Last Sunday I was finally able to get together with Michel, my arabic tutor from NYC. He’s been living in Brooklyn for the past five years, but he’s originally from Kfarabida, a village about halfway between Byblos and Batroun. He’s been in Lebanon for the past couple weeks visiting with family.
He drove down to Beirut Sunday morning and picked us up at our apartment and drove us up to his village. We saw his house (which he started building 15 years ago) and met his family. We collected a niece and a nephew, ages 3 and 5, and headed to the beach. On the way there, Michel was explaining that we would catch something from the sea for lunch, but it wasn’t clear what that “something” was. The children were very excited to be going, sporting new bathing suits and sunglasses, but once we arrived, they were clearly intimidated by the sea. It turned out that the “somethings” were sea urchins. I swam behind Michel as basket-man while he dove and pried them off the rocks with a screwdriver. Unforunately, they weren’t big or plentiful enough to constitute lunch (much to Amy’s relief). We did try a couple, though. You crack them open and eat the orange guts inside. I think because they were so small, the flavor was somewhat salty and bland.
We spent the rest of the day touring around the area, highlights of which included a crusader castle, a Phoenician sea-wall, a martyrs’ shrine, and many of Michel’s friends and family in the village. One of his friends was a 98 year-old friend at a home run by the nuns of Saint Rafqa. He offered Amy a plum from his lunch tray and was bewildered why I, a man, would have such long hair.
Before driving us home that evening, we enjoyed coffee, watermelon, and the sunset on his balcony discussing the economic and personal dynamics of living in the United States and supporting a family in Lebanon.
