Ethan’s Journal

So, we’re a few weeks into Ramadan here. Amy and I have been making a point not eat or drink in public, and especially not to stand on a street corner chugging some cool and refreshing bottled water next to someone who hasn’t been able to allow anything to pass his lips for the last 10 hours. The breaking of the fast, or iftaar, is a substantial daily event, during which families often get together and have a feast for dinner, which they follow with elaborate desserts. One night while my parents were staying with us, our landlord’s wife and daughter brought us some pastries which were as fancy as they were delicious.

I have to admit, prior to coming here (and reading Islam: A Short History), I had assumed that the Ramadan fast had something to do with some sort of spiritual cleansing. My only real exposure to it was during the dormitory days of my first year college, when my next door neighbor would get up at 4 or 5 am to cook a huge meal before sunrise. While in those days I often hadn’t yet gone to bed by that hour, I was uniformly bleary-eyed for one reason or another and I never inquired further. What I didn’t realize is that the period of fasting is intended to make Muslims more aware of the hardships of their less fortunate brethren. Now that I’m a little more informed, this makes perfect sense since, at it’s core, Islam is a rather socially conscious religion.

The most outwardly obvious signs of the holiday (other than dramatic and somewhat terrifying shift in traffic patterns around 6pm when everyone is rushing home to eat) are the bright lights and decorations, often centrally featuring half-moon designs. And at our local Starbucks, Amy discovered that a creme-brulee latte is exactly how you should observe a religious holiday based on privation and abstinence. To be fair, this is really the only example of the kind of exploitation Christian holidays are treated to in the states, but it is nonetheless a funny one.

Between Hurricane Wilma, the outcome of the Rove leak scandal investigation, and now the rocket attack on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, how is a fella supposed to know if G.W. Bush is ready to bring the noise with Syria? It’s going to be a busy news week, to be sure. So busy, in fact, I don’t think I’m even going to have time to find out who Alan Greenspan’s replacement is going to be.

In looking for more news coverage on the aforementioned Syria issue, I stumbled upon this news item about the editor of a magazine in Kabul being sentenced to two years in prison for a couple articles published in his magazine Women’s Rights. I believe one of the articles suggested that apostasy should not be a crime punishable by death and the other advocated gender-equality in punishments for adultery. The New York Times article on the subject claims that the prosecution was actually initially calling for the editor to be executed. I’m not going to be so bold and chauvinistic as to level a blanket criticism on a country trying to govern based on Islamic law, but when I read something like this about the new Afghanistan, I have to wonder: so, like, how uptight were the Taliban when they were in power?

But back to the Syrian thing…if you hear anything substantial, let me know, ok? Because I’m not ready to trust just any knuckle-head with a laptop on this one.

[UPDATE: some members of our household think I’m jumping the gun here and should hold my horses until after the UN Security Council briefing on Tuesday.]

Friday is supposed to be one of my days off, but things haven’t really been working out that way lately. This Friday, however, I just said no to work with the intention of going with Amy to Bourj Al-Barajneh to sit in on the English class she teaches there. Apparently it usually takes Amy an hour to an hour and half to get there on the 12 bus, but we made it in under 45 minutes. The reduced traffic was most definitely due to the fact that the Mehlis report came out today and many people were staying safe and off the streets. We saw an increased military presence, more soldiers as well as tanks and APCs, in the streets on the way. The real highlight of the ride, however, was a pet store on the bus route that sells a real, live baboon.

Actually, we had received some advice to stay close to home ourselves, or at least not go to Bourj. Again, for those of you with a late pass, Bourj Al-Barajneh is one of the 12 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. It’s located in the largely Hezbollah- and Amal-controlled suburbs South of Beirut. Our thinking was that in the somewhat unlikely event that there was to be any “excitement” in the immediate aftermath of the report, it certainly wasn’t going to happen till much later.

Since it was Friday, Amy is usually light on the exercises and heavy on the games. We played Pictionary, and when the word “key” came up, my interest was really captured. Keys as symbols are huge in the Palestinian refugee community, representing a return to the houses they were forced to leave. Many people actually still literally have the keys to the homes they were driven out of. As a result, there is key-themed grafitti everywhere in the camps. So when the student got up to the white-board, I was expecting here to draw the old, iconic skeleton-key type image from the grafitti. Instead she drew a near-perfect rendering of a regular key, the kind that you have for your front-door, rather than the kind you’d see in a Disney pirate-themed animatronic. It also took the students a long time to correctly guess, so I suppose I’m guilty of assigning a gravity to the situation that just wasn’t there. Also interesting from more of a linguistic point-of-view is that when the word “chicken” came up, the student started drawing a kitchen.

Afterwards, we took the 12 bus back to Hamra and from there caught the 4 bus downtown. I have to say, I love taking the bus. For whatever reason, I find taking taxis (service or otherwise) to be an anxious affair. I like the economy and lack of bargaining and personal interaction that goes with taking the bus.

Downtown was fairly empty and the restaurants were nearly deserted. I imagine that the fact that it is Ramadan somewhat contributed to the latter, as well as obviously the aforementioned UN report. Unflapped, we felt genuinely leisure class as we partook of gourmet pizza and Musar red (a Lebanese wine that Richard from Scallywags turned us on to) in the shadow of the magnificent and nearly-completed Hariri mosque. Carrie joined us for some wine and coffee and Amy fed our left-overs to the adorable kitten that had been napping in a nearby flowerbed. It seemed like the only other pedestrians downtown were the passengers of the SS Emerald, a cruise-ship docked in the port.

Afterwards, we dropped by a little place in Gemmayze called Torino Express. It’s cozy and has a lot of character, but more importantly it is the new home of our friend and favorite bartender Mike. He told us that the place had been lousy with press all day. Apparently one of the patrons got (drunk and) sick of it and totally bent the ear of some people from the New York Times. “Free my people!” and all that sort of thing. I’d be interested to see if it makes it into their coverage.

At eight o’clock, there was supposed to be some kind of rally in Martyr’s Square. We didn’t live here when the huge rally occurred shortly after Hariri’s death and I missed the handful of others that happened since. So, my only memory of a protest event in that location was an anti-war protest we went to in 2002, during our first visit to Lebanon. It was a lackluster, student-driven affair. Although it was now a different time, with different circumstances and issues, I was for some reason expecting more of the same. One of the first things we saw was a phalanx of riot police across the street at the South end of the square. Carrie remarked that it would be funny if anything went down because they’d have to charge across two lanes of traffic.

There were, to my estimation, a few hundred or possibly a thousand people there. Some sources count the number in the multiple thousands, but it didn’t seem to be that populated to me and anyway Carrie said “several hundred” in her NPR spot, so I’m going to stick with that. There was much waving of Lebanese and Progressive Socialist Party flags and much chanting, but in my observations it seemed like the most
demonstrative acts were carried out by teenagers vying for the attention of the news cameras. At one point a group of young men ran screaming through the square and climbed the statue at the North end in what I cynically regarded as a photo-op. We left after about 45 minutes or an hour, so it is certainly possible that the event took on a different character (and higher body-count) later.

We decided to have one last beer with Carrie before going our separate ways and we ended up again at Cocktails and Dreams upon my suggestion because it’s one of the only places I’ve found that you can get a pint of non-Almaza/Heineken (in this case, Murphy’s) draft beer that isn’t completely egregious. Unfortunately, they had no Murphy’s capability because “the machine [was] broken.” As a sidenote, “machine” is the popular shorthand among the english-as-second-language set for a device of any stripe, be it mechanical, electronic, or otherwise. Our coffee-grinder is a machine. My router is a machine. Whatever part of the Murphy’s aparatus that wasn’t functioning was a machine. Anyhow, I was disappointed about the Murphy’s, but Tony, the owner, came over and sat with us and bought us a round and told us a funny story about being pulled over for speeding in Paris and telling the cop he was a Saudi prince. Apparently he was convincing because it rated him a full-siren, red-light-running police escort back to his hotel.

Afterwards Amy and I headed back to Hamra. Diran, the owner of our video store, was djing at a place in heretofore-unheard-of-by-us neighborhood bar called The Captain’s Cabin. As soon as we walked in, we were kicking ourselves for not knowing about it sooner. To those readers on Team Brooklyn, imagine Freddy’s if it was rennovated with the intention of preserving every detail of its charm…and then add a nautical theme. Yes, it was that cool. The music was good, the bartender courteous and attentive, and we’ll certainly be returning.

So, all in all, it was a fairly active Friday. Today (Saturday), we woke up early to visit the zoo at Jeite Grotto with our friend Mary Ann and her daughters. The rest of the day was spent at home, hanging out, eating chili, taking care of wedding stuff, and watching movies. In case you’re interested, we watched A Time For Drunken Horses and then I watched Comic Book Confidential on my, Amy having no interest in such nonsense.

Tank on the bus route to Bourj. I think this was actually on Rue Hamra, basically around the corner from our apartment.

Amy Campbell, leisure class.

A leisure class kitten, downtown.

For contrast, a cat in our neighborhood, Hamra.

The statue in Martyr’s Square at sunset. I’d like to point out that the garbage can visible in the lower right of this photo remained in place all through the protest. It made me very nervous, but I was tempted to pretend to put something in it to see if anyone noticed (not seriously, Mom).

Hooligans climbing the statue in Martyr’s Square. I was hoping that the picture would come out such that you could see the Virgin Megastore looming large in the background, but no such luck.

The weather in Beirut has been undergoing some significant changes lately. The temperature has gotten cooler, the days are often overcast, and sometimes there’s even rain. It could be my imagination, but it’s even starting to smell like fall. This is somewhat exciting; a welcome reprieve from from several months of sun, heat, and humidity. However, it also makes me feel kind of melancholy. It makes be miss the cool, crisp autumns spent living in New York and New England. (I have no such memories of Montreal, where it seems like “fall” is a euphemism for 3 weeks of pleasant 20° C weather that occurs before everything is plunged into a subzero purgatory for 5 months*.)

And on the topic of weather of the figurative kind, the UN report on the assassination of former PM Rafik Hariri is being handed over to Kofi Annan today. Amy has already posted about this a couple of times, but for those of you coming into class with a late pass, you can get the broad strokes by reading BBC’s latest. To put it very mildly, this is a pretty hot topic here, but I am finding it hard to figure out what I feel that it all means. To give some context, there was so much drama leading up to the elections, but then nothing happened. Political leaders get assassinated, political prisoners get freed, and what it all amounts to in the public forum is one, maybe two, days of people honking their horns and waving the old militia flags. So, part of me feels like the report will come out and, as expected, it will name prominent Syrian (and possibly Hezbollah) leaders. There will be a couple days of horn-honking and flag-waving and that will be it.

Another part of me wonders if I’m being completely foolish and arrogant, assuming a few months’ experience is adequate in predicting changes in climate in a country with such a, shall say, historically vibrant political meteorology. Amy and I have had some brief discussions about what sort of hypothetical aftermath could possibly get us to leave. The principal UN spokesman for the investigation has apparently left Lebanon due to concerns “for his own safety.” However, it’s really hard for me to feel any real sense of gravity or muster the imagination for worst-case scenarios or even guess which way the wind is going to blow**. Naturally, I expect that the next couple of days will inform my attitude.

* I realize this is something of an exaggeration as well as a trick of my memory, because at least two of the four years I was living in Montreal, the first snow was on or around my birthday, which is in late October. However, it is still fair to say that any fond memories of my college days are most certainly not weather-related.

** BAM! Consider this post book-ended. But seriously, I apologize for the corny, extended, Bob Dylan-inspired weather metaphor. When I started typing this post, I really was just going to write about cool breezes and the scent of autumn.

It’s stuff like this that almost makes one forget they spent 6 dollars for a bunch of celery.

As you may know, I’ve developed something of a borderline-pathetic obsession with a certain so-called journalist. He recently disabled comments on his blog, coinciding with the fact that they were fast becoming loaded with various criticisms, chiefly of things like his advocation of sending pizzas to the Israeli army.

Today he published an article entitled Old School Terrorism in Lebanon on Tech Central Station. My sickness is not so advanced that I will criticize the piece line-by-line (though this is certainly possible), but I will hit the highlights. He includes relatively unimportant details that aren’t true (George Hawi was killed by a bomb placed under the passenger seat, not the driver’s seat, as he claims in the 2nd paragraph) or are matters of opinon (Monot is the “hottest nightclub strip in the Middle East”). His one quoted source for the economic downturn is actually someone I know personally, the owner of a restaurant that wasn’t even open during the last high season. Also, he then claims Gemmayze is “booming” 2 paragraphs after quoting business being down 25 percent (by the way, his “legitimate” source gives a number of about half that). (Not for the first time in Totten’s writings) Assad’s “burn Lebanon” quote is used out of context in a later paragraph. And then in the last paragraph…

Ok, ok, I’ll admit it: I have a problem and I need help.

Speaking of obsessions, Amy and I rented Gaslight, the Charles Boyer/Ingrid Bergman film, last night. It was fun and who really ever gets tired of Ingrid Bergman?

Sunday night we attended a going away surprise party for an aquaintance at the US embassy, a good friend of Carrie’s. Not to be all dramatic, but I’m not sure if I should use his real name here, so I’ll call him “Frank.” We were to meet Carrie at a place at the bottom of Monot at 8 o’clock and head up to the restaurant together. The bar we were meeting at is called Cocktails and Dreams, a name which had secured a place in my bottomless memory for useless facts as the name of the bar Tom Cruise opens at the end of the movie Cocktail. Guests were supposed to arrive at the party itself, at an Italian place called Pinnochio’s, at 8:30pm so that the guest of honor could be properly surprised at 9pm.

And then a funny thing happened: it rained. This might not seem especially exciting or noteworthy (especially to those of you in New York who’ve “enjoyed” a downpour for like 8 straight days), but it has never rained more than a few drops in the 5 months that we’ve been here. It was kind of making us crazy and we thought we’d be euphoric at the first real rain. Instead, it was a pain in the ass. Beirut does a fair number of things well, but sidewalks and stormdrains are not two of these things.

To make a long story short, a crowded car-ride, some running through the rain, and many text-messages and closed/powerless establishments later and we ended up about a block from where we started at a place just off Monot (next to a bar called Che…man do they love their Che here) called Scallywags. Our party was large, maybe 10 people at this point with the intention of swelling to a total of 25, and the venue was small (my apologies to the couple that was there when we arrived, whose romantic dinner we certainly ruined). Scallywags had no power, but Carrie was able to call the owner/head chef, who assured us they could cook and accomodate 25, even without electricity. I thought it was funky and cool and–in addition to it being the guest of honor’s favorite restaurant–we were there and not outside in the downpour. Several of the Lebanese in our number had other ideas of changing venues because of the power issue. The most laughable suggestion was Chili’s…when Carrie politely pointed out to them that Frank was returning to the US, so maybe going to a US chain wasn’t the best idea, it was clear that that hadn’t occurred to anybody.

The main issue was, oddly, the lack of electricity. Rather than finding the cozy, candlelit bistro romantic, one of our party said, “It’s not nice…it reminds us of the war.” My first thought at this was, surely your electricity has gone out at least once since the war. Ours sometimes goes out 4 times in one day. To her immense credit, Carrie’s subtle blend of psychological tactics resulted in us staying put. Richard, the owner/head chef, was already coming in especially for us on his night off.

Ironically, when Frank and his girlfriend finally walked up, he didn’t want to go in, claiming it looked “too dark and packed.” Also ironically, Carrie was “blamed” for this near miss.

But a good time was had by all. Richard was a fantastic (or I should say fabulous) host and a generally interesting fellow. The place served a Lebanese wine I’d never had before. The food was a delicious, fixed-menu experience:

Richard: “I don’t cook to your tastes, I cook to my tastes. I just need to know if anybody’s allergic to anything.”
Someone: “As long as there’s no bees in it, I think I’m ok.”

We will definitely return to that place. It seems like a good time was had by all and that Frank enjoyed his send-off.

As an added bonus, I was pleasantly interrupted twice with phonecalls from my brother. He was calling me back to discuss some travel and wedding details. It’s always great to hear a voice from home.

And so I draw to the close of another perfect “blog” entry…a bunch of wordy, fat paragraphs about going out to dinner.

[ Pics courtesy of Carrie. The first is Richard holding court. Frank is hiding behind his girlfriend. The second is me registering my approval, much to Amy’s boredom. ]

This is probably my favorite joke of all time. It was told to me by friend Todd like 6 or 7 years ago.

A duck walks into a bar. He waddles up to the bartender and asks, “Got any grapes?”

The bartender is somewhat flustered, and answers, “Uh, no, we don’t have any grapes?”

So the duck waddles out. The next day, the duck comes back, waddles up to the bartender and asks, “Got any grapes?”

The bartender, still flustered, but also somewhat annoyed responds, “No, we don’t have any grapes.”

So the duck leaves. The next day, predictably, the duck is back with the same question, “Got any grapes?”

By now the bartender is extremely incensed. He leans in close to the duck and says, “Listen…we didn’t have any grapes yesterday. We don’t have any grapes today. And we’re not going to have any grapes tomorrow. In fact, if you come in tomorrow asking for grapes, I’m going to nail your bill to the bar.”

The following day, the duck comes into the bar. The bartender braces himself for the question, but instead the duck asks, “Got any nails?”

The bartender, flustered once again, responds, “Uh, no.”

The duck then says, “Good. Got any grapes?”

While I don’t generally need an excuse to share my favorite joke of all time, I reproduced it here by way of introducing our grapes. Our next-door neighbors, whose apartment is basically the mirror-image of ours, have trellises over their back patio with huge grapevines all over them. Naturally many of vines creep over the wall and into our patio. In the spirit of the neighborly concept that’s been in effect since at least the 1950s, whatever is on our side of the wall, we claim as our own. We believe them to be wine grapes and they’re just now all starting to get big and ripe. It’s pretty sweet in every way to be able to walk out of your bedroom onto the patio and eat some grapes right off the vine. It smacks of a quality of life that we just didn’t find available in Brooklyn.

Friday night, Amy and I babysat for our friends Matthew and MaryAnn. It was nice to hear that they may be moving to our neck of the woods (Hamra) soon. Afterwards we met up with Carrie at Yabani for good sushi. Several hours later we found ourselves at Basement, a funny danceclub in Gemmayze, with Aboud, the proprietor of a bar/restaurant called Kayan that we’ve taken to frequenting lately. I say “funny” because, although it was a danceclub, there was no dancefloor. Patrons are allowed–or rather, expected–to dance on the tables. Something about that kind of intentional, measured chaos–like “We’re bringing the f***ing party every night!”–is kind of comedic to me. I kept wanting to say how it reminded me of a place I’d been to in Paris, but I thought I’d sound like a twit.

So after all this late-night excitement, us three Americans decided to take a little vacation to Byblos (Jbeil) on Saturday. We didn’t get quite the early start we’d hoped for, as some of us got a little too caught up posting comments on a certain “journalist’s” website. So, we didn’t make it to the Edde Sands resort till about 1 pm. I was going to link to their website to give you an idea of how fancy and expensive it is, but if you try to go to their homepage from their slick flash intro, you get a 404 Page Not Found error. Hey, at Edde Sands it’s not about advertising, “…it’s all about feelings.” Suffice it to say that it’s fancy and expensive, but hey, sometimes you have to treat yourself right.

The day was kind of overcast and chilly, but we had a good time having lunch, walking on the beach, swimming, and generally lounging about. As day turned into night, we sat at the restaurant there and had some cocktails. The whole place really reminded me of St. John, in the USVI. There was none of the rocky, somewhat trash strewn beaches with steep grades and fast-breaking waves I generally associate with Lebanese beaches. It did not seem like we were in Lebanon at all. I mean, they imported their own sand. Later, we went to El Molino, a Mexican restaurant in the port. Their placemats where emblazoned with their “mascot” if you will, kind of a Mexican revolutionary version of a Varga girl which blew my mind on a couple levels. The food and setting were great and again we were transported…maybe not to Mexico, but at least to Southern California.

All in all, it was nice to leave Lebanon for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon/evening.

Carrie’s on her way over now so we can grill chicken. Tonight we’re going to a farewell dinner for one of her embassy friends. I don’t know him too well, but I appreciate his wit, humor, and Navy SEAL-ness.

The strains of life are really taking their toll over here in the ‘Rut. (I have to be glib now because tomorrow I’ll be dealing with “internal mobility sites” and converting pdf content to plain text so it can be indexed for site-wide searches).