Beirut Day 8 – July 1

I was quite excited that Wednesday morning I bought my morning muffin entirely in Lebanese dialect, minus the word “muffin”, which really doesn’t exist natively in Arabic. Dialect class continues to reinforce how much French is in the local dialect, but conjugated. One might say bonjourak, i.e. bonjour to you. For check you can say hisab, the Arabic word, or an Arabized version of the French word “check”. Generally if you don’t know the Arabic word, you could probably get away with inserting the French word. No one would bat an eye. Of course some people just speak straight up French.

So many people here speak Arabic, English and French and the city is so cosmopolitan, at least on the surface, that I often feel that I’m not in a foreign country so much as I’m in a city where they happen to speak another language. This may also be due to the fact that I haven’t been outside of Beirut or because I know enough Arabic that I can and have interacted with locals with only limited pauses and misunderstandings. This city is also really about looks and appearances, is one of the capitals of plastic surgery in the region and women here go out dressed to the nines.

We attempted to read Arabic newspapers in class. Although it was somewhat difficult I realized it was mostly a problem with insufficient vocabulary. It was a great feeling. If the main thing that I need to work on is vocab acquisition then that’s not such a big deal.

At lunch I tried what is essentially a spinach and onion filled pastry/dough triangle. I’m sure all of you know that know me were surprised I tried it, much less liked it. Dinner was a large group affair again at a place called Tasty. I was looking forward to sharpening my ordering in Arabic skills only to find out our waiter was Brazilian and in fact didn’t really speak any Arabic – certainly not better than we did – and begged us to speak in English. Dinner ended with another short trip to dekkenah to get some more apples (my new breakfast food) and some corn cakes.