Last week, Amy and I went into the video store and the owner said, “Hey, it’s the Campbells!”
Our potential landlord in Austin emailed my boss for a reference regarding Ethan Campbell.
As you probably know, we did not change our names when we got married (though I was a strong advocate of hybridization; Cambolda or possibly Hambell).
Coming soon: Tales From Greece!
There was a lot going down here in Beirut this morning that maybe I’ll write something about later, but I really want to say a few words about the “uproar” surrounding the Cheney hunting accident.
What is the matter with people? Seriously.
I don’t know about you, but so far as issues the White House is trying to keep hush-hush on, I’m a little more concerned about absence of WMDs or links between Saddam and Al Qaeda or whether or not leaks of State Defense secrets were authorized during a grudge match than I am about a hunting accident. I’m more interested in the administration proving that they’re justified in selling off national parks land to pay for cuts they made from rural school and road budgets than proving whether or not Cheney had the proper licenses to be hunting quail.
If I had the influence, I’d cut a deal with the administration…come up with a viable exit strategy for Iraq and roll back your tax-cuts for the wealthy and I’ll agree to let Cheney shoot one hunter every week. Maybe even two.
This morning I went to the U.S. Embassy to get more pages put into my passport. We’re going to Greece this weekend and our trip to Aleppo took up my last remaining parcels of passport real estate. We may have previously led you to believe that the embassy here is all fun and games, but there’s serious business afoot at that big, fortified summer camp in the hills.
Our friend and regular taxi driver Mohammed picked me up this morning to take me up to Awkar. If you’ve come to visit us here, you’ve probably been ferried back and forth to the airport by him. Mohammed explained that he had to borrow a friend’s car because his regular car is outfitted for tomorrow’s big event. For those of you who keep coming late to class, tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Hariri. Apparently the embassy is frowning upon cars pulling up to the gate festooned in flags and audio equipment.
After several brief and unpleasant exchanges with the universally grouchy security guards and a couple of metal detectors, I made my way inside. I always find the vagaries security at the embassy humorous. Let’s call it arbitrary and riddled with half-logic and leave it at that, lest I find myself aiding “Googling terrorists.”1
Once inside and once I got to where I needed to be, my affair was actually expedited with impressive efficiency. I had the feeling that adding pages to one’s passport was least complicated transaction one could endeavor in this office. To one side of me was a fellow from Tampa who was trying to get power of attorney over his recently deceased brother’s estate. To the other side of me was a fellow engaged in some harrowing exchange relating to the fact that he was the head (and I suspect only) Lebanese sales rep and distributor for a product called the Ditch Witch.
On the return trip, Mohammed and I got stuck in epic traffic. I was anxious to get home and back to work, but it was actually kind of pleasant to chat about this and that…Hariri’s legacy, the future of Turkey and the EU (Mohammed’s wife is Turkish and he’s in the process of getting the rest of the family visas), how he got started in the taxi biz, etc.
A little while ago, Amy said to me out of the blue: “We may need to bring my brother’s hair to Greece.”
There, verily, is a sequence of words that I never expected to pass Amy’s (or anyone else’s) lips.
Stranger still is the fact that I knew exactly what she was talking about.
Internet was particularly…shall we say, ponderous tonight, so I did a bandwidth test.
Sweet.
If you’re not currently in our neck of the woods, test for your own connection and have a laugh on me.
I created and uploaded a few banner images and so I thought I’d post my image-rotator code.
/* * rotating_banner.php * echoes an img tag populated w/ a random image from an array */ $arr_banner_images=array( 'banner.jpg', 'banner2.jpg', 'banner3.jpg', 'banner4.jpg', 'banner5.jpg', 'banner6.jpg', 'banner7.jpg', 'banner8.jpg', 'banner9.jpg', 'banner10.jpg', 'banner11.jpg', 'banner12.jpg', 'banner13.jpg', 'banner14.jpg', 'banner15.jpg', 'banner16.jpg', 'banner17.jpg', 'banner18.jpg', 'banner19.jpg', 'banner_containment.jpg' ); $dir_banner_location='/journals/ethan/images/'; $banner_width='700'; $banner_height='100'; echo '<img src=\''.$dir_banner_location.$arr_banner_images[rand(0, count($arr_banner_images)-1)].'\' width=\''.$banner_width.'\' height=\''.$banner_height.'\' border=\'0\'/>';
Of course, if I was on a Windows/IIS server, I could just use the ever-nifty <asp:AdRotator> web control.
In other geek news of possibly no interest (which is why I created a separate category for this stuff), I decided to use $45 of my cellphone largesse to participate in a 25 minute development conference call this week. I broached the topic of trying to maintain XHTML 1.0 compliance in all future projects. It was not a popular suggestion with a few of my colleagues. I was surprised by their hesitation to adopt this standard because a fair portion of the business is writing form input to XML documents and then later generating reports from those docs with XSLT. If the original form was XHTML 1.0, you could basically just use that for the report stylesheet with minimal rewriting. But you can never tell anybody anything.
When we returned from spending the holidays in the States, we were slightly dismayed to find that our apartment was freezing and we had neglected to get a gas bottle for our portable heater (or a #25 wrench so that we could swap out one from the grill). After spending a few blanket-covered, teeth-chattering days, we finally got our act together. Although we can only heat one room at a time and don’t feel comfortable using it while we sleep (the pilot went out once and the thought of waking up to a roomful of natural gas is unpleasant, to say the least), it works pretty well. Amy hasn’t yet mastered its nuances and has thus dubbed me the “Heat Boss.” The title is perhaps evocative of a villain you might fight at the end of a particularly difficult level in a 30s-style, gangster-themed video game.
Aside from chilliness, another unwelcome winter addition to our domicile is the mosquito. During the warmer months, we had a few of these insect visitors, but they were infrequent, small, and slow moving. The colder months have inexplicably brought a different variety. At first, we didn’t see them but rather would hear them at night in bed (and awaken with their handiwork on our hands and arms). I imagined them to be hulking, white-furred “snow mosquitoes.” However, the light of day eventually revealed them to be more garden-variety in nature.
Not to be cliched and talk about the weather, but the weather has been strange the last few days. Last night we went to Torino and at one point I said, “What’s that sound?” I looked outsided to see that it was hailing buckets. Later when we walked to the corner to catch a cab, there where patches of these ice-pellets on the sidewalk large enough to make snowballs with.
Earlier today, whilst attempting to get motivated to work, the sun was shining in through the sliding glass doors amidst a total downpour. I don’t know if it’s apparent in the photo below.
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Today is also the Muslim self-flagellation holiday of Ashurah. It’s a largely Shi’a celebration in which the faithful gather in the streets to beat themselves in commemoration of the death of Mohammed’s grandson Hussein at the Kerbala massacre. Amy’s in the next room watching some of the celebrations on TV. Apparently here in Lebanon, Hezbollah has appropriated the occassion as a platform for denouncing, among other things, some cartoons or something.
While Amy and I were visiting my brother and family in Baltimore over Christmas, we spent a Friday to take the DC Metro from Silver Spring into the city for the purpose of getting a couple Syrian visas. In the good old days, we used to be able to get visas on arrival for $16. As our last attempted trip there proved, this is not the case any more. At the embassy in DC, however, we were able to get 2-entry visas good for 3 months for $100/each.
This weekend, Amy and I made trip #1 up to Aleppo (or Halab in Arabic). With a population somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million, it is Syria’s second-largest city after Damascus. It features an extensive souk, a massive medeival citadel, and a confluence of Turkish and Armenian culture not really found in the capital.
If your conveyance is swift and travel-lanes and border officials comply, the trip from Beirut to Aleppo can supposedly be made in a little over 5 hours. It took us about 7 and a half hours. We took a less-trafficked route through Aboudiye, as opposed to the coastal crossing of Arida we attempted to pass last time. The surrounding countryside is actually quite pleasant; the narrow tree-lined roads through the fields reminded me of places in Georgia and South Carolina. The border itself, however, seemed less equipped to deal with travellers of our “distinction” and we held up the bus for many minutes while they decided what to do with us.
Eventually we made it to our destination in the mid-evening and thence by cab to the hotel. Amy had been to Aleppo before with our friend Carrie and had access to some helpful details (such as 100 Syrian pounds (~$2 USD) being way too much to pay to get to the hotel). The hotel, Beit Wakil, was really remarkable. The owner had more-or-less faithfully restored two adjacent 400 year old Ottoman houses and established a courted hotel in one and a courted restaurant (which we were later to discover was the best we would find in town) in the other. During Amy’s previous visit, they dined at the restaurant. Apparently they befriended the owner and were offered the bargain deal of $50/night during the off-season. So we spent most of our nights in the finest suite in the hotel. Thanks Carrie.
The owner, Habib, was particularly jovial and friendly. After we arrived and checked in, we were eating at the restaurant and he came over, made his greetings, and drank whiskey with us. Amy discovered she likes black-label Johnnie Walker. He ensured us that if we needed anything whatsoever, we needed only to give him a call. He wrote his mobile number on the back of a business card and impressed upon us that we “always have a good friend in Aleppo.”
The following day, being Friday, was quiet and nearly everything was closed down. It was quiet and gray and rainy, but we decided to walk around the souk anyway to get a lay of the land without the inconvenience of it being thronged with the bustle of commerce. It was wet and muddy, but not altogether unpleasant. We also visited a khan and spoke with the owner of the only open shop within. Amy had met him on a previous trip, but had neglected to tell me that he was a little…odd. His name was Anthony and he was, of course, Christian (Catholic in fact). He spoke at length (if not depth) about the history, culture, and religion of Syria. He said, “Here in Syria, everybody gets along…Christian, Muslim, everybody.” Now, I’ve been living in this part of the Middle East long enough to know that when someone makes such a statement, it is almost inevitably followed by disparaging statement about some religious group in particular. For instance, in Lebanon, you often hear this from people and they mean “everybody” = “all the Christians” or “everybody” = “all the non-Palestinian Muslims.” So of course, Anthony eventually said something like, “There are no problems in Syria because the Muslims are all Sunni. Not like in Lebanon where you have the Shi’a…” and made a face. He also grilled us on why we didn’t go to church, which was unusual. Later, he showed us the spot on the street where demonstrators had painted Danish, U.S, and Israeli flags for the purpose of stamping them in protest of the depictions of Mohammed in the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. (The following day, of course, demonstrators would attack Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus.)
In the evening, we dined at a place called Kasar al Amil (another hotel/restaurant in a restored Ottoman house) and had a nightcap in the subterranean pub of a place called Sissi (down the street from Beit Wakill and yet another Otto-resto-tel). The latter was interesting in that the walls and ceiling the underground bar featured rough-hewn carvings of various faces and characters. It is a pity we didn’t take photos. Though it was Friday night in the Christian quarter, the only other people in establishment were a trio of Irish tourists. Amy said later that when we left, one of them said, “Where are they going?” Aleppo is like Damascus in that there is not much of a night life.
Saturday was clear and relatively warm and we took advantage of the weather to roam around the citadel. The site of the citadel is a huge, anomalous, natural mound in the middle of the city. Initially a pagan worship site in 10th century BC, it was a significant defensive structure for the Muslims during the Crusades in the 12th and 13th centuries. Saladin’s son is apparently buried there. Being a nerd of the Dungeons & Dragons variety, I was excited to point things out to Amy, such as where there would have been a slitted roof in the barbican through which defenders could drop rocks and boiling oil on assailants. For her part, Amy was mildly impressed when details in the guidebook confirmed my statements.
We spent a fair portion of the day in the souk, now buzzing with activity. We preferred walking through the parts where business focused on sale of meats or spices or…mattresses. In short, things for which we obviously had no immediate need. A large part of the souk is devoted to shops selling rugs, jewelry, and oriental curios. In those sections, there are many young men wandering about attempting to solicit business for the shops. It was merely a minor annoyance (and Amy assures me nowhere near as aggressive and cutthroat as in Morrocan souks) but something that I hadn’t really seen in Damascus. The technique is basically: “Hi. How are you? Where are you from? Ah, I love New York. I have a sister in Michigan. Come and sit with me in my shop and have tea. I have many nice things. You’re not shopping? Ok, just to look then. I have local jewelry. Of course you don’t wear jewelry, but for your mother-in-law.” We’ve been told that the word shopping is actually Arabic in origin. I’m skeptical, largely because of the facts that “ing” isn’t really an Arabic convention and there’s no “p” in the Arabic alphabet, but I heartily invite somebody to prove me and dictionary.com wrong.
In the evening, we were able to sneak in under the wire (or rather, run in while someone was leaving) to see the Umayyad mosque. Naturally, it was large and impressive like all structures associated with the dynasty, but nothing like the grandeur of the one in Damascus (which was apparently built a decade earlier).
Eventually we retired to the hotel room to drink beer and watch CNN, where coverage basically vascillated between the aforementioned “Cartoon Controversy” and the ferry tragedy in the Red Sea. Later, we dined at Beit Wakil. I felt like a somebody as the friendly staff directed us to our “regular table”.
Sunday morning we rose relatively early so that we could have one last look around town before heading back to Beirut. Afterwards we walked to the bus station and my deft grasp of written Arabic enabled us to immediately find the ticket window for the bus company our friend and hotel owner had recommended. The ride home was long, if relatively uneventful. We passed into Lebanon at Arida this time, where we waited in November for 10 hours before they gave us the bird. A young boy named Akhmed, thrust into an early adulthood by working long shifts at the Syrian border house, remembered us from our previous visit and brought us coffee, jokingly motioning for us to have a seat for the wait. Although we ended up spending nearly two hours at the border, luckily it was not us that was holding up the show (though I do think we caused some confusion by having November stamps leaving and entering Lebanon without complementary Syrian entrance stamps).
We made it home by 8:30pm and invited our friend Bjorn over for dinner. It was he who told us that the Danish embassy had been attacked and burnt earlier that day.
The entrance to the citadel (note the barbican on the right). No orcs in sight.
A vaulted dome in the souk.
I just can’t get enough of those mosque doors.
Amy relaxing in the salon of our suite.
After coming up with excuses on several other occasions, I finally went to the Lifestyles gym with Amy yesterday. The apartment building it is located underneath is an imposing cylinder of polished, black stone, looking like nothing so much as my image of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon cast in obsidian (not to be confused with an artist’s image of the same). The gym itself is 2 or 3 stories underground and it is clad in the faux sci-fi style that was very popular with dot com start-ups in the late ’90s. Lots of glass and aluminum. It looked like it could be the subterranean training complex for superheroes. I couldn’t find the Danger Room (whoa, wikipedia actually has an entry for the Danger Room), so I went swimming.
The pool was actually quite small, but I am actually quite out of shape, so it kind of worked out. After about 25 laps, my teeth were throbbing and I felt like throwing up. I consoled myself by spending 10 minutes in the hot-tub waiting for Amy to finish her workout on the incomprehensible machines located elsewhere in the complex. Amy joined me in the hot-tub later and we spent a half hour or so contemplating our leisure-class lives.
After the gym it was home to shower and check email and then off to Torino for a cocktail before meeting up with Carrie, Carrie’s mom, and Caroline. It was Carrie’s mom’s last night in town. Amy and I were both glad to have met her and spend time with her on a couple of ocassions, so it was nice to also be able to bid her a proper farewell.
We had dinner at Mayass, one of two really good Armenian restaurants we’ve discovered in Beirut (though there are undoubtedly more, especially in the neighborhood of Bourj Hammoud). The food and atmosphere are great, there’s an old guy with a ponytail and a guitar, and I find the smirking waiters amusing. Of particular appeal to my 13 year-old sense of humor is that fact that the name of the establishment is pronounced MY-ASS, which leads to all sorts of comic turns of phrase (my favorite thus far being “I’ll meet you in Mayass”).
After dinner we met up with our friend Bjorn for drinks back at Torino and one of the bartenders prevented me from accidentally leaving a 25% tip. From thence home and to bed. Today, Amy went to Jeite Grotto and I am home working. Later we shall go to Matthew and Mary Ann’s for dinner and to make some wedding favors. Tomorrow we are having lunch at the home of one of Amy’s students followed by a belated Thanksgiving dinner with our friend Mike at his parents’ house.
“It’s a good life, if you don’t weaken.”
I bought new swim goggles at Lifestyles. For some reason I felt the need to model them in the shower when we got home. I especially like this picture because it makes me look kind of…dim.
Earlier this week, my mom emailed me about Israel bombing Southern Lebanon and she urged me to be safe. I assured her that, for better or for worse, this sort of thing is fairly common and happens in the disputed Shebaa Farms region a few times year. However, upon further investigation, it appears this time around things are a little more serious than the periodic Israel vs. Hezbollah grudge matches. From the BBC account:
Israeli warplanes have bombed southern Lebanon, a day after Lebanese guerrillas attacked Israeli soldiers in a border area.
The planes fired rockets at a suspected outpost of the Hezbollah group.
Four Hezbollah fighters were killed in clashes on Monday, which came amid intense artillery fire from both sides.
Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz says Israel was conducting its most extensive response to Hezbollah attacks since its forces left Lebanon in 2000.
This morning it was rumored that Israel air-dropped leaflets over Beirut. This seems highly improbable to me, but even if it’s true, I doubt we’ll be able to take a look at one due to the fact that the Sukleen guys will have swept them up as soon as they touch the ground. For those of you that don’t know, all waste collection and street sweeping in Greater Beirut is performed by a private company in lieu of a municipal sanitation department. Green-suited agents patrol the streets 24 hours a day to keep them litter-free. This is a good thing, due to the “the world is my trashcan” attitude most Lebanese seem to have towards littering. If the leaflet thing is true, then it would seem that the Israeli propaganda campaign has been soundly defeated by our men in green.
In other news, Lebanese Independence Day was yesterday and almost everyone had the holiday off. There was a military parade downtown that was met with resounding indifference. I saw some of it on television and even the bleachers set up for govermental VIP seating were only about 2/3 full. I, of course, had to stay home and work.
UPDATE: Apparently the Israeli-warplanes-over-Shebaa stuff was all baloney. Both Israel and Hez’b later recanted. However, the leaflets-over-Beirut stuff is apparently all true.
