Local Mode

So far we’ve been staying in the neighborhood this weekend. On Friday night Amy made some pizzas and we sat on the floor of the living room eating, drinking wine, talking, and listening to The Wedding. Later on, we went around the corner for a beer at The Captain’s Cabin. We’ve become somewhat friendly with the owner, Andre, and our friend Diran from the video store DJs there on Friday nights. It turned out that Diran was training his “replacement”, but we did get to meet his brand-new wife before they left shortly before midnight. An added treat was that the back garden was open. It’s newly rennovated and almost the antithesis of the interior’s rugged, divey, nautical aesthetic. The walls are made of big, rough-hewn blocks (which I’m told are sandstone) that are tastefully lit from below. The patio is composed of slate tiles and has a fountain in the center. The whole thing is illuminated by hanging lanterns. Andre told me that the walls were originally cemented over and he only discovered the sandstone underneath by locking himself out of the bar and having to climb the back wall to break in. The other side of the wall had the exposed stone. Also, he mentioned that he just recently got the fountain working after 15 years of non-function.

Every time we go to the Captain’s Cabin, it is relatively quiet, if not deserted. For many years, there was a Syrian secret service office on the same street and people steered clear of the Cabin because of all the shady characters hanging around. Andre seems to think that the lingering residue of this has something to do with poor business. Our friend Mike, who grew up in the area, agrees: “That entire street has a stain on it that’ll take years to come off.” Whether or not this is true, Friday was an anomaly as far as we were concerned. A bit past midnight a new DJ took over and started playing some kind of weird, lethargic, new-age French music. By 1am the place was packed with Francophones. We stayed for a couple hours, mostly chatting with Andre and a new professor at AUB that we had just met. The latter was an interesting fellow; he left home at 17 to study in Sweden (or Norway, depending on whether you ask me or Amy), spent 4 years living in Japan, did some time in Manhattan as a male model, and is now a composition professor at AUB. We exchanged information, so hopefully we’ll be seeing him again. When we left around 3am, the French new-age party was still going strong.

On Saturday, Carrie came over to do her laundry and then we went with her and Caroline to brunch. They knew a place quite near to our house called Gruen that serves brunch on Saturday. Brunch is not really a thing in Beirut, from what we can tell. The few places we’ve found that serve brunch only do so on Sundays. There is a giant banner on Bliss Street, near AUB, that is announcing the coming of a restaurant called Delicioso and “BRUNCH: THE CONCEPT.” I’m not sure such a place is going to make a beneficial dent in the brunch continuum here. Anyhow, it turns out this place Gruen was right under our noses all along. We’d walked past the building a hundred times and never noticed it. I had two fried eggs on top of some kind of potato-bacon loaf with some kind of tangy butter. They put a heart in my cappucino.

Saturday night we stayed home. Amy made soup and we watched One Hour Photo. I do not recommend it unless you have a soft spot for wooden acting, terrible writing, and so-called thrillers absolutely devoid of suspense.