Baalbek

Last weekend Jeff and I spent the three-day holiday weekend (in honor of Eid al-Adha, which marks the end of the Hajj to Mecca) in Baalbeck, Lebanon's most famous archeological site.

We decided to make the most of our time by renting a car rather than using Lebanon's difficult and time-consuming public transportation. Taking public transportation would have meant grabbing a shared taxi to one of Beirut's bus stations, then finding a minibus that was heading toward the ruins, negotiating a price with the driver, and then waiting for the bus to fill up before leaving Beirut. It also would have meant skipping one of the sites we wanted to see: the ruins at Aanjar, which are off the main highway.

Instead, we piled into our little sub-compact rented Kia and drove stright to Aanjar, a little Armenian town in Lebanon's fertile Bekka valley. Aanjar has Lebanon's only ruins from the Umayyad perod, about 710 CE, in the early days of Islamic rule. It was a beautiful day--cool and sunny, and it felt nice to stroll around the ancient site.

After seeing Aanjar we got back in the car, broke out the sandwiches and red pepper slices we'd brought from home, and had lunch en route to Baalbeck. It was a little tricky navigating the winding, narrow, and sporadically-marked roads, even with the aid of a pretty good map. Before we knew it, though, we were in Baalbeck, with the impressive ruins suddenly visible near the road.

Also visible all along the roadside were yellow flags with Hezbollah's logo on them. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is a political party that has seats in parliament just like the other parties. Also like the other parties, it has its own militia. The Bekka Valley, a poor agricultural region, depends a lot on Hezbollah for social services and other support that it doesn't get from the government. I knew that the Bekka was Hezbollah country; what I didn't know was how well merchandized the party was. Hezbollah flags and billboards were everywhere. Touts selling Hezbollah t-shirts crowded around the ruins. We even saw souvenir lighters that projected an image of the face of Nasrallah (Hezbollah's leader). Wow.

We checked into our room at the Jupiter Hotel, right across from the ruins. As it was surpisingly cold in the high valley of the Bekka, we decided to pay an extra $30 US for a room with heat. As an added bonus, the room also had a lovely view of the ruins and the Hezbollah flags lining the street.

The sun set early in Baalbeck. Around 4:30 it dipped below the mountain range and the temperatures started to drop. We decided to save our visit to the the ruins for Saturday and instead take a quick walk to an ancient quarry containing what is supposed to be the world's largest cut stone. A sign on the gift shop nearby claimed that the stone increased the fertility of any woman who touched it. I stayed well away and watched while Jeff climbed it.

We grabbed a couple chicken shwarma sandwiches for dinner and then returned to our room. The room was "heated" by an oil stove. Diesel fuel dripped audibly from the tank into the burner all night long, like an IV drip in a hospital. It was cozy when we pulled the chairs right up to it, but it was a pretty chilly night nonetheless.

In the morning we headed straight to the Baalbek ruins. They were impressive indeed. About 1000 years BCE, a temple was built on this site in honor of Baal the storm god. When the Romans later conquered the area, they built the impressive complex of temples that are still visible today.

Interestingly, Mark Twain visited Baalbek in 1867. He describes the Temple of Jupiter this way: "The six columns are perfect...and six more shapely columns do not exist. The columns and the entablature together are ninety feet high--a prodigious altitude for shafts of stone to reach, truly--and yet one only thinks of their beauty and symmetry when looking at them" (Innocents Abroad, p. 447).

There is also a Temple of Venus,

and lots of ornately carved rubble. It is indeed pretty amazing to imagine the construction of such massive and artistically-designed buildings.

We spent most of the day at the ruins, and then went for a late afternoon lunch at one of the best Lebanese restaurants we've been to. Our hotel proprietor kept calling it "the Hezbollah restaurant," but aside from the restaurant's green and yellow logo, the only thing that seemed different about it was its excellent food. We went back there for breakfast Sunday morning and had a giant bowl of chick peas in some sort of spiced yogurt sauce, liberally sprinkled with pine nuts and olive oil. It was delicious.

After the courteous restaurant staff packed up our breakfast leftovers for us to take with us, we piled into our little rented car and headed back to Beirut. It is mid-semester for us (we'll continue until late January, with only about six days off for Christmas and New Years), and I knew I had a pile of grading waiting for me upon our return from Baalbek. Nevertheless, I was very glad to have taken some time away from work to see such amazing ancient sites. If ancient people can carve giant stones and erect ninety-foot columns, I figured I could grade a few papers! Funny how visiting places like Baalbeck helps put modern-day struggles into perspective.

Holidays

It's hard to believe that this is my second Thanksgiving in Beirut. Last year I think I had take-out hummus and a chicken kabob for dinner. I'm not quite sure what's on the menu this year, aside from a giant slice of the fabulous cake that my Aunt and Uncle had delivered to me unexpectedly at work. They also had a gorgeous bouquet of flowers delivered.

I would post a photo of the cake, too, but it has been gnawed pretty well already! The surprise gifts from them were especially nice because they made Thanksgiving actually feel like a holiday. My school does not recognize Thanksgiving, so it's just another work day for us.

Luckily, though, there are other holidays this time of year. This past Sunday was Lebanese Independence Day, which marks the sixty-sixth anniversary of Lebanon's independence from the French Mandate, which is what they call the period when France governed Lebanon after carving it out of Syria because it had Christians in it. The occasion was marked by the overflights of many helicopters--or maybe they were just the same helicopters over and over again. We watched from the balcony as they flew by.

When Jeff waved at one of the helicopters the guy leaning out of it waved back. Neat.

We were not supposed to get a day off for Independence Day, since it fell on a Sunday. After reassuring my students on Friday that we would meet on Monday as usual, Saturday morning found an email from AUB in my inbox declaring Monday a holiday as per the government's surprise directive. It was great, of course, but required much rearranging of course schedules, emails to students, etc. I'm just not used to having surprise holidays. I guess if you live in an area without snow days you have to liven things up somehow.

Even though Thanksgiving is a work day, we do have Friday off for Eid al-Adha, the Muslim holiday marking the end of the pilgrimage to Mecca known as the Hajj. There are some interesting posters around AUB that honor the holiday by sharing people's Hajj experiences, as well as decorations showing that people come from all over the world to make the pilgrimage. The Hajj sounds like a real ordeal that involves a lot of fairly hard traveling and tremendous crowds.

Jeff and I plan to spend our holiday weekend doing some fairly easy traveling--to the ruins of the temples of Baal and Jupiter in the valley east of Beirut. I am thankful for the opportunity to get to see such neat things and to learn about holidays I'd never heard of before moving here. And thankful for the continued peace and stability in the region, of course. And for cake. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

Beirut: Round Two!

It is hard to believe that I am about to begin my second year at the American University of Beirut. I will have a few new responsibilities this year, such as advising undergraduates (accurately, I hope) about which courses they should take and coordinating the MA comprehensive exam. Other than that, I'm just looking forward to another year of teaching American literature to my sharp, pleasant, and always entertaining students. It is really nice to start the year off already having an office, a phone, and an email account, not to mention a familiarity with the inner workings of the department's photocopier!

Still, Beirut feels a little new right now, as Jeff and I just returned from a whirlwind visit to the U.S. (I'll take this opportunity to apologize en masse to all of you whom I did not see but would have liked to. There just weren't enough hours in the day, sadly. I hope you'll understand.) Our visit started in St. Louis, where we had a nice visit with Jeff's sister and her family. We were also reunited with Jeff's pickup truck and all his worldly possessions, which the park service shipped to his sister upon his separation from the park service.

We then had a fun road trip from St. Louis to the East Coast, stopping along the way to visit friends and see sights such as Mark Twain's boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri:

It was really neat to roam around Hannibal, although the town seems to blur the line between fact (Samuel Clemens actually lived there) and fiction (Tom Sawyer did not).

That didn't stop me from going overboard in the gift shop, however. Yes, I lugged a copy of William Dean Howells's My Mark Twain back in my suitcase, not to mention a Mark Twain finger puppet, keychain, and shot glass! However, I resisted the urge to dress up like the man himself and wander the streets of Hannibal, which apparently is something of a problem there:

Upon reaching the East Coast we spent a little time in Manhattan visiting friends of Jeff's. We had a great time eating Mexican food, which is very hard to come by in the Middle East.

and walking through Chinatown, where I had a cone of green tea flavored ice cream. Neat!

Manhattan made me miss the diversity of so many big U. S. cities. Beirut, for all its charms, is really very homogenous racially and culturally, at least to an outsider. Locals consider the differences between Christians, Druze, and Sunni and Shia Muslims to be huge, as well as the differences between Lebanese, Syrian, and Jordanian people. From an outsider's perspective, though, the streets of Manhattan seem full of a variety that Beirut can't approach.

We then headed up to Connecticut, where we spent time with Jeff's family.

We feasted on far too much great food that his mom cooked for us and tried to undo the damage by jogging in a nearby park.

After a trip to Willimantic, Connecticut to see my old friends there, we headed up to Maine. We moved in for a week with the mice who had been living in my cabin since I left, and spent a fun time hanging out with my mom and other friends and family. The contradancing, bike riding, and step aerobics (thanks, Karen!) made me feel somewhat human again after weeks of sloth and delicious food!

Upon returning to Beirut I was struck by the noise of the city: even Mahnattan is quiet compared to the constant car horns and construction noise here. The language barrier also seems new again. I really miss being able to understand what people around me are saying, and I think I'd have to put a lot of time into learning Arabic to even come close to understanding.

Returning to Beirut after some time away also made me a bit more appreciative of the fashionable flair that people--especially women--bring to their everyday lives here. For instance, this time last year I was perplexed and a bit horrified by housewives who wore layers of makeup and stiletto heels to go grocery shopping on a weekday morning. Now, when I see a woman at the gym don a purely decorative belt of beaded fringe atop her workout spandex, I just smile and think "Ah, Beirut." It may not be home, but it's still good to be back.

Nippy!

Those of you who follow Beirut news are probably curious about the implications of Druze leader Walid Jumblatt’s leaving the US-backed March 14th coalition and joining the opposition party—the one that just lost the June parliamentary elections. Israel has certainly been making lots of threats about the nasty things they’ll do to Lebanon if the opposition—led by Hezbollah—plays a more prominent role in the government in the wake of Jumblatt’s move, so you may be wondering how serious those Israeli threats are. Or you may be wondering about Beirut’s gay bar scene, which was recently covered (or outed, as one gay Beiruti asserts) by a New York Times travel writer. However, I’m afraid this blog entry will not answer any of your questions on topical matters, or elucidate any of the tangled and shifting allegiances in Lebanese politics. Instead, I want to mention one of our neighbors here in the new apartment building we moved to in June. We call her Nippy.

As I may or may not have mentioned, in June Jeff and I moved to a new apartment. My first apartment was on the lightless, airless ground floor of what was really an office building, and people kept coming to the door thinking I was the concierge. In the new place, I have an extra room in which to work, with a breeze and a big, sunny window!

As an added bonus, this apartment building also has a population of cats. They are not exactly feral, or even stray, as most of them seem to have lived here in and around this building for generations. One of them in particular spends a lot of time in the stairwell, on the landing, and yes, even in the elevator. We started calling her Nippy because of her nipped ear, but then started to realize that several of the cats around here have a similar ear nip. One of my colleagues finally told me that AUB spays a lot of the campus cats. The spayed cats have their ears nipped, so as not to be rounded up twice.
Nevertheless, Nippy’s name has stuck. She herself is working hard to be able to stick around the apartment. She frequently loiters outside our door, and has been known to launch herself inside the instant we crack the door open.

Jeff and I both play with her, of course, whenever we see her in the building or outside.

She caught on really quickly to the fact that our apartment means positive human attention. Once, Jeff went out to do an errand, saw her on a lower floor, and played with her for a moment. As soon as he continued on his way, Nippy came upstairs and sat outside our door, waiting for him to return. Pretty smart!

When she makes it inside, she typically sniffs around for a while, scratches the couch, and then sits in the kitchen looking pathetic. We learned from a next-door neighbor (who came knocking one night wearing only a towel, having locked himself out of his apartment. Very sitcom-esque) that Nippy used to be the pet of a family in this building who left her behind when they moved away. I think that explains her propensity for kitchen begging, and her obvious desire to be someone’s indoor cat. For now, we are content to have her as a frequent visitor, but she seems determined to ingratiate herself into our place—or kitchen, at least—more permanently.

As for Jumblatt, Hezbollah, and the gay bar scene, you’ll just have to keep your eye on the Times or Al-Jazeera English. But you can count on “My Life in Beirut” for all your Nippy news. Signing off for now. Happy end of summer to all!

Eating A la Turka

It has been warm and humid in Beirut recently. Not quite Louisiana hot, but pretty stuffy all the same. Jeff and I decided that the uncomfortably balmy weather provided the perfect excuse to head north for a little while, so last week we caught an early morning flight to Istanbul, Turkey!

When I say "an early morning flight," I mean early--as in 6am or so, which meant a 4am taxi ride to the Beirut airport. We found our sleep-deprived selves checked into our hotel and back out on the lovely streets of Istanbul by 10am. Our first stop was a delightful cafe where I got some great coffee and we read the English-language version of the local newspaper. By noon or so, we were starving, so we headed to a restaurant called "Cooking Alaturka" for lunch.

The restaurant is only open for lunch, as cooking lessons are offered in the evenings. Every day the woman who runs it offers a four-course set lunch menu, with the daily dishes determined by the seasonal produce available in the markets. We ate there twice, and both times were wonderful.

As its name suggests, the restaurant specializes in Turkish food. One day we had a traditional dish called "Imam Bayildi," which is a roasted eggplant stuffed with tomatoes, onions, and dill. Its name means "the Imam fainted," supposedly because an Imam (Muslim religious leader) fainted because it was so tasty. I don't doubt it!

We also had some fresh green beans with tomatoes and dill,a tasty soup of red lentils and bulgur--a grain that is ubiquitous in the Middle East, and a really good lamb stew that was served atop some baba-ghanoush-style roasted eggplant. Eggplant, tomatoes, and dill seem to be really popular in Turkey. A winning combination, to be sure.

For desert we had "Incir Tatlisi," or figs stuffed with walnuts and soaked in an interesting clove-flavored syrup. I'd never really had cooked figs before, Newtons aside, and I liked them.

Many restaurants serve glasses of tea, or cai, at the end of a meal. It always comes in cute but impractical handle-less glasses in nice, decorative saucers.

At Cooking Alaturka we were served a little dish of Turkish Delight or "lokum" after our meal, and even though I was entirely full after the soup, beans, stew, and figs, I had to try some. After all, I'd seen it for sale in the bazaar and markets all around Istanbul, and it looked appealing.

It was very...chewy. Even if the lokum was a bit disappointing, everything else about Turkey--the weather, the food, and the beautiful old buildings--was truly a delight!

Summer Visitor

It's been a hot, quiet, couple of weeks here in Beirut. Most of my ex-pat colleagues have headed back to the States or Europe for the summer, and many well-heeled Beirutis are spending their traditional looong weekends in their villas up in the cool, breezy mountains of Lebanon. I've been enjoying the quiet--getting some good work done on a new paper, trying to get to the gym more regularly, and going for evening strolls around the green and leafy campus.

While most of the AUB community seems to have flown the coop for the summer, we did get an unexpected visitor to our balcony the other day: a parakeet! Mind you, our place may look idyllic, set amidst palm trees and sweet-smelling jasmine bushes, but parakeet country it isn't. It was quite a surprise, then, Jeff spotted it on the railing the other day. It spent about fifteen minutes or so hopping around out there, and then flew away. Jeff emailed a photo of it to the Middle East Ornithological Association (which, oddly, is based in England and appears to be composed entirely of Brits). On their website we discovered that apparently there was at one time a breeding population of ring-necked parakeets on the AUB campus. However, our visitor was not of that flock.

Someone from the Association emailed him back the next day and said that the brightly-colored little squawker who visited us is an African Lovebird! There is no breeding population of them here, unfortunately, so our visitor must have been an escapee from somewhere. It certainly was nice to see him. I hope he stays out of reach of all the campus cats!

Meanwhile, we are getting ready for a quick trip to Istanbul and continuing to enjoy quiet summer days here. I'm sure before we know it, it will be time for the fall migration back to campus--the human kind, that is.

Sweet, sweaty Syria

Jeff and I recently returned from our second trip to Syria. This time we headed north to Aleppo, up near the Turkish border. We had a great trip...once we got into Syria, that is. It took us a good four hours for them to let us cross the border from Lebanon. Four hot, thirsty hours. Luckily we had a couple bagels (from our Beirut source) and some water with us, but it was still somewhat uncomfortable. On the other hand, we felt really victorious when we finally got across and headed to our hotel in the little town of Hama. Here's Jeff in front of one of the waterwheels, or norias, in Hama:

The next day we started sightseeing with gusto. First we visited the Musyaf castle, which the Crusaders conquered in the early 12th century. After the Crusaders, a sect known as "The Assassins" took it over.

I thought Musyaf was pretty impressive, but then we visited the ruins of Quala'at al-Hosen, or Krak de Chevaliers, which is by all accounts Syria's most grand and well-preserved castle.

It was, of course, blazing hot in Syria in late June, and the desert air was much dryer than Beirut's seaside humidity. The thing I noticed (and appreciated!) about both castles was their ability to maintain cool temperatures even in the mid-day heat. Those massive stone buildings were really quite practical desert structures.

We saw another fascinating bit of desert architecture when we visited what are commonly called "beehive houses." They are conical mud structures that used to be used as housing by the Bedouins who live in Syria's desert. Nowadays they are mostly used as storage, and the villagers live in more prosaic modern cement houses. One Bedouin family keeps a beehive house open for viewing by the few tourists who travel through, and we had tea with him inside it. The house had airholes at the bottom of it, and there was quite a nice draft coming through. It wasn't quite as cool inside as the massive stone castles, but it was very pleasant nonetheless.

Speaking of clever air conditioning methods, Jeff and I had dinner one night at a restaurant in a restored old building. We sat in the building's courtyard, and every so often jets of water would spray out and cool the area. It looked as nice as it felt.

Before leaving Hama, we also visited some Roman ruins at Apamea:

When we were finished sightseeing around Hama, we headed north to Aleppo. We had fun walking through the souk, or bazaar, and visiting the old citadel that dominates the town. Here we are atop the citadel:

After a day of walking the streets of Aleppo, we repaired to the Baron Hotel bar for some cold Turkish beer. The Baron Hotel is famous as the place where Agatha Christie stayed while writing Murder on the Orient Express. It was also frequented by T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia), whose bar bill is on display inside.

Before I say more about the sights we saw, I must say that the biggest thing I will remember about Syria is how incredibly nice and welcoming the people are. Everywhere we went, people asked where we were from. When we said "America," nearly everyone said that they were very glad that we were there, and that they hoped our country and theirs could be friends. Many, many people asked us to sit and talk with them and have tea. No one had anything good to say about former president Bush, but they were all able to separate American people from American politicians. One man said "American people good, Bush bad."

The most surprising, and moving, thing to me was that several women dressed head-to-toe in all-black hejab (in the heat!) went out of their way to be friendly to me. One kissed me on both cheeks and said (in rough English) that she hoped her daughter would be able to marry an American man. Another woman gave me some candy and smiled broadly. It was sweet how they went out of their way to make me feel welcome.

Another time, Jeff and I were walking past a tiny little tire shop and the proprietor waved us in, brought in some chairs for us, and handed us chilled bottles of cherry soda. We sat and drank soda and tried to make small talk despite the language barrier. For awhile we took turns naming American brands of tires! It was really funny, and just so sweet how hospitable they were.

We went on to visit another town to the south and saw some more ruins, including those at Ugarit, where a written alphabet dating from 2000 BC was found. I can barely imagine something that old. Also at Ugarit were ruins of temples to pagan deities Baal, the storm god, and his father, Dagon.

While all the sights (and sites) we saw were fascinating, it is the Syrians' genuine goodwill toward Americans that I will remember most. If an Arabic-speaking woman in full hejab were ever to go sightseeing in the U. S., I can only hope that Americans would be as hospitable to her as the Syrians were to us.

Happy 4th of July to all!