Beirut Day 17- July 10, 2009

Sadly this morning I mourned the death of my first bottle of sunscreen. I have a second and hopefully it will last the remaining four weeks. I really should have brought three as I am doubtful that I can find a sufficient SPF in this land of SPF 5 and bronzer. This morning I also resolved to drink more water. I realized recently that I drink more water daily in Seattle than I do in Beirut which seems a poor decision.

I had previously mentioned on Thursdays we are scheduled to have clubs. Sara, not wanting Hussein (who teaches everything but the first hour of MSA class because Sara has classes she has to attend) to have to do all the clubs, moved them to Friday. So today we went to the Center for Palestinian Studies where our classmate Suleiman/Seth had been doing some doctoral research. It was interested and had a varied collection but unfortunately we did not get to see a clip of any of the documentary films because we ran out of time.

After we got back I had to go recharge the minutes on my phone. I keep forgetting to lock my phone while it is in my pocket and consequently have accidentally called several of my friends. This however does allow me, barring my spending it all, to have minutes until I leave. My previous purchase of minutes was going to expire on August 3rd and since I was leaving 5 days later I had not decided whether or not to renew it. After that I headed back to my room and took a nap for several hours since I had been up until 1:30 the night before.

After my nap, I was contemplating all the stuff in Lebanon and Syria (sorry Mom! Don’t read the rest of this paragraph.) that I still want to do. Tomorrow, Saturday, is the first program-wide fieldtrip. We are going to Jbeil/Byblos, Hrisa and Jeita Grotto and it will take all day. After this weekend I only have three weekends left to visit the Crusader castles and hopefully Damascus, if I can find someone to go with me to the latter (I already have someone to go with to the Crusader castles). Also Saturday the 25th will be taken up with another day-long program wide trip which on no account do I want to miss. It’d also be nice to see some more of Lebanon outside of these program trips such as Tyre, Sidon and the Cedars.

In the early evening I accompanied Teresa and Claire as they went to find a knitting store they had heard about online located in Saifi Village, near downtown. We found it fairly easily after asking a security guard to make sure we were on the right street. Contrary to their hopes, all of the yarn was imported and not Lebanese or from any Arabic country.

We were quite close to the downtown so we walked to Solidere (that would be the downtown area with the clock tower on my Flickr account) to find a restaurant. We walked into one called Al-Balad (i.e. The Country or The Nation) and after extensive questioning of the waiter eventually ordered several small dishes to share, of which I took part of two as they were the vegetarian ones.

One was called cheese and garlic and essentially was a small pizza sized piece of bread (also a bit like pizza dough) with a cheese and garlic topping. The cheese was more for texture and not so much for taste and it basically ended up tasting like warm garlic bread and it was amazing. I also had some of the fried potatoes. These weren’t French fries but a bit closer to home fries but without the skin on. Everything was really good and it may have been the best food I’ve had since I got here. Claire and Teresa enjoyed those two dishes as well as their meat dishes.

After that, we decided to go to the nearby Virgin Megastore. I had wanted to see if I could find Harry Potter in Arabic and Claire wanted to get the Arabic memoir of her beekeeping teacher on his youth in Hezbollah, his change of politics and his pursuit of the family business of beekeeping. Alas I did not find Harry Potter. We did however, find Disney movies with Arabic dubbing, and I bought Disney’s Robin Hood which we will all be watching together at a later date. I look forward to hearing what the songs sound like.

Near the movies were children’s books and we spent a long time attempting to read them. It was largely a question of insufficient vocabulary. The book series, Al-Kitab, that is standard in teaching Arabic, especially in the U.S. has a very specialized set of vocabulary more geared towards talking about famous writers, poets or historical events. The first chapter of the first book of the three book series contains the words “mother, father, United Nations, etc”. After looking at the books for like a half hour and laughing helplessly at our ineptness we went to the cashier to get our purchases. The cashier seemed very amused by our attempts and resoluteness to use Arabic and asked Teresa to read him the children’s book on manaeesh and zaatar that she bought. She read maybe a sentence or two and was overcome by laughter…and so was the cashier and two employees standing nearby. Perhaps had we not all been in such a good mood already it may have seemed a bit mean but we know exactly how inadequate our vocabularies are for daily interactions. We were all still laughing on our way out.