Beirut Day 12 – July 5, 2009

I spent most of Sunday doing the rest of my homework and writing flashcards while listening to the podcast of NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. The wireless internet in the dorms is often quite slow and spotty so it’s nice to have podcasts I can just download and listen to without having it stop and start with the internet connection. For some reason a pack of notecards costs about $2 here whereas in the States the most expensive I’ve seen one of the same size is $.99. In a place where almost everything else is cheaper, it baffles me that notecards are more expensive. They gave us this small notepad of graph paper at orientation for some reason and I have been cutting it up, since I brought scissors just in case, and making it into my own ghetto notecards.

In the afternoon Claire and I tried to go to the pool at the gym since neither of us had been yet. Unfortunately that whole area of the gym was closed because it was adjacent to the field that was being set up for the Majida El Roumi concern that night. I will have to try some other time since I paid the gym fee but have yet to actually use it because all my free time is spent doing homework.

Later we headed downtown because there was supposed to be an arts and crafts-like fair in Martyrs’ Square and we wanted to get dinner nearby. A rarity, we were actually able to find a restaurant with a website, which gave us a downtown location. We walked there and got a bit lost but somehow I was actually able to orient myself from some of the landmarks I’d seen before. Finding the restaurant looked for a minute like it was going to be like trying to find Olive but we asked a security guard and he was able to direct us. His directions went way too fast but we were just watching his hands anyway.

We did find the restaurant eventually. The problem was the restaurant was listed as being on a certain road when really it was within a series of walking only plazas surrounding that road. It was a Chinese restaurant named Chopsticks and was quite nice. Dinner for the two of us (shared bottle of water, one entrée each and a bowl of rice each) cost $19 although we totally could have gotten away with getting one entrée and bowl of rice and sharing them as neither of us finished more than half of our entrees. We also got free “welcome shots” which were some sort of flavored carbonated drink in a shot glass and really smelled like nothing so much as conditioner, but still tasted good.

The way they packaged our leftovers was fairly interesting because I’d never seen it before. Each piece, e.g. entrée or rice, got its own sealed plastic container. Then both the containers were put in a cardboard box with two depressions made specifically for that purpose. Consequently when we got back to the dorms maybe an hour, hour and a half later, the food was still fairly warm.

The fair was located only a little ways from the restaurant and was set up in a giant white tent across from Martyrs’ Square. It was much less craft-y than I was expecting with a mix of small food places (juice, honey, pickled things, manaeesh), craft-like places, more professional looking places and some more high-end jewelry and clothing places. It seemed more like a showcase of local business than anything else.

We sort of got trapped in the booth of the Palestinian Women’s Cooperative (I don’t remember the actual name) while a woman tried to entice us to buy scarves and jackets and abayas in a large array of colors. I didn’t really like most of the colors and Claire didn’t like the workmanship. I just couldn’t see anywhere I’d want to wear a bright green abaya even if it was supposed to be “for the house”. The best piece of the booth was a vested-shirt with a wide belt with red embroidery on it. The only problem was the patter was the keffiyeh pattern; the black and white checkered pattern associated with Palestine and Palestinian liberation and now also, unfortunately, American hipster. I felt like if I wore that I’d feel like I was wearing a flag, something I’m not inclined to do and that some people might take offense.

Claire didn’t buy anything but I bought a t-shirt. There were two t-shirt vendors that had fairly clever or cute shirts, one male group and one female group. We looked at the shirts in the men’s booth and liked some of them but not enough to buy them, plus I believe they were all in men’s styles. The best one was a Superman shirt with the letter seen (the Arabic letter representing the ess sound) instead of the normal stylized S. I bought a t-shirt from the women’s both that said “Hi, Kifak, Ca va?” and below that [Lebanese Mother Tongues]. Kifak means ‘how are you’, at least when addressing a male. When addressing a female it would be Kifik. As I wrote before, the Lebanese constantly code switch between all three languages: most learn Arabic at home and everywhere, learn French once they get to school and then English either in school or in college or just from others.