Beirut Day 38 – July 31, 2009

Friday was another one of those days in class where we laughed a lot, and it was good. I gave my short presentation on Amin Maalouf and I think it went fairly well. I was even able to ad lib a little. We read a story in Arabic called “A Girl Named Apple”. Apparently there are some fruit names for girls that are not uncommon in the Gulf region. It ended up turning into a discussion on marriage customs in the Middle East and the practice of giving dowries, both of which related to the story. I got to anthropology nerd-out on the term dowry. In Islam, the word mahr should not be translated into English as “dowry”. A dowry is given from the bride’s family to the groom. What happens in Islam is the groom gives the items or promises to the bride and said items are then her property to do with as she wills. This is more properly called a bride gift. I was pleasantly surprised that when I objected to that translation that my teacher knew what I meant before I clarified, since usually it just gets me strange looks. That’s the end of my anthropology rant.

Since it was a Friday without a trip, class ended early, at 1pm. I went back to my room and napped for a while and worked for a little bit on preparing to write the second half of my paper. Since my plans to go to Beiteddine on Saturday were cancelled and Claire’s plans to go to Bsharre were delayed, I asked Rob and Claire if they wanted to go see Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. We picked a time and at 8 headed to Achrafiyeh and ABC Mall (pronounced like French, Ah Bey Say). The architecture at ABC is quite nice but if you wanted a bastion of Westernism in Beirut, ABC is definitely it.

We had dinner in ABC Mall at a place called Nando’s, which is a Portuguese food chain in the region. Then we went to the theatre, which was also in the mall. What was surprising to us, but is apparently common in Europe, is that the theatre has assigned seating. When we bought our tickets we were asked where we wanted to sit, much to our initial confusion. It was a small theatre and not particularly filled so we more or less had our choice of seats. Sadly we did miss the previews on account of taking a bit too long at dinner.

The movie was subtitled in Arabic and French and some of the French translations were a source of great amusement to us, such as Poudlard for Hogwarts and baguette for wand. One of the best parts had to be when, due to a startling and scary scene when Harry’s leg is grabbed by an Inferi (think zombie) out of a lake, Rob positively jumped and screamed. I had remembered that much from the book and was properly hunched down with my ears covered. After the movie, which we all enjoyed – although that may have been due to our continued whispered comments – we got a cab and headed back to AUB.