Beirut Day 6-June 29

Monday was the first day of Lebanese dialect class. We mostly went over greetings. I found that many of them were different from Egyptian but that in some interactions there were enough similarities (like the Lebanese dropping the terminal sheen for negation, but the rest of the word being the same) that I was glad that I had learned some Egyptian beforehand. I’ve also found that it’s helped in daily interactions. Egyptian Arabic is fairly widely understood – although it is often mocked for its accent – due to the fact that Egyptian media is really widespread.

For lunch I tried manaeesh for the first time. Basically thick grilled pita bread rolled up with something in the middle. I’ve just been getting mine with jibneh (cheese) although I found I had to specify that I didn’t want vegetables if I didn’t want to get olives. It’s really quite good and is probably my favorite Lebanese food so far. I really enjoy how cheap street food is. My manaeesh is about 2000 or 3000LL which is about $2. Dinner, which usually ends up being at arestaurant, is more comparable to European and American cities, as promised by the CAMES orientation packet. In class we read a very difficult Arabic story and were also told about the two Saturday fieldtrips during the program. It turns out that the fieldtrips go to every place I had definitely planned to go while in Lebanon and it’ll be on the program’s dime (really our fees, but it won’t be any more money) so that’s nice. For dinner I went back to Barbar with Claire and Rob and this time got the falafel sandwich, which I enjoyed. We wandered around for a while and dinner ended up taking two hours which seems to be the norm. Unfortunately this meant that I had to stay up late working on homework.