Amy’s Journal

The souk is closed on Fridays. It’s nice to wander around when the souk is empty.

Drinking fountain

Ethan turns down a cigarette in the meat souk.

Tasty sheep heads.

al-Jdeideh, the Christian quarter.

We stopped in for a drink at the “cave bar” underneath our hotel. There are also tunnels that go several kilometers to the Citadel (a castle-like structure with a moat, where people would go when the city was under siege). Unfortunately, the tunnels are closed.

So things have really gotten out of hand with regard to these Mohammed caricatures. Since my last post, the Danish embassies in both Damascus and Beirut were destroyed, or at least heavily damaged. I find it upsetting that some churches and other property in Achrafiyeh, a mostly Christian neighborhood where the embassy is located, were also vandalized. I think it is safe to say that Lebanon is in trouble- the level of sectarianism here is nauseating and sad. The fact that most of the violence yesterday in Beirut was committed by extremists (many not actually Lebanese, apparently) doesn’t really matter. There are plenty of extremists on both sides, and this is how all of the many sane, rational people – who want the best for the country and its people – get dragged in.

The photo above was taken this weekend in Aleppo – a Danish flag to stomp on. We did have a really nice weekend- lots of delicious food and wandering around. I will post more photos very soon.

I woke up to the news that there was small explosion at around 2 AM which targeted a Lebanese army barracks. No injuries.

We are off to the bus station….

Lately there has been a fair amount of buzz about these cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed as a terrorist, which were first published in a Danish newspaper several months ago. Some leaders and clerics in Saudi Arabia and other countries have called for a boycott of Danish products and stores in Kuwait and the Gulf are obliging. However, today at my grocery store all of the Danish cheese and butter was still in place. So far the most absurd report is that a gang of armed men temporarily took over an EU office in Gaza in order to register their disapproval. Way to challenge the insinuation that Islam breeds terrorism by engaging in an act of terrorism.

There is still no bird flu documented in Lebanon or Syria, but a lot of Lebanese have stopped eating chicken. Some of my students stopped eating it last Fall, and it did no good for me to explain that you don’t get sick from eating chicken, you need to be exposed to live birds. Chicken is now about half price here and I read this a while ago about a guy in Saida who has publicly eaten raw chicken to try to persuade people to buy it.

Tomorrow is Groundhog Day and we are off to Syria for the weekend. We are going to Aleppo, a very interesting city in the northern part of Syria. Aleppo is one of those cities that claims to be the oldest consistently inhabited city in the world – along with Damascus, Byblos, Jericho, and some cities in Turkey and Iran. We went ahead and got expensive Syrian visas in Washington D.C. right before Christmas, since we wanted to avoid another possible border debacle. I’m really looking forward to it, even though it sounds like it is going to be rather chilly there- below freezing at night. I will post some pictures next week.

Sort of like the ice cream trucks in urban America, there are fruit and vegetable sellers here who push their carts around, calling out their products. This one is in the camp, but they come down our street, too- though much more often in summer. The fancier ones have actual trucks that they drive slowly around, calling out with a megaphone. When we first arrived in Beirut, upon hearing such commotion, I wondered if we were hearing some sort of political announcement. But it turned out, it was just a guy selling tomatoes to women on balconies.

They have the old balance scales. You tell him you want a kilo of pomegranates, and he puts a kilo weight on one side, and piles up the produce on the other until the two sides are balanced.

He hasn’ t been around in awhile, but every day when the weather was warmer, there was a guy on a moped who sold bread (kaik, actually, a round bread with a hole in it) by driving around the neighborhood honking his horn, revving the scooter engine, and yelling out “Kaik!”. He was on the street below our apartment every afternoon like clockwork. Maybe I will know that winter is over when he reappears.