Some photos of Beirut's Corniche

How do you know you spend too much time on Facebook?

Last night I had a dream that I went with some group from Lebanon to the International Space Station. Somehow I was able to overcome my fear of flying to travel into space. When we got there, we were told to wait in a place that looked like a mall with a big bowling alley in the middle, only instead of bowling, we were supposed to throw shiny paper airplanes and darts into a ring at the other end. My Lebanese bartender friend was there, but I didn't know any of the others. I was the only one who was able to throw one of the airplanes all the way to the other side of the bowling lanes. All I could think about the whole time was when I got back, I'd write "Just got back from the International Space Station. Seriously." as my status update.

Edukashun

In a meeting yesterday I discovered some fascinating things about the wretched state of the education system in Lebanon.

1. There are two schools in Lebanon that you have to cross the border into Syria and back into Lebanon to get to because there are no roads directly to the school. To other schools children must walk through fields because of a lack of roads. Schools are often located in buildings that are falling apart, old stables, or buildings without roofs.

2. Lebanese high schools are really good because by the time children get old enough to attend high school, the bad students (i.e. poor students) have already dropped out of school.

3. There is a school in Bourj Hammoud (which is in Beirut) that sits above a fish market where there is a 73% failure rate. I suppose I'd fail, too, if I had to smell fish all day.

4. Teachers who are on contract only get paid once a year, and it's at the end of the year. To live, they depend on salary advance companies, which take up to a 30% fee. Full-time teachers are tenured and impossible to fire, so they often don't bother showing up to class.

5. The Education Ministry has historically been so corrupt that anyone who needs a job and knows somebody can be appointed as a teacher, no matter how unqualified.

Sad.

Life's a beach

Spent a lovely Sunday afternoon at the beach yesterday. I've turned from a white American to some sort of islander. Actually, yesterday I had the face of a lobster.

Walked past the Pigeon Rocks and what did I see? Some idiot had somehow climbed to the top and posted a baby blue Future Movement flag on top, ruining the whole view of the Med with stupid politics.

Today, the ugly gray weather is perfect for a Monday.

For the next two weeks there will only be a 6 hour time difference from the East Coast because Lebanon doesn't change to daylight savings time until the last weekend in March.

Allahu Akbar

I have to hand it to Islam. I love the sound of church bells, but they can't beat a muezzin's call to prayer.

In Beirut, it's difficult to reconcile the incessant honking of car horns, the construction drills, the conversations on the corner, or the ka-ching of a cash register with the spiritual song coming from the minarets five times a day. Sometimes I wish everything would just stop and everyone would just listen - me, the irreligious, metaphysical agnostic with a healthy respect for Christian philosophy but a belief that all religions are the same chemical manifestations of the mind taking shape through the lens of culture, the coincidence of birth; me, the fledgling disciple of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell and St. Bono the Divine. There is something other worldly about these calls to prayer, as if they exist outside of time, like they are the past, present, and future ringing out all at once. They seem to be breathing soul back into the world after humans have sucked it all out.

But sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who notices. It's a lonely feeling.

Then they stop, and everything melts into normal again, and history returns to books and the future returns to sci-fi films, and the present becomes the dissonant tick tock of a bustling clock and flesh and bones and joy and sorrow and haves and have nots. The sun goes down, the sun comes up, the alarm rings, and the labor of breathing continues. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and all that jazz.

Mysterious ways, indeed.

They only come out at night

The bats come out at dusk. They flutter around abandoned buildings like butterflies on speed, dashing between antennas and satellite dishes, under wires, through windows that have long since seen their glass removed by bombs or bullets or simple neglect. A feast of mosquitoes and gnats floats there in the darkening sky.

[You’ve done nothing until you’ve gotten a giant insect out of your room by throwing a wine cork at it and swatting it with a pair of jeans. It looked like the world’s biggest mosquito; I couldn’t take the risk of letting it stay.]

But back to the bats – they’re one of my favorite things about Beirut. They’re stuck between the darkness and the light; they feed on the bad to make things good. They fly above the city unnoticed by everyone but me.

I’m like a bat, fluttering above the nonsense, stuck between the darkness and the light. Like the waves of the Mediterranean that crash upon the shores of this artificial country, I waver in my own thoughts and feelings about the place. Certainly I love living in Hamra, with its plethora of cafés and dive bars and bookstores and students, but I wonder if this country will ever stop teetering on the brink of conflict and insanity. I’m beginning to think that the bats turn to vampires at night and that the politicians are just zombies with fancy makeup. Can vampires and zombies be in the same movie?

It's not an air freshener, it's an earth killer

Last night I got home at 11:30 only to discover the chemical taste of air freshener had returned to my mouth. In my place, there is a mechanical air freshener that spits out some horrific chemical that I think is supposed to be like a flower. It floats through the air and gets on your tongue and makes you sneeze. I've asked three times now to have it turned off (they have a key to do it), but for some reason, the maid keeps turning it back on.

I can't figure out how anyone could think such a device and such chemicals are a good idea. I mean, even if you don't care about the environment, which is the case of most Lebanese, it doesn't smell good and it's so thick it gets in your mouth! Why on earth would they use these things?

She also keeps the balcony door open, too, which allows the mosquitoes to get in and buzz around my ears all night, keeping me awake. I have a huge mosquito bite on my face. Being winter, the only place there is to bite is my head and hands, and that's where they do.

Yeah, the place smells a little funny because of the old pipes in the bathroom and the kitchen, but it isn't so bad that I must suffer these things for it.

Where Everyone Knows Your Name, Even If They Pronounce It Funny

My day usually consist of this: 10am meeting in Hamra (the neighborhood where I live), walk to the office in Achrafiyeh (a half hour walk), work until 4pm in the office, have a meeting at 4 or 4:30 either in Achrafiyeh or back in Hamra, and go to an event in the evening, sometimes at universities, sometimes at NGO offices, sometimes at cafés. When 8 or 9pm rolls around, the day is done. That’s when I go to Evergreen.

Evergreen is a pub owned by a guy named Amigo that is around the corner from where I live. It’s a quintessential dive bar. The walls and shelves are covered with all sorts of items given to him by his customers – odd hats, flags, knickknacks from other parts of the world, and things you might find at Spenser’s Gifts. Behind the bar is a wall of money from all over the globe, most of it with messages to Amigo on it. On the ceiling are rolled up “wishes” that customers wrote, pieces of yellowed paper hanging like bats in a cave. In a way, it’s appropriate, because Amigo is like a vampire, as he never sees the sun. He opens his bar beyond daylight hours and roams the streets of Hamra whenever his last customer leaves or when he feels like closing. People sometimes come in at 3 in the morning. Other times, he kicks everyone out so he can go have some fun. (I love this thing called freedom here, where there are no imposing laws telling you what time you have to go to bed.)

There are a few customers that are there nearly every day. One is a retired general who’s called General. There’s another called General, too, because he looks exactly like General Aoun, one of the infamous political figures in Lebanon.

I'm learning Arabic from them. I could spend hours pouring over lessons and texts and listening to pre-recorded language tapes, or I can sit in a pub with a bunch of old guys and just listen to what they’re saying. I a few weeks away from where I was when I took my Arabic proficiency tests in terms of listening and reading, and I’m amazed at how I am remembering obscure words, sometimes randomly.

It’s important that I be able to speak Arabic because soon I will start traveling to smaller towns and villages to meet with civil society groups and not everyone speaks English outside of Beirut. It’s also important because showing you’ve attempted to learn their language gains the trust of people who may be skeptical of a foreigner. I’m fairly certain that in two or three weeks I will feel comfortable having a conversation in Arabic, as long as I keep up my study regiment and my trips to Evergreen. (The latter shouldn’t be a problem.) I only wish Lebanese dialect wasn’t so different from Classical Arabic, because I feel like I’m learning two different languages at the same time.

I often eat dinner there. Sometimes Amigo will share his dinner that he’s cooked for himself with me; other times Amigo or the General (the real one) will order food for delivery and we sit there and eat it at the bar and they answer my questions about Lebanon. A few days ago I tried Armenian food for the first time – it’s spicy, not like Lebanese food. Of course I liked it. I rambled on about how I love spicy food and how I love hot sauce and now I have to bring in my bottle of Frank’s Red Hot Sauce for them to try. If I can ever figure out how to light the stove in my place, I’m going to cook Cincinnati chili for them some time. (I think you have to put a match on the burner when you turn the gas on, but this scares me.) This is the Lebanese way; I’ve been few places where the people are as generous.

Of course, there are also people my age and younger who come in, people like the two German guys whose names I always forget (but whom I beat at darts) and Ashkan from Iran who teaches at AUB and with whom I’ve gone other places in Beirut and Sami the AUB track runner who told me I was too tense and Dr. Paul the Plastic Surgeon and his friend Tarek and many college students who make me feel like I’m in the age group of the old guys.

Oh, yes, and there is the dartboard. I triumphantly won five dollars from Amigo when I defeated him on Saturday two games to one, and we’re not talking the game where you get three of each kind of number but the game called 301 where you have to hit a double (double is the tiny ring on the outside of the board) to start the scoring and you count down to 0, ending your game with a double. In the final game, I needed 5, which meant I needed to hit a 1 and a double 2. I hit both. Yes, I am still gloating about it, ha ha ha.

Last night I was suddenly hit with a memory of Pub 13 in Luxembourg where I learned how to play darts. When Amigo first asked me if I had ever played, I said yes, but I couldn’t remember where. Last night I remembered, and I couldn’t stop remembering. This trip feels a lot like that one. It’s been a dozen years and I’ve some life experience and the caution that comes with it, but I haven’t felt this energized since then.

The other night I had a dream that I was in Ohio and I wanted to go back to Beirut but there were no flights and I couldn’t get anyone to drive me to the airport. I was so upset in the dream. But when I woke, I couldn’t help but laugh, because I realized that I was still in Beirut and still had a lot of time left. I’ve fallen in love with the chaos, with the dirt, with the sounds of construction drills and hammers and shouting, with the occasional cockroach crawling across the bar, the insane drivers, the dreadful traffic, the incessant honking of horns even as it drives me crazy.

But damn Israel if they attack this spring like some people think might happen. And damn the Obama administration and the United States if they sit back and let Israel do it. Or maybe I shouldn’t say that. Political talk is banned in Evergreen. Religion, too. Of course, I haven’t been thrown out yet.