Beirut Day 15 – July 8, 2009

Once again I got woken up at an ungodly hour – 2:30am – by a loud banging noise. Quickly realizing it was not the death knells of another insectoid invader and given where I am, I went to the window, hoping to see only fireworks. Which I did, down by the sea. Apparently it is quite legal here to buy fireworks and set them off yourselves. You can see my Maryland childhood in the fact that I am surprised at this. Low level fireworks I can understand but these were actually going into the air. I did eventually get back to sleep but it made for a tired me.

In class we found out that we have a unit test on Monday and then the midterm on Friday. Once again the part of the program title where it says its “Intensive” comes back to me. The much more interesting part of class, at least from the perspective of my anthropological interest, we learned several Lebanese/Arabic gestures. The most confusing one from a Western perspective is the way to say no. The head is moved slightly back, both eyebrows get raised briefly and a short tsking (tongue clicking against the front teeth) noise. Unfortunately it looks a lot like a gesture an American man might make when wishing to say “Hey baby.”

The other two we learned were hand gestures. One of them was only for women and means something like “that’s a shame” or more like that thing you just did was shameful. The hands are in front of you, near the body and the left hand is palm downwards and the right hand comes down on top of the left hand and is held there for a bit. The second gesture apparently is old enough to actually be described in the Qur’an. It is usually described as hitting one palm with the other. If you envision the motion of a golf clap – the fingers of one hand slapping the palm of the other hand – and sort of ending with the slapped hand briefly grasping the fingers of the other hand. It is a gesture of frustration. Our teacher couldn’t think of any on the spot but told us to ask him if he made any. Hopefully we’ll see some in the near future.

For lunch we went to a small restaurant I don’t remember the name of. I was overjoyed when I saw that the menu had a “veggie burger” and I felt compelled to try it. I was a bit confused when the waitress asked me egg and cheese or egg and mushroom but I figured it had something to do with its composition. Turns out…that was the entirety of the burger. Essentially it was a cheese omelet (minus any vegetables) on a bun with fries on the side. It tasted fine and it was probably the largest lunch I’d had in a long while and I was quite full for several hours.

After we got back from lunch the class was going on a fieldtrip to three bookstores. First we went to a small bookstore and publisher in the basement of a mall that looked really interesting. We also found out that our instructor Hussein also worked as a translator and they had one of the books there that he had translated into Arabic. The second store was Antoine’s which I had visited previously but was amusing because we found Twilight translated in Arabic. There was a moment in the third bookstore when we were very excited when we thought we had found a translation of Harry Potter. Sadly it was just a book about the “boy hero” as the book titled him. I asked my instructor for a recommendation and he suggested this book that he described as like The Fall of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a bit funny, but based on Saddam Hussein (note: a novel, not a history). I bought it but I honestly have no idea when I’ll have time to read it.

We were talking about some very American thing we had seen on Hamra (a street that runs through the district of the same name and has a large concentration of shops) and our teacher said something along the lines of “You see something in America and the next day it shows up in Ras Beirut”. Ras Beirut is the top of Beirut (Ras meaning ‘head’ in Arabic) and includes AUB.

I had eaten such a big lunch and was for so long that I just stayed in for dinner and snacked a bit on the stuff I had in my room.