because my grandmother lived in NY and her sister lived in Senegal. She said it was very difficult the first time they saw each other, because "I look for my sister, but I don't find her." She said it was like her sister was a different person, or maybe that she herself had changed-- and of course after 20 years of living in different countries both had changed. But after "4, 5 hours of conversation, there was no problem, I find my sister."

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A neighbor stopped by for coffee, and my aunt called a friend of hers from Damascus to ask advice about hiring a taxi for me, since I realized this week that I cannot go with the family friend as he is going Tuesday and I need to be there Monday. We also called the family in Damascus and I spoke a little to the mother, Leila, who doesn't speak much English (probably a good thing) but sounded very sweet and my aunt spoke to her in Arabic to get the full address of the house. I also talked to her older son who spoke English very well and gave me a few more details for when I arrive.

Josyan and Eli came by to visit, offering the idea of going out to dinner and a movie (Valkyrie) that night with all of us; it was Eli's idea to take me out on my last weekend in Beirut. I hadn't been out anywhere with my aunt and I liked the idea of going out with the whole family, though I probably wouldn't have seen the movie otherwise. Chantal had been out all day so when she returned around 7 we left for the theater. Seating in Lebanese theaters is assigned so when I was sent ahead to buy tickets (they cost about $7) I tried to find 6 seats together as Michel was joining us. The movie was intense but everybody loved it, my aunt Nagibe included. I asked her if she liked violent action movies and she said yes "c'est magnifique!" We went to a pizza restaurant on the top floor of the mall where the cinema is (the largest mall in Beirut, packed with families and teenagers on a Saturday night) and each person ordered their own thin-crust platter-sized pizza, of which I could finish half. Not too bad though, when I think about other countries' attempts to recreate pizza (I think the weirdest was in Japan with corn and shrimp), particularly since the restaurant tried to stay faithful to the Napolitan theme.

We were home by 1230, pizza boxes in hand, and I gladly went to bed. I probably could have still met up with Diana and her friends, but sleep is good too.

Cabin Fever; Friends? part 2

I spent the day Friday at home again, sleeping in, sitting in the kitchen with my aunt while she cooked but refused to let me help. I found myself feeling anxious-- not wanting to be a tourist anymore, ready to leave the comfort of living with family to live on my own, but still nervous about going to Damascus in a few days and knowing nobody. It was raining all day and I didn't want to do anything, nor did I know anything to do.

Josyan had given me the number of her friend's niece, Diana, so I had called her the day before and emailed her to see if we could meet up Friday afternoon. She responded that the rain kept her indoors and she was busy working on her thesis, but she did feel a bit of cabin fever and wanted to go out that night. So we made plans to meet up later in the evening. I was glad that I would not leave Beirut without experiencing any of its famous nightlife and I felt a little reassured from our brief conversations that we might have more in common than the last group of friends I was set up with. After dinner with Chantal and Nagibe, I waited for a taxi to come and bring me to her dorm in AUB campus, where she lived. We met and walked to her friend's apartment nearby. There were four of us, including her friend Kevin (American, in the same ME studies program) and his friend George (a French-Lebanese who is working as a journalist). In the car, I asked them about their master's program, both laughed and said it was a little disappointing in the end. There are only 21 credits (7 courses), 2-3 of which are Arabic language, 1 is an easy seminar, and 3 are actually relevant to the program. They both were excited and supportive of my decision to study in Damascus and Diana said in retrospect she probably would have preferred Damascus over Beirut for school, though she loves living in the city and has been here for 2 1/2 years.

We ended up at a club called Basement, which turned out to be a little stuffy. The people seemed a bit too serious and there were few places to hang out and talk. You couldn't sit anywhere as the only options were the seats at the bar for $25 and the tables with bottles of champagne-- we didn't ask-- and there was little standing room. They talked a little bit about other clubs they've been to/heard about in Beirut, including one that is underground that doesn't get busy til after 2 am but opens its roof so partiers can watch the sunrise and another with $1000 tables, reservations necessary-- Kevin only slipped in without paying as part of a larger group. Around 1230 we opted to head out, stopping at a local snack shop called Barbar (if I remember correctly, the family of the kids I met the week before owns it) to get a little food-- Diana said they have the best falafel but I couldn't stomach the huge sandwich, I opted for a (huge but delicious) spinach pie under $1. Then we continued on to Acid, listed in LP as one of the gay-friendly bars in a country where homosexuality is illegal. Entry for women is free before midnight, and though we missed the cutoff they also feature an open bar. This business model makes no sense to me, but at least the crowd was a lot more fun and colorful (perfect for people-watching) and of course representative of a subculture in Beirut that you don't see out and about during the day. They had laser shows, showered foam from the ceilings, pounding music, etc etc that began to get to me sometime around 230 am as we debated leaving for another club or staying a little longer. We stayed, and by 330 we were leaving, this time for home. They drove me back to Jel El-Dib, which was great for me not to have to take a taxi, and I was home before 4. I don't think I saw the full range of what Beirut has to offer in one night, but I am glad I got the chance to go out before leaving. Diana called me the following night for a more "organized" night out, but we had plans with the family to go out for dinner and a movie, on Beirut time (aka movie at 8, dinner at 1030, home at 1230). See following post for more details.

Saturday: Saida, Cinema and Samra

So the weekend had finally come and though I could not tell the difference, Chantal was glad for the break from her busy week at work. Thus she took on the new job of Guide and we debated over a late breakfast what our day's plans should be. After a few phone calls and finding many of our destinations closed/unresponsive and fears of impending rain, Chantal suggested we drive south to one of her favorite cities, Saida (Saidon).

Saida is only about 40 km south of Beirut (about the same distance as Byblos) in the southern region, a predominantly Muslim area. Lebanon borders Israel in the south so it often receives attention for extremist groups lobbing bombs over the border and being invaded by Israel, etc. As we drove, Chantal quizzed me on my education about the civil war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and seemed surprised to hear that American universities aren't all spouting pro-Israeli propoganda. She explained that she feels a certain connection to the Muslim population in this area, likely because as a nurse at the AUB hospital, located in West Beirut, she cared for predominantly Muslim casualties during the civil war and she feels the greatest sympathy for the Palestinian refugees, though her sympathies don't extend to the extremists that the region houses (evidenced by flags of various colors denoting one's affiliation-- yellow for Hezbollah, green for Amal, etc). Saida is most famous for being the birthplace of former PM Rafiq Hariri and a lot of the city has been rebuilt after the civil war thanks to a foundation in his name.

We began at the Khan al-Franj (restored by the Hariri Foundation) apparently the largest/most beautiful/best preserved of its type, built in the 17th century by the Lebanese prince Fakhreddine. It has an open courtyard with two stories, the top level to provide housing for travelers and merchants, the lower level with covered stables and storage. I looked inside one of the stables and found a darkened room that housed a mini art gallery for pieces of work that all expressed emotions of hope, peace, anger and such about the Gaza-Israeli conflict.

However, our main attraction to Saida, in addition to its picturesque coastal setting, was the soap museum (al-mathaf a-sabon), a 13th century building rededicated to soap making in the 19th century, which we found after wandering through a maze of covered souqs and almost walking past its nondescript door. Its trilingual signs explained the process of "saponification," with displays of various ingredients used and their benefits, of tools used to process, cut and design the soaps. This particular factory had been used to supply the hammams (public bathhouses), so there was also a display about the customs and artifacts of the bathhouses. It was particularly interesting to read about the importance of personal hygiene in the culture and the use of hammams as social centers in Arab cultures where women weren't allowed to go out in public.

While I wandered the museum, Chantal waited for me in the accompanying cafe and when I was finished I met her for tea and orange blossom water. Then to the museum gift shop, which made me wish we had such bathhouses back in the US so one could justify spending so much on embroidered slippers, robes, towels, etc. It also made me think about how I could rearrange my already-overweight bags to pack in a few more gifts/souvenirs. And I haven't even arrived in Syria yet...

We somehow found our way back out of the markets and stopped to buy me a falafel sandwich (which cost less than my tea)-- I found it just as much fun to watch them make my sandwich as it was delicious for me to eat, looking out across the harbor to the floating Sea Castle (built by the Crusaders in 1228). Unfortunately the castle was closed off to visitors so we saw it from behind the bars, then returned to the car and drove back to Beirut, arriving just in time to make it to the cinemas to meet Chantal's friend for Revolutionary Road.

We left the theaters fully depressed after the movie (but don't let that discourage you from seeing it!) and after a few errands at the mall (where I spotted my first Uggs since arriving, though malls are malls) we met Michel for dinner at a Thai restaurant. After dropping him back at his apartment, we continued on to meet up with her co-workers at a cafe to celebrate the end of their monthlong-working-marathon.

The cafe was called Samra and was well-hidden on the second story of an otherwise empty street at 1030 on a Saturday night. It was relatively small with a bar in the back and posters of favorite old Egyptian movies, actors and singers (the only one I recognized/remember was a young Umm Kalthoum) and is apparently unique for its distinctly Arab character. The cafe slowly filled up, with both our table's mix of young and old, surrounded by groups of students and another table hosting a local (older) TV star and his large crowd. Later in the evening a band (bass, oud, violin and drum) arrived and began playing traditional Arabic music that everyone in the room except for the lone American knew all the words to. The room erupted into spontaneous and spirited dancing (though not spastic-- it was both calculated and expressive, in particular the national dance the debke, performed by a group holding hands moving in a circle [n.b. this is difficult in a crowded cafe]) as it seemed with each new song they remembered, 'oh yes, THIS is my favorite song,' and the dancers found a piece of floor to claim for their own. There were certain individuals who were particularly skilled (we had a former belly dancer in our own group) and I was impressed that across all age groups, male and female, no one held back from twisting their hips and waving napkins. I still think there may have been some musicians planted in the audience, as random people pulled out castanets, jumped up to the microphone to sing a few songs, etc. In short, the audience put on as much of a performance as the musicians did and I am sorry that I left my camera behind in the car. The belly dancer at our table was Syrian and she told me that I could expect as much fun in Damascus with good music and cheaper food [I continue to receive contradicting opinions about what to expect, I will just have to wait it out and see for myself]. Though she was born in Aleppo, she lived in Damascus for some period of time while dating an Italian diplomat, so much of her advice for a young Westerner was to seek out the embassies and foreign cultural centers for events and activities.

On the table (for approx. 10 people): 25 small dishes (about 2 of each) including bread, potatoes, hummus, eggplant dip, tabbouleh, fattoush, sausage, kibbe, cheese, vegetables, chicken, etc.

Friends for Maggie?

As you may have noticed, I've been spending a lot of time with old people. I use the word 'old' loosely, meaning anyone over the age of... 27 maybe. It hasn't really bothered me so much, especially since they have been family members primarily, but it worries my cousin Chantal to no end that I have not spent time with the youth of Beirut. Thus, on Wednesday I was set up to spend an evening with her colleague's 22 year old son, Ziad. Being forced to spend time with anyone you don't know can be awkward, especially when parents are the driving force behind the arrangement. I felt a little like the socially inept cousin who can't get a date for the prom, but all in all it wasn't that bad.

I met him at Chantal's office, with his mom and my cousin excited enough for the two of us. We got into his car and started driving around the city. At first, I assumed, naively I suppose, that he had some ultimate destination in mind, and we made easy conversation as he drove. I started to recognize the buildings and the neighborhood and it appeared that we were making laps around downtown Beirut-- finally he asked me if there was anywhere that I wanted to go. I assured him I had no idea what there was to do, that I hadn't gone out at night yet and I would be happy with anything. He assured me we could do anything I want, I need only to say it. After a little back and forth I realized he really had no idea what to do with me. Great. We walked around downtown a little bit, where expensive designer boutiques and cafes line the pedestrian streets. There are engraved footsteps in the sidewalk marking the last steps former Prime Minister Hariri took before he was assassinated in 2005, and we could see the mosque built in his honor lit up in the background. Then we returned to the car and continued driving. For at leaaaast 2 hours.

In the meantime we had fairly good conversation-- he is a business student who never does school work and says the only things to do in Beirut are go out to eat and go clubbing. "Did you know we have clubs that are open 24 hours a day?" I asked him if he had any other interests outside of school-- yes, clubbing, also he used to play basketball, but then girls took up too much time. Ok. Eventually he asked if I would be interested in a movie, yes of course! We parked the car and waited for his friend to pick us up. She was warm, friendly and very talkative, named Laili, studying journalism. She had just finished her first interview, with a Shi'i Muslim who belongs to a particular sect that celebrates some kind of event in their religion by cutting their scalp with razors and wearing white cloth to soak the blood. Her analysis? "People who do this are very stupid."

We met up with Laili's brother, Hamoud, and his girlfriend Maia, and followed their car to the cinema, located in a shopping mall in the neighborhood Achrafiyeh. We arrived at 830, 30 minutes after the last movie had started, so we opted for dinner instead. It was my first experience eating out at a restaurant, and ultimately I was grateful that I am so lucky to have such good cooks and a home to stay in, so I don't have to spend all my money eating out (Chantal's friend Michel explained to me that there was a difference between Lebanese food at home and Lebanese restaurants. Restaurants only serve mezze, small appetizer-style dishes, kabobs and sandwiches, whereas at home you get the real thing). There is nearly every genre and chain of restaurants here: Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Italian, fast food/American (Ziad was surprised to hear that there was such thing as American cuisine outside of fast food). We ate at a Lebanese restaurant called "Cafe Blanc." Only 3 of us ordered food and Hamoud, who hadn't ordered anything, picked up the check. Of course I pulled out my wallet to pay and was met with wide-eyed looks from all around the table and was forced to put it away.

For the most part, they spoke in Arabic together and I had small side conversations in English with the people near me. Hamoud's friend, Sam, asked me how I feel about Obama. They were surprised to hear that most Americans are glad to see Bush go-- which surprised me in turn. Sam said he was reserving his opinions on Obama for when there was some clear evidence of his political policy, since he hadn't been overt about them during his campaign. This has been a common theme with most Lebanese I've talked to about our new president and in general I think it is because they are most concerned with US political policy toward Gaza, and they are skeptical that the US will ever do anything for the Palestinian people against their Israeli allies.

We left the restaurant around 10 and drove back to Laili's apartment to drop her off. On the way we noticed cars pulled over on the side of the highway and Ziad pulled over to join them. We got out of the car and as we followed the commotion and looked over the bridge, we saw an overturned car on the road below. Looking further along the bridge that we stood on there was a gaping hole in the rail where the car had apparently driven through and flipped over, landing in the highway below. Thankfully it didn't seem as if it had struck any other cars. All along the side of the highway, cars had pulled over with their hazard lights on and everyone watched the activity. It was rubbernecking like I'd never seen it before.

Once we arrived at her apartment, we left her car there and joined Hamoud in his car so he could drive me home. In the car we had a pretty good conversation; Hamoud had barely spoken to me during dinner but now he loosened up a little and asked me many questions about studying Arabic and told me about Lebanon and Beirut. When I had told Leili and Ziad earlier that I was planning to study in Damascus, they responded with the usual confusion. To them, Syria was "ugly," the people were "dirty," there was no nightlife and no reason to go there. Hamoud was a little more reasonable and once we talked out why I was interested in studying there, he agreed with me for the most part. It has been interesting bringing up this subject with the Lebanese here, because they don't understand why I am majoring in Arabic in the first place (which is interesting because its not appealing to them at all and it doesn't tell them anything more about my academic interests; obviously I want to learn Arabic, I'm in the Middle East, my family is from here. So what else?), why I wouldn't pick something that actually gave me a career ("Don't you want to add business or some other program to that? Can't you double major?"), and why I would go to Damascus, of all places. We also talked about the Francophile Lebanese-- Hamoud said there was no reason why he would ever want to travel or work in the US, because "what is there to learn there? In Europe there is history and culture....what is there in the US?" Lebanon gets its French leanings from being under French occupation after WWI; some Lebanese (at the time, maybe now) would have preferred to remain part of Europe than the Arab world. A lot of people here attended French schools, travel there yearly, moved there during the war, etc.

Another interesting conversation we had was about men in America. Earlier, Ziad had asked me if it was true "what you hear about gangs and gangsters in America." Uhhh what do you mean by that? I told him of course they exist, but only in certain parts of certain cities, and they certainly weren't prevalent in the culture, though they have their own subculture, and it was likely misrepresented in whatever representation he saw of it in Lebanon. Hamoud similarly asked me if it was true that all American men are "assholes." I didn't know how to respond to that. Ziad brought up the gang question again and Hamoud referred to college movies where the big guy beats up on the little guy and is respected for it. The only thing I could think of was the stereotypical frat/jock and no of course not all men are like that. He said it makes him angry to see that depicted in movies-- I think he is watching the wrong movies.

Hamoud also asked me what I thought so far about Lebanese women. I wasn't really sure how to respond. "You know, you will never see them without makeup, big hair, high heels, even at 830 in the morning! they go to class dressed like they just left the club..." Ahh yes, I think American women are a little bit more casual, for better or for worse, though you can find a little bit of everything there.

Anyway, apparently they had never been to Jal El-Dib before, probably because it is outside of Christian East Beirut and Muslims don't usually go out there, so we continued to drive on the autostradt until I realized that we were halfway to the next city, Jounieh, and asked if we had gone too far. "We never use navigation systems or maps in Lebanon, I know every street in Beirut, but I've never been to Jal El-Dib." Somehow I managed to navigate the neighborhood (yes I was very proud of myself) and was home by 1130. So much driving, so little action. But in the end I was still appreciative that they took me along and it was good to learn a little about the youth in Beirut.

--

The following day (Thursday) Chantal called me from work to see if I would want to go an Arab play with her and a few friends, though I wouldn't understand most of it. Of course! I took a taxi to her office and she asked me how my previous night had been. I explained and she was shocked. I told her it wasn't that bad, but still she was disappointed: "They have nothing better to do than drive around the city in circles at night? They have no interests?? When we were their age, we were wild!" Unfortunately, the play was sold out, so we went to her friend's house instead ("Maggie, I am sorry but you will have to spend another night with old people." Really, I don't mind.) She warned me in advance that the host of the evening, Akram, loved to put on film nights, but he was too much of an intellectual and they were often difficult to get through (and he difficult to watch them with). Akram is a professor at AUB in literature, and a writer himself. I promised I was up for the intellectual challenege, it would be a nice change from the night before.

We picked up her friend Jenna on the way, who is also a nurse but teaches dance therapy and is also involved in drama. Once she found out I was studying formal arabic, she pledged to speak to me only in fus'ha for the car ride over, so we commenced to speak (or I tried to speak) in the elegantly constructed sentences that no one ever uses.

Akram and his overly energetic dog met us at the door-- it is somewhat rare to see dogs in Beirut, I still haven't seen one outdoors (when I was at Selim's apartment a few days earlier he had a beautiful tall blonde dog who bounded about the house, I commented it must be tough to be inside all day and he said, well, he has the balcony). Chantal asked for some recommendations about what I should do and see, and lamented about the youth today. Akram agreed, both as a professor and a father, as his daughter is my age and he can't get her to take interest in anything beyond going out. Chantal suggested she might take me along somewhere... and so it continues. Though, I did meet her when she came home and she seemed significantly more down to earth than the others, and she promised to make some plans after her architecture final was finished on Tuesday.

The movie for the evening was based on a James Joyce short story called "The Dead." His friends groaned and cried out for something more entertaining. He replied, "To me, this is the height of action." There was an extended debate about which restaurant to order in from, finally they agreed to eat home-cooked after the movie was over. Chantal's worries about me spending too much time with old people were in vain-- regardless of age I would prefer to spend time with people I can relate to. I could imagine having some of the same conversations they had with my own group of friends, and they seem to have a lot of fun together, planning weekends out, dinners at home and going out to plays and films.

The movie, faithful to the 20 page short story to the word, was slow and difficult for the others to hear the Irish accent. But the last scene tied together the entire film with all its recurring themes (or machines, as Akram called them), both intellectual and aesthetic. Over dinner, which Akram had prepared himself, conversation erupted into a massive argument, which I stayed out of, on whether or not one can "interpret" any work of art. Jenna, the dancer/drama teacher, pleaded yes, while Akram firmly argued that there is no such thing as interpretation, only analysis of structural elements, and that it was impossible to ever determine what the author "means" or is "trying to say." I thought Akram was overlooking the value of art as a form of expression, but again, found no method of entry into the heated conversation. Ultimately, the difference in opinion was boiled down to a mistranslation of the word "interpretation" into English from French, since they were all speaking in their third language, for my benefit.

The conversation turned to politics when Jenna asked me what the opinion of the American people is on the situation in Gaza. I told her it was difficult for me to say, since it began when I was at home, rather than surrounded by people at school and then of course I came to Lebanon. However, I thought that speaking for myself, and those whose opinion I am aware of, were sympathetic to the Palestinians and waited upon the regime change so it would not be Bush acting in the name of the American people. Around the table, they all expressed doubt that the US would ever come to the rescue of the Palestinians against their own longtime ally. They argued about whether or not the US president was a puppet for the political elite, and how the president's position of power had changed since Nixon and LBJ had abused their power and kept their political actions hidden from the people. I decided they were raining on our DC parade and chose to forego cynicism for optimism, just this once.

For dinner (served by the housekeeper but made by Akram), we had lentil soup, vegetable soup, spinach side dish, kibbe, salad, breads, beans & snowpeas in a red sauce, rice. And for dessert, three kinds of jam: fig, apricot and quince. Also carob molasses, which I didn't like but is a favorite here-- the tree of which I saw for the first time while hiking last weekend. Apparently all the seeds on a carob tree are equal in weight, without fail, and as a result it was used as a weight of measure-- the carat. In fact, now that I am looking the word up in the dictionary to make sure I spelt it correctly, the word actually derives from the Greek word keration, meaning "fruit of the carob." [side note: I also saw a pepper tree for the first time. Who knew that peppercorns grew on trees?!]