Lebanon

Just as soon as classes ended two weeks ago, me and good friend John
decided to leave for beautiful Lebanon, just 50 miles away. First thing we
got to Lebanon, we ironically stumbled into the most beautiful mosque I've
seen in the Middle East. It's actually supposed to be a baby version of
the famous Blue Mosque in Istanbul, and it's centuries old but was very
thoroughly renovated / rebuilt just a few years back. The mosque was
meaningful for me (and I bet the Lebanese) for a few reasons: first, it's
located on the infamous Green Line that divided West and East Beirut
(approx. Christian and Muslim respectively) during the civil war; secondly,
its restoration occurred under Rafiq Hariri, assassinated in 2005 by ?
(theories abound...).

Another day we wandered from the Corniche up alleys towards what we had
heard was the beautiful campus of the American University of Beirut. Along
the way, we found entertaining graffiti, some of which (the faces) we
couldn't make sense out of. Any ideas from the readership?

The campus didn't disappoint. On the first hill rising from the
Mediterranean, there is so much green space, more than one huge banyan
tree, and benches where John could sit and look out at the sea.

For the last picture, we liked the irony of "evoking a sense of
contemporary elegance" amid the destroyed building in front of it. That's
probably not rubble from the civil war, as that has mostly been cleaned up,
but it could certainly have been destroyed in 2006 in the Israel -
Hezbollah war. Or it could have been wrecked to put up something new in
its place.

Culturally, Beirut is worlds away from Damascus. Damascus is famed as one
of the best places to learn Arabic because people truly have very little
proficiency in foreign languages. The pan-Arabist mentality of the
Ba'athist government in Syria means that Arabic-only education is virtually
the only thing going. In contrast, Lebanon has for 150 years been the Arab
country that looks most towards Europe. The Lebanese elite generally
speaks more French than Arabic in their daily lives, and we found plenty of
well-to-do Lebanese confused and a little insulted that we should speak
Arabic with them, and automatically responding to us in French, which does
not work well if you don't speak French! In fact, many claimed not to be
able to understand our (very comprehensible) Arabic, a situation that
becomes all the more amusing when the working classes of Beirut were
delighted by our fairly good Arabic and talked with us at length. I
honestly think there's a bit of a cognitive block on the part of the elite
leading them to literally be unable to speak Arabic with foreigners.

One night, we went out for drinks and even ended up at a gay club. Now,
Lebanon isn't this liberal in its entirety, but like another small country
in the region it has everything from one extreme to the other, and so at
the bars and in the club we found a huge mix of foreigners and Lebanese,
including the first drag queen I've ever seen in the Middle East. The
Lebanese guys at the club were jealous of us living in Damascus, because as
they said, even the queeniest Damascenes are still manly men, unlike
Beirutis. Of course, they weren't jealous of the kind of silence and
invisibility that would come over them as gay men in Damascus...

The food highlight of the trip: having seen one night a bakery with amazing
rustic-looking French bread in the windows, we came back the next morning
and found they serve a traditional French breakfast: really good crusty
bread with jam and butter, your choice of a pastry (I had a pain au
chocolat), black coffee or cafe au lait and good fresh orange juice.
Heaven!