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The first, most noticeable thank you goes out to my friend Betsy from Greensboro, who sent me this lovely postcard of a banner! Yes, that’s Lebanon that you see in the background. The picture looks like it was taken in the Cedars Reserve, which is about 13 miles from my house. Betsy has a blog called The Beautiful Mundane, which (as its name suggests) is full of lovely sights and sounds. Betsy is a great curator. She’s also a great documentarian (if you’re at all interested in the ins and outs of modern Quakerism and its different branches, may I recommend her film Can We All Be Friends?), an eco-entrepreneur (her eco-friendly laundry soap is addictive—buy now and buy often!), a brilliant marketer, and all-around wonderful human being.
As long as I’m doling out the praises (and also bearing in mind that 90% of the people who read this are family who already know about his blog), I also want to say thank you to my uncle Ned, who gave me a shout-out on his blog after my first entry. Ned created the website starchamber.com and has been blogging since before the word blog even existed. That, my friends, is no exaggeration: his archives go back to April 1996. Ned is another wonderful curator of interesting things and ideas. His professional interests are of the technological variety, but his non-professional (unprofessional?) interests are wide-ranging and, well, interesting. Alchemy, geography, robotics, crowd sourcing, fiction, and even the occasional simian feces-flinging joke: it’s all there.
So go out and read, and tell them that Sarah sent you.
I can almost guarantee that my commute home last night was better than your commute home. It hasn’t gotten cold yet here, but there’s a definite nip in the air, and I walked home past the terraced olive grove under a clear sky and a full moon. During my walk, I kept on thinking about a Federico García Lorca poem that we read—Lorca, of course, poor, doomed, tragic Lorca, one of the first casualties of Franco’s forces when they came to Andalucia. Lorca, whose fascination with gypsies (I know I’m supposed to say the Roma, but it just doesn’t translate well from Spanish, and besides they were called gypsies in the thirties before anyone knew any better) seems both quaint and fierce nowadays. It’s a poem about the full moon, who sees a young gypsy boy asleep outside. It’s actually (like most poetry involving gypsies) quite sad and morbid, but I defy you read the line, “Huye, luna luna luna” without shivering a little with delight. And that’s what I was doing on the way home.: looking at the moon, looking at the moonlight on the mountains and the olive grove, whispering “huye luna luna luna” to myself, and shivering with delight all the way.
La luna vino a la fragua
con su polisón de nardos.
El niño la mira, mira.
El niño la está mirando.
En el aire conmovido
mueve la luna sus brazos
y enseña, lúbrica y pura,
sus senos de duro estaño.
Huye luna, luna, luna.
Si vinieran los gitanos,
harían con tu corazón
collares y anillos blancos.
Niño, déjame que baile.
Cuando vengan los gitanos,
te encontrarán sobre el yunque
con los ojillos cerrados.
Huye luna, luna, luna,
que ya siento sus caballos.
Niño, déjame, no pises
mi blancor almidonado.
Cómo canta la zumaya,
¡ay, cómo canta en el árbol!
Por el cielo va la luna
con un niño de la mano.
Dentro de la fragua lloran,
dando gritos, los gitanos.
El aire la vela, vela.
El aire la está velando.
So far as I can tell, the general philosophy of navigating Beirut (and Lebanon in general) is based on a single precept: if you can’t find your way, you should have been born here. Or, in my case, you should at least be able to pronounce the landmark closest to where you’re going. (My batting average is shamefully low on that count.) Streets, if they’re labeled at all, aren’t labeled according to the names on the map. Building numbers seem to be non-existent. I won’t give you my ever-expanding list of mishaps that have come as a result of this—or tell you how many items on that list have ended in tears—but the system does make you feel just a little smug once you finally (FINALLY) figure it out on your 5th attempt.
Mary Pipher (author of The Middle of Everywhere, a book about refugees that I highly recommend) said, “Every day in a foreign country is like final exam day.” I have to say, I agree, and the exam is on local knowledge. Thus far in my stay, I’ve learned the following:
I have yet to learn:
I’d give myself a 52%.
I love local knowledge. I don’t think I’m alone in this. In New York, I loved knowing which subway car to get on so that the exit was right at your feet at your stop. I loved deciding which bars would fit which mood. I loved jumping on buses without having to even glance at a map. I loved directing my parents to order this appetizer and that entree from the menu. Local knowledge makes us, well, locals, and the parts of our brain that once struggled to figure out every day tasks are now freed up for ennui and judging tourists (or helping them, as is the case more often than not both here and in New York).
But not having local knowledge is pretty thrilling, too. Where will I eat? Well, what’s around this corner and behind this door? How do I get there from here? Well, where’s the closest landmark that I can pronounce intelligibly? How long will it take me to get there? Damned if I know, but I’m along for the ride.
Pictures will come, I promise! I know that you’re sick and tired of me complaining about the molasses-on-a-frosty-morning-like speed of my internet, but it really does take a long time to upload pictures.
One of the ways that I used my Adha holiday was to finally get a handle on Beirut. This finally happened for a couple of reasons, namely that I finally had time to invest a couple of afternoons in just wandering and that I finally have friends in Beirut. My first friend is another Sarah who works for an American NGO here. Sarah graciously offered me use of her couch for crashing purposes and took me out on the town.
Sitting in a bar for the first time after a month in the village, I felt like a new person. I don’t typically think of myself as someone who needs alcohol to have a good time (cue the ABC after-school special music), but I did miss environments where men and women of more or less the same age could mingle without it being fraught. (Many Druze men—the religious ones, who use the title “Sheikh”—aren’t allowed to shake hands with a non-related woman or ride alone in a car with her.) I’m not going to lie, either—the bourbon tasted really, really good.
My friend Lily from New York is also here. It’s really nice to have her here, especially because our travel stars often align. We met in Dakar in 2004 (the only two Quakers in all of Senegal, so far as I could tell) and randomly ended up in Lebanon at the same time. It’s been wonderful to have a “pre-existing” friend, especially someone with whom I’ve already traveled! Lily is an excellent fellow wanderer, and so we’ve meandered through several Beirut neighborhoods in a quest to get to know the city. We walked from Hamra (the neighborhood where American University of Beirut is) to Pigeon Rocks (islands with natural stone arches and lovely little grottos) and along the Corniche (a walking path that goes along the lip of the Mediterranean) to the downtown area (devastated by the civil war and rebuilt into a pedestrian mall area dotted with designer boutiques) and Gemmayze (the East Village of Beirut). Lily’s girlfriend Suzy is a filmmaker in New York but she lived in Beirut for several years, so it’s been nice to take advantage of some of her contacts and meet more people through her.
Finally, there’s Kelly, who is the other English Language Fellow (ELF) in Lebanon. She teaches at Hagassian University (an Aremenian university whose classes are nominally all in English) in Beirut. This past Saturday, we got on a tour bus packed with student members of the Hagassian Heritage Club and had a tour of Northern Lebanon. It was pretty cool—we saw old forts, salt drying beds, an amazing monastery in the very dramatic Qadisha valley, and an artificial lake with the biggest fake Christmas tree I’ve ever seen. It was really funny to be on a bus full of students who were only marginally interested in talking to Kelly and me, but we entertained ourselves quite well.
OK: you’re probably as tired of reading this as I am of writing. I’ve been sitting at my computer frantically typing lesson plans all day. The upshot: Lebanon is beautiful and friendly, and I’m finally learning my way around Beirut! I’m becoming an excellent local tour guide (ahem, ahem) for anyone who wants to come my way!
As many of you know, Eid-al-Adha was last week. I had the entire week off (rather blissfully, it must be said) and really enjoyed seeing friends in Beirut and generally being a bum.
Also as many of you probably know, Islam uses a lunar calendar, which means that the month in which Adha begins is based upon when the new moon rises—specifically, it’s always 10 days after the first crescent moon. Nights have been crisp and clear here, and there was something incredibly thrilling about watching the crescent grow larger and larger out of my window each evening before it set into the mountains.
I was walking home from the internet café a few nights ago, and saw that there was a spotlight pointing directly into the path of the waxing crescent moon. It was so lovely—this beam of light going into the sky and landing in the path of the moon. I went down to the store an hour later, and the beam of light was parallel to Orion’s belt. I thought about how much the Arab/Islamic world had contributed to astronomy and silently congratulated whatever holy person had arranged for the spotlight to raise our awareness like this.
The next night, I walked to the gym. I noticed that I was getting closer and closer to the spotlight—and when I turned the corner, there was the source: the brand-spankin’-new KFC that had just opened.
I was happier in my ignorance. There’s probably a lesson there.