Today is the last day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday, which marks the end of Ramadan. Eid begins with the sighting of the crescent moon--not its change of phase, mind you, but its sighting. This means that there is some ambiguity about when the holiday begins, as from what I understand there is not always agreement about when the crescent becomes visible. The holiday seems to have started on Tuesday, so the moon must have showed up on Monday night. However, I read that there are some who think that the holiday started on Wednesday. The upshot is that campus has been closed on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and will re-open for classes on Friday. I wonder how attendance will be.
I decided to take a break from my course prep and take a nice long morning walk to make the most of the last day off. I walked through neighborhoods I'd never visited before and got thoroughly lost wandering down some narrow, labyrinthine streets. There was one particularly interesting area tucked away near a highway overpass. I saw several older women in hijab carrying shopping bags and walking slowly out of what looked like to be a maze of alleys, so I went to see where they were coming from. Underneath the overpass and in some alleys radiating out from it were little fruit, bread, and grocery stands. The weren't selling anything terribly unusual, but their unexpected location made them seem like a great surprise. As I was checking it out, a really loud 'bang!' sounded from around the corner. I about jumped out of my skin, but no one else reacted at all. I'm assuming it must've just been a super-loud Eid firecracker, or surely someone would have flinched just a little, despite the legendary Lebanese cool about such things.
Anyway, here are some photos I took along the way today.
The blue-domed Mosque against the blue sky is the place where former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri was cremated.
The rest are just buildings that caught my eye--some Ottoman-era,
some very modern.
All the buildings in these photos are intact. It just seemed like too nice a day to photograph civil war-era rubble. Maybe another time, after Eid is over.
3 comments:
photos, cultural history, historical background information, personal insights . . . I'm REALLY enjoying reading your blog. Thanks! Keep it up!
Aw, shucks...thanks, Theresa! It's so nice to know you're reading along.
Wow, super interesting photos—what a lovely, wide range of architecture. I'd be interested to see rubble, but intact buildings reassure me that you are safe. *g*
I love the idea of a surprise market, too! It's always good to know little out-of-the-way places like that.
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