“Some cities are dog cities, like Paris. Beirut is a cat city.” --MJD, a colleague from the English department who showed me around campus and the city.
I’ll write more later about the impossibly beautiful AUB campus, but the thing that caught my attention right away was its population of feral cats. They’re everywhere, and some of them are really cute. I hate to think what their presence means for the indigenous bird population, but I admit that I really like having them around.
Quote Two:
“Ah, there were glorious times here. But I don’t like to talk about the past.”
As I was wandering around the administration building, I ran into an elderly Lebanese man who said he had been a professor at AUB for forty-three years (which seems like an awfully long time, but who knows?). I told him that I had only been in Beirut for a few days, and that prompted his wistful remark about the glorious times in the city’s past. Nearly all the Beirutis I meet say that the city is great…as long as it is peaceful. The reality that it is not always peaceful here, and will likely get chaotic again seems to be very much a part of the popular consciousness.
3 comments:
I remember feral cats from when I visited Italy. They are fabulously adorable and you wonder why they aren't friendly, but they're not! They don't understand the joys of being petted.
Thanks for adding the cat picture! I know they have a whole big cat society, but I'm Culturally Conditioned to wish that they had safe homes, health care, and access to reproductive control.
Aren't cats originally from that part of the world? I think the oldest cat skeleton was found in the middle east, so maybe those cats are feral in the true sense of the word as oppose to being domesticated and then gone wild? Either way, I hope you learned your lesson about trying to pet them.
I've heard that the Phonecians were the first to domesticate cats, so these little furry sweeties could indeed be indigenous. I know, I know...hands off from now on, I promise!
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