Beirut Night 1- June 23

I arrived at Rafik Hariri International Airport in the evening. Passport control took forever and I was afraid that my AUB-provided ride would leave since the orientation packet, the Source of All Knowledge at that point, said it would only wait up to an hour after the scheduled landing of my flight. It was not so much that I needed extra screening so much that I got in a ridiculously slow line and no one respects queues. Some family ahead of me had like 8 people and had to keep calling members of the family up to discuss things. A new line started next to my line but because I was respecting the queue I did not jump in because I was waiting for acknowledgement of the official. The guy behind me rushed over and by that point I was next in line so I just decided to wait. When I finally reached the official he didn’t take that long with me, probably because my visa was completely in order and not particularly complicated. I proceeded to the luggage carousel. I found my first smaller bag quite quickly. Unfortunately shortly after I found that the carousel stopped completely and I had to wait for it to start up again to find my luggage and I was getting increasingly worried that it had been lost (my biggest fear of the whole trip). Eventually I found it and hauled it off and proceeded towards customs where I had nothing to declare so I went right through. My arms were once again killing me due to the heavy weight of my luggage but I managed to get it through. As soon as I exited customs there was a huge crowd of people waiting for arrivals. I knew I had to find the guy with a sign with my name on it but there were two option of which way to go. Lucky for me I picked the right one and found the guy fairly quickly. I was then taken to a group of CAMES students and we all stood introducing ourselves and chatting while we waited for the last student to show up, but he never did (he did later safely arrive at AUB). The taxi drive to AUB was a bit crowded and a fairly hot even though it was like 9pm because the taxi didn’t have any air conditioning. I got set up with my private room and also met my suitemate. We have rooms with an adjoining bathroom that we have to walk through to get to our individual rooms. Although we both opted for private rooms they are set up for double occupancy so there are two desks, two beds, etc in both of our rooms. The air conditioning works amazingly well and I usually only turn it on for about 20min at a time, usually after coming in from outside, and then turn it off. The shower, as I discovered later, also functions really well and gets hot immediately. After tossing my stuff on to the bed and floor I went to see Emily who had been in the taxi with me and she, her roommate Leila and I went to Bliss Street to get some food. I tried sage (think of a French pronunciation) for the first time with zaatar wa labne (herb mix and labne…you can Wikipedia that). They grill it on this big dome shaped thing. It was pretty good. This is also when I found out how cheap bottled water is, since that’s what most people drink. A two liter bottle of water should never cost more than 1000LL or about $.66. Of course plastic recycling is practically nonexistent although I found out today that there may be somewhere nearby that I can deal with the small pile of plastic bottles I have accumulated in my room. We went back to sit on campus and I was introduced to the improbably large number of stray cats that live on campus. Leila played with one of them while we ate, since she said she had all her shots. I later heard that there was an endowment for the cats and I’ve definitely seen piles of catfood lying around. One cat attached himself to us and we named him Assad (lion). We also saw the most adorable kittens. After dinner I went back to my room and tried to prepare myself for the placement test that was the next day. I still didn’t have any internet so I just unpacked, did some flashcards and stared at my grammar sheets without thinking. Eventually I went to sleep although I did wake up really early because of course I wasn’t adjusted yet.