Amy’s Journal

My students threw a party for me yesterday, my last day for awhile. I have repeatedly said that I will return in January, but maybe they don’t believe it. I’m not sure.

The party was great fun and I was pretty moved. I might have been even more emotional if they had managed to keep it a secret, but they kept giddily mentioning it to me last week. They had taken up a collection and bought a huge cake with my name on it. They also gave me some really hideous rose motif pajamas (with booties, a scarf and a hat to match) and this purple fake velvet robe with leopard print trim. We did some dancing to TV videos and took a bunch of pictures.

Sunday was entirely consumed with 2 very different meals. We had lunch at the home of one of my students, Asmahan. She and her family live in Khalde, south of Beirut. Her husband and kids came and collected me and Ethan from in front of AUB, and we had a traditional Levantine meal. The kids are really fun and speak quite a bit of English. Asmahan gave us all kinds of small presents, mostly knick knacks from around the house. This is always a tough situation, because one absolutely cannot refuse such things, but it is always too much, especially from people who can’t afford much. You always have to be very careful not to compliment different items too much, because they will invariably be given to you as gifts.

That night, we went to a (belated) Thanksgiving dinner. We thought we had missed our chance, but our friend, Mike, invited us to dinner at his parents’ home. We had turkey and all of the usual, with the parents and a few other friends. There was a lot of political discussion, stories about living here during the war, etc. Both of Mike’s parents are professors at AUB and have a lot to say about Lebanon’s past, present, and future.

Tonight we are going for our last dinner with Carrie and some other friends. It’s our last evening in Beirut with Carrie- she will be leaving for good next week, in time to make it to our wedding in TX.

It’s been a bit of a scramble to get things done in preparation to come to the States, but we are almost there. Ethan is convinced that I am going to experience some sort of culture shock after having been gone for 6 months, but I don’t think that I will. I don’t think it is different enough here. It’s very westernized and we are able to speak English nearly exclusively. The one thing I am slightly nervous about is getting hit by a car. If you want to cross the street in Beirut, you pretty much just walk into oncoming traffic, forcing the cars to stop. You could wait around all day, otherwise. The crosswalks in NYC are going to be a little tricky for me at first.

We’ve had a nice weekend so far with lots of socializing with various friends. I feel like we have a lot to cram in before we head off to the US for over a month.

Yesterday, I went to Jeita Grotto for the first time, which was quite nice. It’s an impressive cave with many dramatic formations. You can actually ride a little boat around on a river in the lower grotto. It’s also the most expensive tourist site in all of Lebanon ($12) and they won’t let you take any photos whatsoever.

In other news, Syria finally gave in to UN pressure and is allowing 5 of the 6 wanted for questioning to be interrogated in Vienna. This is very good news because it looked like they might not agree to this, which had many people concerned. I have also just read that one of the major witnesses in the case has either died in a freak accident or has been murdered. The plot thickens, again.

Many of you are aware that tensions at the border with Israel have been rather elevated for the past few days. Hezbollah and Israeli soldiers have exchanged fire, resulting in the deaths of at least one Israeli and 4 Hezbollah soldiers. Israeli planes have flown over Lebanon, even dropping anti-Hezbollah leaflets over Beirut and other cities and villages. Unfortunately, I didn’t get one.

However, today’s news brings something even more bizarre. There was more fighting between the 2 armies, but it centered around an Israeli civilian who supposedly accidentally drifted into Lebanon on a handglider. There are (few) details here. No explanation is given for why anyone would be hand gliding so close to the border of 2 countries who remain in a state of war, especially during a (not that uncommon) week of fighting. Competing for the Darwin Awards, maybe.

I had the day off from teaching because today is Independence Day. If the people I talked to are representative of the population at large, this is somehow not felt to be a very important holiday, even in 2005, the year the Syrian soldiers left.

Lebanon gained independence in 1943, after being administered by France following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. I missed the military parade that went on downtown, mostly because it started at 8 AM and I had stayed up late the night before, but I watched a bit of it on TV. The VIP stands were about half full and there were very few other spectators. I wandered down there shortly after the parade ended and took some pictures of flags and tanks. A few groups of people came to bring flowers to Harri’s grave, but otherwise, Martyr’s Square was nearly empty.

Today I met some friends at one of Beirut’s only real parks, in Sanayeh, about a 15 minute walk from our apartment. Mostly, we adults followed their 2 year-old around on her adventures, which included inspecting different sorts of trash on the ground, puddle stomping, and dodging big kids on the slide.

There is a huge fountain in the middle of the park, but there is no water in it. Ultimately, this is probably for the best, since it would no doubt be ignored and serve as a massive breeding ground for mosquitoes. Since it is empty, kids tend to use it as a bike riding area. S. has a new bike, which absolutely thrills her, but she is not ready to actually get on it yet, so she just pushes it around.

[Speaking of mosquitoes, they are out in full force now that is it winter, go figure. When we were stuck at the border the other night, we found ourselves simultaneously wishing that we had gloves and trying to avoid being eaten alive by the little bloodsuckers.]

The park itself is actually pretty nice, if a bit run down. There are all sorts of trees and plenty of cheerful families. It really stands out, since there is a real lack of parks here, which is something that I miss about New York. Sounds odd to say that I miss the greenery of NYC, but it’s true.

As the sun went down, a guy came to the park entrance and started blowing on a whistle repeatedly. Time to go, the park was closing.

I will leave it to Ethan to provide a detailed description of yesterday’s failure to make it to Syria. In case you hate following links, we took a bus headed to Aleppo, but at the border were told that there is a “new order” and we now needed permission from Damascus to get a visa at the border. They would “telegraph” them (I’m pretty sure “fax” was the intended word) and we could wait. And wait we did.

The bus left, and we spent the next 10 hours sitting in the dirty lobby. We played cards, we went over some wedding stuff, we stared into space. Many of the soldiers/border guards felt sorry for us and brought us coffee, tea, nuts, oranges, a banana. They tried advocating for us to the guy in charge.

Finally, it was midnight, and we couldn’t imagine sleeping on a bench in the freezing lobby. I had read some online accounts about people waiting for permission for a visa at the border with Turkey for 24 hours. Lebanon has had a different relationship with Syria, and for years it has been easy for foreigners to get a visa at the border (I have done this 5 times without difficulty). This “new order” is presumably because of the changing relationship between Lebanon and Syria, supposedly we were the first to be affected by it at the relatively quiet Arida border crossing.

We had an irritating interaction with the guy in charge (who happened to be the only person there who spoke English), got our passports, and walked back to the Lebanese border post. We got 2 week visas easily (they didn’t notice or care that we had not really left the country, as we were supposed to have done in order to get new Lebanese visas). After a mere 2.5 hour wait (and offers of coffee and apples), a bus finally came along and we were off. We made it home at 6 AM and fell into bed.

In the photo, it is difficult to see, but there is a poster in the background that I find particularly humorous. There is a crowd of people gazing lovingly up at the image of Hafez Assad (the former head of Syria, who died in 2000. He is the father of Bashar Assad, the current leader) with a Syrian flag waving in the background.

The biggest drag about the whole thing is that we didn’t get to go to Aleppo (and Ethan has never been) and we didn’t get to stay at Beit Wakil, a place I have been dreaming about since I saw it in September. Carrie and I had made the acquaintance of the owner, Habib, who had insisted on us drinking a glass of whiskey with him.
Beit Wakil is actually 2 adjoined Ottoman houses which have been beautifully restored. One side is a courtyard restaurant, considered one of the best restaurants in Syria, and the other is a hotel with the rooms arranged around the other courtyard. Habib had lived up to his promise of a special rate, and we were even getting a suite, since it was the last room available. Hopefully, we will manage to return in January or February- we will see.

So I trekked out to teach my English class today, and only two students were there. At first I was sort of disappointed, but then I thought of taking those two out to lunch, so it ended up being fun and not a complete waste of time. Camilia, who is one of the more advanced English speakers, ordered for us after asking what we wanted, and I guess I have a lot to work on, because I ended up with a french fry sandwich. Oh well. The place where we ate, in Haret Hreik, is called BFC- “Beirut Fried Chicken”.

Yesterday morning, Ethan and I paid a visit to the General Security building to try to get our visas extended. Our six-month multiple-entry tourist visas expire tomorrow, and our flight to the US doesn’t leave for a few weeks. Unfortunately, it is “impossible” to extend beyond 3 months, so we have to leave the country. Our current dilemma is whether we should go spend a couple of nights in wonderful Aleppo, or just go past the border at Masnaa and back.

UPDATE: Aleppo it is. We’ll be back Friday sometime.

I spent the late morning and early afternoon on the corniche watching the Beirut Marathon. I was sad to have missed the New York City Marathon last weekend, since Ethan/Ethan and I lived on the route for years and always made sure to watch, usually at a brunch party at our place or Pam’s. Sadly, the Beirut Marathon is nothing like New York’s- people don’t really turn out to watch, there are very few runners, and it doesn’t feel like a celebration.

It was still really pleasant- the weather was absolutely perfect and there were no cars allowed there or on many other streets in Beirut. It was so peaceful not to have the usual traffic and relentless car horns to which everyone here is so accustomed. You could actually hear the waves lapping at the shore. Carrie and I sat beside the sea and clapped for the occasional runner (or walker, as we were sitting at km 39). I called Ethan and told him he should get out of bed in order to witness traffic-free Beirut- for us this was probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Another pleasant evening at Torino……

Today we had a party in my English class for October birthdays. Yes, I know that we are a third of the way through November, but as it turned out, there was only one October birthday, and she went out of town. Then the holiday lasted most of last week.

I had promised cake and music, and I delivered on the former. Unfortunately, the electricity went out for most of the class period, which kind of cut back on the party vibe. They were all very funny, the teenagers took about a billion pictures of each other with my camera, the adults just sat and chatted, but seemed impressed that an effort had been made. Toward the end of the hour, the electricity came back on, and we all clapped. There was a bit of dancing to a music video – some blond Arab gal wearing shiny pink and very skimpy pajamas. It is sort of bizarre how Arabic pop stars are every bit as slutty looking as their western counterparts.

Ooh- I forgot to mention that the one month countdown is upon us……