Beiteddine and Deir al-Qamar

Over Easter weekend Jeff and I took a trip into Lebanon's Chouf mountains to get away from the noise of the city for a little bit. It's amazing how much cooler the air feels in the mountains. It felt like we were vast distances away from Beirut, but we could still see the sea from the terrace of our hotel, so we weren't really that far inland.

We visited Beiteddine palace, built in the early 1800s for an emir, or Ottoman-era governor, and still used at times in the summer by important Lebanese officials. There were some really ornate rooms inside.

Most of the rooms were locked, so we had to get a guide to take us around and unlock them. He also doubled as a photographer.

There is a second palace up the hill from Beiteddine, where the Emir's son lived. It has now been turned into a hotel, and that's where we stayed. It wasn't as fancy as you're probably imagining, (think drafty old stone building with 1960s-era plumbing) but it did have a nice view and a fountain in which one could cool one's toes after a day of sightseeing.

The nearby village of Deir al-Qamar is down the hill from Beiteddine.

It's a lovely little town, and we had a good time just wandering down the streets, getting a good falafel sandwich, and watching workers decorate the Church of Saidet at-Talle for Easter. They were filling it with huge white roses, and one of the workers gave me one...or rather he gave it to Jeff to give to me. The church was built on the foundation of a seventh-century temple to the goddess Astarte, and then repurposed for Christianity. I love thinking about the pagan foundations of so many churches here; what a sense of history.

All in all it was a lovely trip, and well worth the hair-raising hour-long taxi ride down windy mountain roads to get back to Beirut!

Washer!

There is only one "self-serve," "coin-operated" landromat in Beirut. I say "coin-operated" because you have to pay the attendant, and then he operates it for you. It is "self-serve" in the sense that there are, in fact, two washers that you can pay the attendant to use. That is, you can if they are not broken or down due to one of the daily power outages. I quickly began to understand why people just drop off their laundry rather than trying to do it themselves. The only trouble is that when you drop it off, they jam all the laundry from your huge bag into one tiny machine, and it doesn't get very clean. Add to that the fact that the laundromat is quite expensive and a long, awkward walk from home, and I started to earnestly desire the ability to do laundry at home while working. So Jeff and I took a cab to the big home appliance place in Beirut and bought one! It just got delivered today, and it seems to be doing fine. Like most Beirutis, we're just hanging it up inside to dry.

It feels very festive to be able to do laundry at home. Yay!

Springtime in Syria

I know it has been ages since I've updated my blog. My only excuse is the usual one: spring semester, in Beirut as everywhere else, seems to be especially busy and tiring. In its quest to acknowledge the holidays of multiple religious sects, AUB's calendar only gave us a couple weeks off after fall semester, and so everyone is feeling a bit frazzled by now. Classes are going well, and I am advising a couple Master's theses for the first time, so I'm staying busy.

However, we did recently get two long weekends in a row, in commemoration of both Western and Eastern Orthodox Easters, and so Jeff and I took a trip to Damascus. It was really exciting finally getting to visit Syria, and we had a great time visiting some historic sites, such as an old, ornate mosque where I had to put on a beige druid-like robe that the attendant handed me before I could go in.

Damascus is also known for its souks, or markets, and it was fun looking at the piles of nuts and spices some of the vendors had for sale.



We took a trip to the nearby town of Maalula, where the local people still speak Aramaic, an ancient language I thought was dead. We visited a church which had formerly been a pagan temple. When they redecorated, the Christians replaced the church's pagan altar that had a hole in the middle of it to drain off the blood of sacrifices. The tour guide there prayed aloud in Aramaic, which was neat to hear. Also in Maalula, we visited another ancient church that was actually just a walled-in cave. It has a tree growing in it, as well as a holy water basin that is continually replenished by the water seeping out of the rock itself. Pretty neat.





The town of Maalula itself was lovely, too, perched on some
desert cliffs.

All in all, we had a wonderful time looking around and getting to meet some incredibly friendly Syrian people.