Beirut Day 23 – July 16, 2009

So the video from Al-Jazeera that I left to load overnight only loaded ¾ of the way, but it didn’t end up being a problem as we re-watched the video in class anyway. It was a debate between the host (a Syrian), an Egyptian doctor and a Sudanese WHO employee. Much of our time was spent being amused at the calmness and politeness of the Sudanese man who when he tried to interrupt or begin a comment he would say “ya azizi” which means approximately “my dear”. My teacher said that this show at one point had two Sudanese guests on the show in a debate about partitioning the country between Christians and Muslims and even then they were both polite and calm despite the frustrated host’s attempts to rile them up.

As a may have mentioned before there are often brief power outages at AUB, maybe once or twice a day that I notice and lasting approximately 5-10 minutes. This would not have been a problem in our normal classroom but for the last hour and a half on Thursday afternoons we move to this windowless classroom on the fourth floor. The power went out for maybe two minutes while we were there and everyone discovered my shirt had glow in the dark images. There was a bit of sunlight coming in through the ceiling but other than that nothing. It came back on and we resumed our grammar lesson only for the power to go out again a bit later for even longer. After sitting in the dark for quite a while we finally began moving to another classroom, which was in the basement which was also dark but had the benefit of windows. The grammar review contained those explanations that make everything clear and you wonder why the book can’t teach it that way.

After class I went to the CAMES office to get some travel advice and then went back to my dorm to study. I was actually fairly good about studying and did flashcards straight for over an hour and looked at some grammar. That is, I was good until it came time to get dinner.

Jeff has to leave the program early, this Sunday, because his job is starting and Claire and I wanted to treat him to a dinner. Claire and I met Jeff for dinner around 8:30 or 8:45 and decided to try and find this place called Barometre. First we had to go to the store so Jeff could recharge his phone so that he could call the people he was meeting later for drinks. Then we decided to meet up with his friend Mike, who knew where the restaurant was.

We got to the restaurant…only to find it was the same restaurant we had been calling Al Bayt. Both names appear on the same storefront and I’m not really sure what the difference is. We sat outside and as we waited for another student, Kevin, we ordered kibbeh, spiced potatoes, fattouch, hummus, ra’a’at, shish taouk, and probably some other things that I can’t remember. I know we reordered the potatoes and the hummus. Dinner was fantastic but we did it Lebanese style (i.e. sharing dishes and then just sitting and talking) and it took four and a half hours so I didn’t get back to my room until around midnight. I studied grammar until about 1am and then went to sleep.

Jeff claims to know the answer to the long running mystery about why we didn’t go in the Muhammad al-Amin mosque; apparently it is forbidden to allow Christians in, which explains why Emily, a Muslim, was able to enter.