Ethan’s Journal

Bomb-Buddy – A mirror on an end of a stick, sometimes with wheels, used for checking underneath automobiles for bombs. They’re pretty common at most parking lots and fancy hotels in Beirut.

Hallas – Arabic for “enough”. Proper usage: (when the university students in your neighborhood are shrieking and hollering from their balconies at 3am) “HALLAS!” Amy once got an ovation in her English class when she said this because the students were acting up.

“Lollapalooza is that way, dude” – I don’t even really know what this means, but I say it a lot. It started in Cyprus. There was this dreadlocked guy with an iguana. The first time we saw him he was riding a scooter down the sidewalk with the iguana on his shoulder. The next time we saw him, he was mugging for photos with tourists with the iguana on his shoulder. The following time we saw him he was riding a jet-ski with the iguana on his shoulder. Like, Lollapalooza is that way, dude.

Pint – 0.5 liters…no more, no less. An imperial (aka UK) pint is 0.5682612 liters. A US pint is 0.4731765 liters. A Lebanon pint is 0.5000000 liters. It’s as if God moved the earth a tiny bit closer to the sun and consequently made the acceleration of gravity exactly 10 m/s².

Post-Tourist – Also, Neo-Tourist. A person who visits a country for an extended period of time, staying long enough to rent an apartment and receive mail. Though not strictly limited by the length of the visit, the informal parameters are generally considered to be a month or longer. It’s like, “Well you’re not really a tourist, but you don’t really live here…exactly what are you doing here?” It is up for debate in some sectors whether or not freelance journalists with a temporary dateline in a foreign country are actually considered post-tourists.

Smalls – Small denominations of money, generally but not always 1000 and 5000 LL notes. Also loosely applies to 250 and 500 LL coins. The expression is frequently used due to the fact that ATMs in Lebanon typically dispense large-denomination bills (either 100,000 LL or $100 USD) that are essentially unuseable in most common transactions. Usage: “Do you have any smalls? I need to take a taxi.” Also an apt expression because of the diminutive size of the new 5000 LL note (see below).

Tottenism – The act of imbuing an ordinary occurence with an inordinate sense of danger or drama. For instance, one might normally say, “Today I rode the A train to my first day at my new job.” However, were one to express this using a tottenism, one would say, “Today I rode the notoriously dangerous NYC subway system and managed to make to my first day on the job without getting mugged, murdered, or raped.” This is so named after the style of journalist Michael J. Totten. It is sometimes thought that tottenism also refers to stating an assertion based on a single experience or testimonial as an unassailable and universal fact. While this is another element of Mr. Totten’s style, we don’t have an expression for it yet.

So far we’ve been staying in the neighborhood this weekend. On Friday night Amy made some pizzas and we sat on the floor of the living room eating, drinking wine, talking, and listening to The Wedding. Later on, we went around the corner for a beer at The Captain’s Cabin. We’ve become somewhat friendly with the owner, Andre, and our friend Diran from the video store DJs there on Friday nights. It turned out that Diran was training his “replacement”, but we did get to meet his brand-new wife before they left shortly before midnight. An added treat was that the back garden was open. It’s newly rennovated and almost the antithesis of the interior’s rugged, divey, nautical aesthetic. The walls are made of big, rough-hewn blocks (which I’m told are sandstone) that are tastefully lit from below. The patio is composed of slate tiles and has a fountain in the center. The whole thing is illuminated by hanging lanterns. Andre told me that the walls were originally cemented over and he only discovered the sandstone underneath by locking himself out of the bar and having to climb the back wall to break in. The other side of the wall had the exposed stone. Also, he mentioned that he just recently got the fountain working after 15 years of non-function.

Every time we go to the Captain’s Cabin, it is relatively quiet, if not deserted. For many years, there was a Syrian secret service office on the same street and people steered clear of the Cabin because of all the shady characters hanging around. Andre seems to think that the lingering residue of this has something to do with poor business. Our friend Mike, who grew up in the area, agrees: “That entire street has a stain on it that’ll take years to come off.” Whether or not this is true, Friday was an anomaly as far as we were concerned. A bit past midnight a new DJ took over and started playing some kind of weird, lethargic, new-age French music. By 1am the place was packed with Francophones. We stayed for a couple hours, mostly chatting with Andre and a new professor at AUB that we had just met. The latter was an interesting fellow; he left home at 17 to study in Sweden (or Norway, depending on whether you ask me or Amy), spent 4 years living in Japan, did some time in Manhattan as a male model, and is now a composition professor at AUB. We exchanged information, so hopefully we’ll be seeing him again. When we left around 3am, the French new-age party was still going strong.

On Saturday, Carrie came over to do her laundry and then we went with her and Caroline to brunch. They knew a place quite near to our house called Gruen that serves brunch on Saturday. Brunch is not really a thing in Beirut, from what we can tell. The few places we’ve found that serve brunch only do so on Sundays. There is a giant banner on Bliss Street, near AUB, that is announcing the coming of a restaurant called Delicioso and “BRUNCH: THE CONCEPT.” I’m not sure such a place is going to make a beneficial dent in the brunch continuum here. Anyhow, it turns out this place Gruen was right under our noses all along. We’d walked past the building a hundred times and never noticed it. I had two fried eggs on top of some kind of potato-bacon loaf with some kind of tangy butter. They put a heart in my cappucino.

Saturday night we stayed home. Amy made soup and we watched One Hour Photo. I do not recommend it unless you have a soft spot for wooden acting, terrible writing, and so-called thrillers absolutely devoid of suspense.

So I cleared it with my colleagues and clients that I would be leaving town for a few days to renew my visa. I had satisfied myself that we were on track with wedding plans and preparations to come back to the States. I was actually starting to look forward to our little romantic getaway in Aleppo (rather than stressing out that it was a time commitment I couldn’t afford to make).

The bus ride to the border was pleasant enough, if uneventful. Our troubles began on the Syrian side of the border. We had crossed through at Masnaa several times to go to Damascus so we figured the Arida border would be something similar. At Masnaa, sometimes you have to wait in line forever and usually it’s total mayhem, but there is never anything resembling a complication. This time crossing at Arida very much started to resemble a complication. We were asked many questions, including quite pointedly and several times what our professions were. We were told that there was a “new order” and that they had to wait for a “telegraph” from Damascus before they could issue our visas. Our fate was sealed when the bus driver made an improvised gesture to us that had an unmistakable meaning, “Do you have any bags on the bus?”, i.e.”We’re leaving you here.”

So I got our remaining bag and we settling into some reasonably comfortable chairs and watched some TV in one of the offices. I complained that we would have to pay a double bus-fare. Little did I know that that would be the least of our worries and that this would be as good as it got for several hours.

The new order seemed to apply to all nationalities at all the borders. We were told that we were the first foreigners to try to cross at Arida since the new order…what an ignominious distinction.

Shortly after settling in, a short man who seemed to have been given the job of dealing with us made a confusing gesture, circling his index finger around his watch. What he was trying to say was, “You are going to be waiting a while and you can’t wait here.” As is the way with many people in these parts, he was deferential and not at all insistent, so it took us a couple of embarrassing minutes to figure this out.

We secured some seats on the hard, white, wooden benches in the lobby. It was here that we would spend the next 10 hours. No, that’s not a typo, TEN HOURS. They were long hours and many of them were cold. After the sun went down, the temperature dropped to 45° or so Fahrenheit and it was barely warmer inside the building than outside. However, they were not entirely uneventful hours. At one point a bearded, long-haired man in some kind of big, baggy (and somewhat filthy) knit sweater wandered in. To my inexpert and somewhat politically incorrect eye, he looked like nothing so much as a homeless person you might see in Tompkins Square Park in NYC. It turned out that he was German and had ridden his bicycle all the way from Germany and was continuing through to Lebanon. Amy tried unsuccessfully to snap a photo of him as he peddled away on his one-speed cruiser with a handlebar basket.

As we were getting into maybe hour 4 or 5 and it was looking like we might be missing dinner at the hotel, I wandered across the road to buy some food from some fellows in a cinderblock shack. I bought a strange sandwich, which consisted of hard-boiled eggs in pita with salad-type stuff and some oils and spices of unknown origin. I was a convert, but Amy’s faith in more conventional sandwiches remained unshaken.

At another point, I thought I was hallucinating as I saw a solitary frog hop-hopping across the floor of the lobby. It was not a figment of my imagination, but a rather a real live Arab frog, no doubt also waiting for a telegraph from Damascus. Amy caught it and I took a photo. She then set it free outside, no doubt to get run over by a taxi or a semi-truck carrying 30 tons of rebar.

One of the men who worked at the Departures desk took pity on us and started periodically offering us coffee and tea and nuts and cigarettes and fruit. As we became a fixture there, the Departures staff were generally nicer to us than the Arrivals staff. Amy’s theory was that since they could do nothing to help us, they could afford to offer us kindness without subtext.

We started noticing people we had seen before coming back in the opposite direction. I saw one particular truck–notable for it’s unmistakable illuminated multiple-snowman motif on the roof–make a second trip back into Lebanon. We kept seeing truck-drivers that bore an uncanny resemblance to Buck Angel (google that at your own risk, ladies and gentlemen…seriously), but it was hard to tell if it was the same guy or several different guys.

We developed an intense (and as turned out later, entirely warranted) dislike for the man who had first told us about the “new order.” He was also the only person on staff who spoke any English and seemed to be in charge of things. He sequestered himself in the office we had to vacate and for hours upon hours we watched him on the other side of some poorly-functioning one-way glass as he did little else besides drink coffee, watch television, and read the newspaper. Our man with the Departures even went in to plead our case at one point, but the boss-man just shrugged. Our contempt became quite palpable.

As of hour eight, I had yet to go to the bathroom. I didn’t have to go, so it wasn’t a problem, but it disturbed me.

Sometime around then, one of the boys who worked at the shack across the street brought us tea. We suspect this was the work of the Departures staff.

We pondered our options. Would Lebanese immigration let us return to Lebanon with a new visa? While it was true we had an exit stamp, if this were possible we could have theoretically gotten our new visa right then without even leaving the building. If we were able to return without a visa and let it lapse, we would pay an indeterminate (but presumably hefty) fine upon leaving at the end of the month, and more importantly would probably not be allowed to enter the country again one we left. Despite all these heady considerations, I think the main thing that we were sad about, though, was that we were missing Aleppo. Amy had made us a reservation for a suite at a fancy hotel at a discount rate because she had met the owner during a previous visit. And the longer we waited, the more of an investment we’d made in holding out for the visa. Also, as a consequence of this “new order”, we probably would not attempt to go to Syria again.

An interesting side-note to all of this is that, while we were certainly nonplussed by the whole situation, we were never quite miserable. At times we even enjoyed ourselves. I can’t really think of anybody else that I could’ve really done something like this with without partially losing my mind. Just thinking about that made me happy.

Another contributing factor to keeping our spirits up was the realization that there are plenty of people who have to go through something like this every time they cross a border. Especially, people of Arab descent trying to go to Europe or the States post-September 11. I think about this every time someone bitches about being “treated like a terrorist” because they have to take off their shoes in the airport. I would suggest that until you’ve been questioned for 6 hours under threat of deportation, you have no idea what being “treated like a terrorist” really feels like. Now I’m not saying that we were being treated like terrorists, but rather just profoundly incovenienced. I’m just saying that as an American sometimes I find it easy to forget how easy I generally have it when travelling.

But I digress…

So finally at around half-past-midnight, we decided to cut bait. We asked for our passports back and the boss-man asked us a bunch of stupid questions which at this point we had no patience for.

Him: So, you will not return to Syria again?
Us: Not if it’s always going to be this difficult.

Him: I think that you should wait till the morning and the telegraph will come then.
Us: But we can’t sleep here.
Him: I know.

Him: So, I cannot decide for you whether you stay. It is your choice.
Us: Yes, we know. So give us our goddamn passports already.

We finally got our passports and started walking, out of the building and across the parking lot. Our Departure guy stopped us and asked for our passports and then led us back inside and talked to another guy. The other guy went into the office with boss-man. Part of me was thinking, Ah, finally someone is doing something about this situation and we’re going to be in our fancy suite by 3am. Another part of me was thinking, Shit, if this was all it took, I really wish that someone would’ve brought the noise about 7 hours ago. We had taken the tea mugs when we left, with the intention of returning them across the street, so I also thought, I wonder if they thought we were stealing those. But alas, noise was not brought, or at least not sufficiently so. They emerged from the office, handed us back our passports, and told us we were free to go.

We walked back to the border and waited where a Syrian soldier was inspecting a car ahead of us. In a final infuriating moment, the boss-man walked up behind us, pointed past the guard and said, “There is Lebanon. Go!”

It was kind of funny, walking across the bridge back into Lebanon, feeling disenfranchised. Syria had given us the bird. The flightless bird. Syria had given us the penguin, or perhaps the chicken.

The first two things I noticed was that the Lebanese immigration office was warmer and the young soldiers behind the partition spoke English. One of them had a sister in Austin, TX. True to form, they offered us seats and coffee and fruit. We waited there in relative comfort for a bus to arrive and other than the fellow at customs ripping us off changing money (absorbing a $6 overage), the wait was without incident. I noticed, not for the first time, the placard reading “Foreigners & Arabs.” This placard seems to be in all immigration offices in Lebanon and it makes we wonder why they make the distinction. If there was one queue for “Foreigners” and one for “Arabs”, I could imagine there might be some reasoning behind it. But here, it’s the same queue. The only thing I can think of is that it is a courtesy; travellers from Syria or Kuwait or Qatar do not want to be thought of as mere “Foreigners.”

We laughed with one of the soldiers about the German bicyclist who had been through 7 hours earlier. We were told that the German was actually going through Lebanon, back through Syria, through Jordan and Israel and eventually to Egypt. Wow.

At around 3:30am, a bus finally arrived. It was a ramshackle affair with busted seats and shocks dating back to the Carter administration, but we didn’t care. When I asked the driver how much was the fare to Beirut, he waved me off with a smile and some Arabic…something like “Salam Aleikum” but not quite. It was a bouncy, drafty 2+ hours but when we pulled into Charles Helou bus terminal as the sun was coming up, everything was all right. Amy asked again about payment upon exiting the bus and was waved off. I said goodbye to the bus driver and his “conductor”, but they stopped me, and simultaneously made a rubbing of fingers against their thumbs and said “money money money money.” Ha, I thought, that’s a new one. Act like it’s a favor when I’m in a position to negotiate and then insist on an inflated sum when I’m powerless to haggle. So, I paid $10 for the two of us when it should have been more like $6. Ok. Fine. I blame Syria for that.

This weekend we picked up our rings, walked around Solidere and Bourj Hammoud taking pictures, hung out at Torino, and marvelled at the completely lackluster response to the Beirut marathon.

We started the week off with a bang by going down to the General Security building at 8:30am and finding out that we have to leave the country between now and Wednesday to renew our visas. This is annoying and inconvenient (especially since we were finding it exceedingly difficult to get this information via telephone or internet), but ultimately not a big deal. We haven’t decided yet whether to just do a quick trip to the border and back or take a romantic two-day getaway in Aleppo instead.

Not only where these about $100 cheaper than I thought they’d be, but our man knocked off another 30 bucks because he felt we had to wait to long for the engraving…which he didn’t charge us for because it was his “gift” to us.

I believe this is the only TGIFridays in the world with a view of ancient Roman ruins. I am not very well-travelled though, so I could be wrong. Do they have TGIFridays in Italy?

The mighty, filthy Beirut River.

Amy. Coffee. Torino.

We were flipping through the channels tonight after watching a particularly unambitious episode of Nip/Tuck when we saw the news of the bombings of three hotels in Jordan. It is a strange feeling, because this isn’t the first time we’ve been flipping through television channels and have seen news footage of an explosive aftermath accompanied by Arabic commentary and thought, “Shit, was that here?” Since we understand only very little of what is being said, this is generally followed by scrambling to find something on the internet or on an English tv news station (of which, lamentably, BBC World is practically our only resource). But this is the first time I can think of that we’ve thought, “was that here?” and it hasn’t been. I’m just reading and watching the reports coming in now, but this series of attacks is most certainly of a different and more awful strain–by many orders of magnitude–than anything we’ve had here.

It seems like last week was quite typical of my recent time here: a week of drudgery book-ended by weekends of total fun. Last weekend, my birthday weekend, was terrific. In addition to winning top prize at the embassy party, we went to my new favorite restaurant followed by a nightcap or two at my sort of new favorite bar. At the former–Scallywags–the owner asked us to stay longer, offering us another bottle of wine on the house. At the latter–Torino–they opened champagne when we arrived (though quite possibly not for me). It’s nice to be loved…or at least liked…or humored.

So the week was a grind (especially, predictably, Tuesday), but last weekend we finally made a deposit on some rings. After several weeks of popping in and out of nearly every storefront jeweler we passed by, we decided to stop screwing around and get serious. Amy had been eyeing a place nearby called Nsouli. It was in a building on Hamra on the 4th floor and presumably fancy. On the sidewalks of Rue Hamra there are star-shaped plaques in the sidewalk much like the Hollywood Walk of Fame. They commemorate businesses on the street of a certain reputation, prestige, or (as I suspect is most often the case) longevity. Nsouli jewelers had such a distinction. In fact, we actually walked up and down the street for several minutes unable to find the exact location until we happened upon their “star” in the sidewalk.

The establishment itself was intimidating to the point of being comical. Up on the fourth floor we were buzzed in through a steel door so heavy that I am embarrassed to say I had a little trouble opening it.. We stepped into a 5’x5′ vestibule and had to close the door behind us before another identical door opened into what looked like the lobby of a nice hotel. As I said, we had previously priced rings at storefront jewelers and since plain bands are basically priced by weight, I was expecting to be laughed out of the establishment upon expressing interest in a mere couple hundred dollars worth of jewelry. On the contrary, they were very deferential. We were introduced to Ahmad, a Syrian living in Dubai but currently “temporarily” in Beirut to work. He insisted we have coffee and showed us a wide array of rings. After much deliberation, we found one for Amy and arranged to have a similar, wider one made in my size. Ahmad was so polite, in fact, he almost seemed like he didn’t want us to leave a deposit. To be fair, this is an aspect of Lebanese business we’re somewhat familiar with…”We need you to do this thing and it’s totally standard procedure, but if you’re not familiar with the procedure I’m not going to embarrass myself my requiring you to do it.” He also gave us his number in Dubai, should we ever happen to passing through town. We should be picking up the rings on Saturday.

Halloween? Yes!

I had assumed upon moving to Beirut that one of the things I would be giving up would be Halloween. However, due to our slightly less than six degrees of separation from the U.S. Embassy, we found ourselves getting ready to go to a Halloween party on Saturday night. Luckily, just around the corner from us is a store of indeterminate purpose which seemed to convert itself into a costume shop for 72 hours. We were able to get zombie makeup, fake blood, a knife-type apparatus, and a bat costume for 24, 500 LL (~$16). When I was perusing the meager ghoul makeup selection, the proprietor said to me, “We have a t-shirt with [inaudible/incomprehensible] to go with that.” I thought to myself, “It sounded like he said ‘a t-shirt with breasts’, but I must be mistaken.” After about five minutes of rummaging around through boxes, he produced, surely enough, a polyester t-shirt with a pair of ample prostheses. We passed on that item.

Speaking of transgender costumes, earlier in the day I tried unsuccessfully to wriggle into a wedding dress of Amy’s that didn’t make the cut. I’m actually quite glad that option didn’t work out.

Amy already covered quite a bit about the party in her post, so some of the following might be a repeat. Our friend Caroline, who works at AUB, was kind enough to pick us up at the Kabab-Ji in Hamra. On our way we were considering trying to avoid the main street, but we figured what the hell. I was trying to act casual, but I was worried my expertly applied makeup would run because I was sweating so much. People stopped and pointed, parents held their children up to see, older siblings tried to scare younger siblings, people hollered and greeted us from across the street. It was quite hilarious and ended up being one of the highlights of my evening. I’m sure that nearly everyone on the street realized we were dressing for Halloween, but I secretly harbor the hope that there were at least one or two old-timers who had no idea what the hell was going on. At one point, some young ladies from Qatar stopped their car and got out to have their pictures taken with us. They kept saying, “We are from Qatar. We are not from Lebanon. We do not have this.” Based on the spectacle we were creating, neither did Lebanon (though to be fair, when we were dining off Monot on the 31st, we saw several people walk by the restaurant in costume).

During our photo op, our friend arrived, dressed as a gypsy, and we were off. The embassy is about half-an-hour outside of town and there is a checkpoint down the road about 500-600 feet before you reach the main gate. At first I was thinking, “Oh great…I’m sure the soldier on duty is going to love this,” but then my companions assured me that we obviously weren’t the first group of costumed freaks to come through on our way to the party.

I was wondering if we’d have any issues at the gate, considering we were all in disguise. Though they seemed to take as much time inspecting our documents as the last time, they seemed to recognize me from my passport photo regardless. They ushered us through and then put us in a car that drove us 50 feet to the building where the party was being held.

The party itself was upstairs at an establishment called The Bunker Bar. We re-met and met for the first time a bunch of embassy people and various other expats. As always, the question “so, like, uh, what are you doing here?” (“here” meaning Lebanon) was frequently asked. I should mention that all U.S. Embassy employees are required to live on the compound, and with very few exceptions they are required to get permission 24 hours in advance to leave. When they do leave, they’re required to be attended by a bodyguard at all times. I think this kind of living affects the embassy people in two principal ways: (1) it makes a couple of gringos like us moving to Beirut and living there under our own steam seem strange and unusual (or at least, you know, more so) and (2) it makes them kind of weird in sometimes delightful, oft-times disturbing ways.

I believe we all had a good time and I was surprised that so many people dressed in costume. At first I thought that they must have limited resources for such a thing on the compound, but then it occurred to me that the costumes probably get passed on from generation to generation. Two common costumes were members of the medical profession and what can best be described as Saudi-type arabs. I found this second costume lame at best and offensive at worst. While I am sure that it was an easy thing to put together, some embassy dude to throw on a keffiyeh and a robe and call it a costume just hits me wrong. Maybe I’m too sensitive or maybe it just smacks of the whole “Lebanon is a desert full of camels” stereotype. Seeing these guys did spark some Halloween memories. The first was going to a Halloween party at the Frying Pan in New York City in October 2001 (i.e. a little over a month after the September 11 attacks). As we were walking in, some guy was walking out dressed as Osama bin Laden and it made me sad and angry. The second, more light-hearted, memory is that of our friend telling us about dressing as a post-conversion Cat Stevens for Halloween and getting accused of basically doing what these embassy guys were doing.

There were some other notable costumes. Carrie dressed as a black widow spider. Several people were dressed as members of the medical profession (and nearly every one made a joke referring to helping with the dagger sticking through my head). There were two women who both dressed as flamenco dancers. I wondered if one of them felt inferior. There was a theme couple: the man dressed as a plastic surgeon (basically a labcoat, a bald cap, and a huge syringe marked “silicon” that with which he nearly poked my eye out at the bar) and the woman dressed as his augmented and bandaged creation. There was a costume contest and they won for “best couple.” The prize for “cutest costume” went to a guy dressed as a nun with a puzzlingly and improbably huge bust. The fake-breast motif was mercifully brought to a halt when I won for “scariest costume.” To be honest, there wasn’t a lot of competition…the guy who got runner-up dressed as a half-assed grim reaper was the only other remotely scary costume (in the classic, Halloween sense). When I accepted my bottle of wine and was handed the microphone, I said my name and mentioned that I thought the person dressed as George W. Bush would win for scariest costume. Unfortunately, what might be considered a fairly edgy thing at a U.S. Embassy party was lost on everyone, as I believe Amy and the woman presenting the awards were the only people to hear me (though to my delight, the latter actually seemed kind of mortified).

We ended up staying late as most of the guests drifted out, presumably to go dancing on Monot St., presumably with their bodyguards in tow. We talked with the bartenders, who were all young guys that volunteered for their posts behind the bar.

Caroline drove us home and I was perhaps too animated in my personal assessments of some of the people I had met at the party. Why must I always judge? After some lurching around the apartment like a zombie, I washed off (most of) my makeup and went to bed. The next day we had brunch at Casablanca with Caroline and Carrie and I still had some tell-tale black around the eyes and blood around the lips.

I believe that Amy and I have both previously described how kind, warm, and welcoming our landlords, the Sidani family, have been to us. We have been invited frequently to stop by for coffee sometime, but as gringos, we find it hard to know how to accept such an invite. It seems rude and inconvenient to just drop by unannounced. A Lebanese friend of ours assured us that there is no inconvenient time under such circumstances, but still we were gunshy. On Thursday, however, our landlord’s son formally invited us to celebrate the iftaar, or breaking of the daily fast, that evening with them.

The food was great…vegetable soup, roast beef, falafel. Although there were some exceptions like fattouche, the fare was generally not the sort of thing that is served in Lebanese restaurants (which I supppose is like anywhere else). The conversation was good as well. We learned that Mrs. Sidani married Mr. Sidani when she was 13 and had her first child at 14. Mr. Sidani told us some stories from the days of the war, in particular about his 5 years spent with Save The Children. Obviously it was a terrible time, but he had quite a sense of humor about daily task of surreptitiously carrying large amounts of cash around a city during wartime. After dinner we had coffee and Qatayef and smoked argileh and talked more about cabbages and kings. Ramadan Kareem!

I took most of Friday off, which means that I only worked till 4:30pm or so. I’d been burning the midnight oil all week working on a project that experienced a significant degree of what another client of mine calls “scope creep” and I was determined to get out. We hung out with Mike at Torino for happy hour and then met up with Carrie at Scallywags for another great dinner. We ended up meeting up with Richard the owner later at a (what I was told was gay) dance club called Gallery. Actually, I don’t think it was a dance club, but we sure were dancing. It turned into such a late night that I almost wasn’t in the mood for the Halloween party at the US Embassy the next day. Almost. More on that later.

UPDATE 2005-11-03– I forgot to mention that during our post-iftaar conversations, Mrs. Sidani told us that her maiden name is Yammout. We live on Yammout Street. The next street over is Sidani.

What Halloween?

Below are some photos of one of only two examples of Halloween decorations I’ve seen in Beirut. The other one prominently featured orange umbrellas. I may be all alone on this, but unless they are demon-possessed, lined with razor-sharp teeth, and prone to closing on their owners and devouring them, umbrellas are not scary.

It’s really the gigantic spiders on the gigantic guitar that do it for me.

So not only is there no Halloween in Lebanon, apparently Europe has a beef with the holiday as well.