This morning I went to the U.S. Embassy to get more pages put into my passport. We’re going to Greece this weekend and our trip to Aleppo took up my last remaining parcels of passport real estate. We may have previously led you to believe that the embassy here is all fun and games, but there’s serious business afoot at that big, fortified summer camp in the hills.
Our friend and regular taxi driver Mohammed picked me up this morning to take me up to Awkar. If you’ve come to visit us here, you’ve probably been ferried back and forth to the airport by him. Mohammed explained that he had to borrow a friend’s car because his regular car is outfitted for tomorrow’s big event. For those of you who keep coming late to class, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Hariri. Apparently the embassy is frowning upon cars pulling up to the gate festooned in flags and audio equipment.
After several brief and unpleasant exchanges with the universally grouchy security guards and a couple of metal detectors, I made my way inside. I always find the vagaries security at the embassy humorous. Let’s call it arbitrary and riddled with half-logic and leave it at that, lest I find myself aiding “Googling terrorists.”1
Once inside and once I got to where I needed to be, my affair was actually expedited with impressive efficiency. I had the feeling that adding pages to one’s passport was least complicated transaction one could endeavor in this office. To one side of me was a fellow from Tampa who was trying to get power of attorney over his recently deceased brother’s estate. To the other side of me was a fellow engaged in some harrowing exchange relating to the fact that he was the head (and I suspect only) Lebanese sales rep and distributor for a product called the Ditch Witch.
On the return trip, Mohammed and I got stuck in epic traffic. I was anxious to get home and back to work, but it was actually kind of pleasant to chat about this and that…Hariri’s legacy, the future of Turkey and the EU (Mohammed’s wife is Turkish and he’s in the process of getting the rest of the family visas), how he got started in the taxi biz, etc.
1 Good god, it makes me laugh just to think of that phrase. Though I suspect his revenue might be based on page-views and I’m loathe to add to his coffers, I have to footnote the source, Michael Totten’s most recent post about his trip to Iraq. If you must click, you’ll notice he gives a tip of the hat back to old Beirut and our epidemic of Syrian ninjas.