Snakes on a Plane

Dummy me, forgot my camera. If I hadn't, you would have seen photos of a street in Hamra populated by throngs of green beer guzzling (mostly) Lebanese. You would have seen the green hair, the funny hats, the girl dancing with a pineapple. You would have noticed somewhere in the background the 500 year old, 500 pound Kuwaiti who kept trying to get me to go back to his hotel with him.

Did you know that pouring Blue Curacao into beer will turn it green?

The party was in a liquor store. Unlike in the US, where liquor stores tend to be synonymous with bad neighborhoods and unsavory characters, liquor stores in Beirut just sell liquor (and beer and wine, etc.) Except this one, Sam's Beverage, which, in addition to selling booze, held a street party for Paddy's Day with free green beer.

Sam's is where I buy my Almaza and wine, so when I stopped in last week, the owner invited me to the Paddy's Day party. I used to buy beer from one of two shops a few blocks away, but stopped going to one when once I purchased two large bottles of Almaza, took them home, and realized the old man had given me one small bottle but charged me for two big ones. The other place I stopped going to when I realized their prices were several dollars more than everyone else. (12000 for six Almazas when it should be 9000. That's two whole dollars more for a six pack.) Anyway, Sam's is closer - a minute's walk down my street. The owner's a nice guy (he should be - I'm in there enough) and it was a pleasant surprise to discover the beer was free (especially after having dropped a pretty penny at the Mayflower so I could have a few Paddy's Day Guinnesses.)

It's funny how a holiday that is supposed to be in memory of a Christian saint (though he’s never been canonized by Rome) has turned into a global celebration of drunkenness. Most people think nothing of the reason for the day. I do, of course, since I overthink everything. St. Patrick's Day wasn't much of a holiday in Ireland. You went to church of course, and you thanked St. Patrick for getting rid of the snakes and bringing Holy Christianity to heathen Ireland, but that was it. It was the Irish Americans who made it a holiday. They wanted to celebrate their heritage and the country they so loved but were pushed out by British oppression and forced starvation. Back then, the Irish were working class and generally too poor to travel to back to Ireland. So they brought Ireland to them.

Fate brought me to Ireland. By a stroke of luck, U2 was playing in Dublin one week before I was supposed to study abroad in Luxembourg during my Miami U years, so I flew over early and fell in love with the place. I can't forget flying in there for the first time, seeing from the plane window a green I'd never experienced, going to the ATM for money called pounds, trying to figure out the bus system to get into Dublin, watching rows and rows of red brick Georgian homes from the bus window, taking a taxi (I'm not sure I'd ever been in a taxi at that point in my life) to the Brewery Hostel, a yellow building next to the Guinness Brewery. I'd never had Guinness before, hated James Joyce (we had to read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in my senior English class), and couldn't figure out how to make international telephone calls.

All these things make me chuckle now.

I began to learn about Ireland, about the history, about the politics, about the literature, about the music. I was interested in everything Ireland; it became a hobby of mine. And then, a curious thing happened. I began to identify with it. I began to understand what my own Irish ancestors had gone through, the O'Hagan clan from County Tyrone. Not only did Irishness become a part of me, but it became a part of my Americanness. These two things were inseparable from one another. We are a nation of immigrants, a land whose ancestors were poor and persecuted. Now, immigrants are the poor and prosecuted. The thing that made us a nation is now ripping us apart. Fear of difference, fear of the unknown, fear of lifestyles that are not like our own.

James Joyce, who is now my favorite writer, said while living outside Ireland,

“All things are inconstant except the faith in the soul, which changes all things and fills their inconstancy with light, but though I seem to be driven out of my country as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.”

He wasn't talking about church faith, as he despised organized religion. He was talking about the essence of being, that which makes us human, what most people call the soul. Joyce desperately wanted to love his country, which was a part of his being, but he couldn't. He hated Dublin, but said “When I die Dublin will be written in my heart.” He couldn't bear to watch his fellow citizens' engage in politics, either supporting the British monarchy that had oppressed them for centuries or following the different nationalists sects that couldn’t get along to accomplish anything, and he couldn’t bear their blind obedience to the church that also oppressed them with its rules and superstitions with no regard for the human soul, and he didn’t tolerate the cultural and moral decay produced by economic development, particularly as the rich got richer while the poor continued to starve. These were all recurring themes in his books.

I know exactly how he felt.

Happy Paddy's Day!

This is my second Paddy’s Day in Beirut, tying it with the number of times I’ve celebrated Paddy’s Day in Dublin. (If there had been blogging back then (1998 & 2000), I’d link to my posts about them. Alas, those memories are recorded with pen and paper.) Last year’s Paddy’s Day in Beirut was great. I convinced Amigo to have a Paddy’s Day party and to sell Guinness. I invited a bunch of Irish Americans with names like Barrett, Foley, and Cole. The only catch was that I was responsible for procuring the Guinness, which you can find in very few places. So, a couple of days before Paddy’s Day, I strolled down to Score Market and purchased 48 cans of Guinness for around $200.

Do you know how heavy 48 cans of Guinness is?

Now, imagine this American girl wearing a Cincinnati Reds cap walking down a rainy street in Hamra carrying 48 cans of Guinness. I made it a block before my arms started to burn. I made it half another before I had to set the cases on top of the short poles that prevent people from parking on the sidewalks. I began to use each of those poles, then I reached muscle failure and could no longer carry them. Seeing me covered at this point in sweat, a shop owner let me leave one of the cases in his shop while I carried the other home. I went back to get the other one and he began to ask me questions about Guinness, so I told him about the brewery and the process of making it dark and I was going to give him a can to try. But it turns out he is a devout Muslim, so he apologized that he couldn’t accept it.

Amigo didn’t make any money on the Guinness that Paddy’s Day. He had to charge ten bucks a can to make any profit. But streams of whiskey were flowing, too. He had purchased all sorts of green colored food not typically thought of as Paddy’s Day food – foul, green almonds, olives.

Tonight I’m going to stop by the liquor store where I get my Almaza and wine, as they’re having a green beer party. Right now I’m sitting in the Mayflower Hotel drinking Guinness because Score Market is out of it. Someone’s having a party – wish I knew who…

To Bidet or Not to Bidet

Us Americans aren’t bidet users. I imagine most Americans don’t even know what a bidet is. I can’t use the one in my bathroom, because the water is scalding hot. We’re talking injurious heat. So it sits there – or sat there until Sunday after the bathroom poopfest. It became handy in cleaning the floor and the walls. As I discovered, it has much better water pressure than the shower. But hot, hot, hot!

The bathroom flooded again yesterday. This time it only two the maintenance guy two hours to unclog the drain. The disgusting mess was not as bad as on Sunday, and it didn’t flow into my bedroom this time, but it was still gross and I had to clean the bathroom again. The guy didn’t call a plumber so I’m just waiting for it to happen again.

I've always thought it strange that most of the world uses bidets but Americans don't even know what they are. Just google "Americans and Bidets" and you'll find article after article asking why Americans don't use bidets.

Bidets are more hygienic and better for the environment.

Justin Thomas, editor of the website metaefficient.com, considers bidets to be “a key green technology” because they eliminate the use of toilet paper. According to his analysis, Americans use 36.5 billion rolls of toilet paper every year, representing the pulping of some 15 million trees. Says Thomas: “This also involves 473,587,500,000 gallons of water to produce the paper and 253,000 tons of chlorine for bleaching.” He adds that manufacturing requires about 17.3 terawatts of electricity annually and that significant amounts of energy and materials are used in packaging and in transportation to retail outlets.

So there you have it.

Poop

I was up pretty late last night chatting with a friend a half a world away, which made for a fine morning of sleeping in. What I woke to, however, made me wish I could have stayed asleep.

I woke up, said a little yay to the sunshine, and expected to enjoy my afternoon in its warm glow on the balcony. I was going to go out and get some Coronas (still the only marketing campaign in history that has affected my consumption habits), hope I could find a lime (lemons are adequate substitutes), and dream about grilled bratwurst. I was staying home to avoid any remote possibility of running into anything that reminded me of the rally for St. Hariri Day*, as my friend calls it.

I slowly rose from the bed and put my foot on the ground. Wet. I looked around and saw two upright water bottles, one unopened. Not the culprit. I looked up and saw the water coming from under the door. I opened it. Water, water, everywhere. I looked in the kitchen. Water. But I hadn’t left the sink running. Then, I splashed over to the bathroom.

Oh. My. God.

The water was ankle deep. Not only was it ankle deep, but it wasn’t just water, either. It was water mixed with the ancient contents of a toilet, weeks or months or years worth of stuff stuck in aged pipes. We’re talking poop. And cockroaches, only some of them dead.

I ran downstairs immediately. This being Lebanon, the building manager tried to unclog the drain with a coat hanger and a plunger instead of calling a plumber. There were a couple of phone calls after that, but either no plumber works on Sunday, they were all at the rally, or there just aren’t any plumbers. So the maintenance guy had to spend his whole Sunday – seven hours total – standing in the flushed contents of a toilet. Every time someone turned on the water in another apartment, more disgusting sludge came billowing out from the bathroom drain.

I was stuck inside all day while the maintenance guy plunged away while water flushed and gushed and only started to stink in the evening, so there’s that. Right now, I’m busy cleaning up the mess in increments. I can only do so much before I start to feel sick. I bought some Detol and will use the whole entire bottle to disinfect it. I tried various methods of optimism – heyatleastI’mnotinJapanthosepeoplehaverealproblems, thebathroomneededcleanedanyway, atleastidon’thavetopayforaplumber – but in the end, it’s still poop.

*The rally is to celebrate the Cedar Revolution that occurred on March 14, 2005, a month after Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated. It was a day when one million Lebanese – one fourth of the population of the country – marched on downtown Beirut to say Enough! The Syrians were pushed out, and Lebanon thought just maybe it could finally start to be a real country again, united under one flag, ready to move past political assassinations and the divisions that had stoked its 15 year apocalypse and the havoc that followed. Hezbshatan had other plans, however, provoking Israel to invade in 2006, kidnapping Beirut in 2007, and generally being all around dicks, accompanied by their “Christian” buddy Aounosaurus. (Not that the March 14 folks weren't dicks, too. Politicians.) Six years later, Hezbshatan has forced a government collapse, a Syrian puppet is about to be Prime Minister, and the Cedar Revolution is dead. That hasn’t stopped the grand delusion from taking place every March 14th.

Money talks

They put out the new 1000 lira bill last week (who's they? there's no government...) It looks quite nice. The 1000 was my favorite bill before and they made it even better. They've kept the best part of the bill - the chart that shows the Phoenician alphabet and beneath it the evolution from Aramaic to Nabataean to Arabic. This chart may just make the 1000 pound bill my favorite bill in the world currently in circulation.

I am a bill collector and have been since...well, actually, since my first trip out of the country to Australia in 1994. Coins, too, but those are more difficult to carry around. I put my bills in my copy of my favorite book, James Joyce's Ulysses. It's for my own odyssey...

What a country puts on its money tells a lot about the people of that country. The US puts George Washington, the leader of the War for Independence and first POTUS, on its most commonly circulated bill, the one dollar. The man who saved the union and abolished human slavery in the US, Abraham Lincoln, appears on the five dollar bill. Then it gets a bit, well, it shows what Americans value most by placing the first treasurer of the country, Alexander Hamilton, on the ten dollar bill. On the twenty you find one of my heroes, Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence. On the fifty is Ulysses S. Grant, put there for his military leadership during the Civil War, not for the mediocre job he did as POTUS. Finally, the hundred, the largest bill in the dollar arsenal, with the face of Ben Franklin, the last American renaissance man, a guy who was too old to be the first president of the country he helped create. On the backs of the bills are institutions rather than personalities. What's interesting is that all of these personalities and institutions are GOVERNMENT-centric. Tell that to all of the government haters in the US.

The very first bill you find when you open the book is my favorite bill that was ever used, the Irish ten pound note, sadly replaced by the euro. On one side is a picture of Joyce, and on the flip side is a map of Dublin and the opening lines of Finnegan's Wake, which is actually a continuation of the last line in the book.

riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius view of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

I'd write something here about how the Irish really know what to value except elsewhere in the book is a five pound note with the picture of a nun on it.

Other bills in the book:

Lebanon: An old 1000 pound note, the same that was produced during the war, though the one I have was minted in 1991, the year after the Ta'if Agreement. I also have the old version of the Lebanese 1000 pound bill, not the old old one but the one printed until this year. I used to have a 5000 but I spent that last week.

Luxembourg: A 100 franc note featuring on one side the Grand Duke and on the other a nice drawing of Luxembourg City. The Luxembourgish notes were semi-rare because they had a monetary union with Belgium and we just used Belgian francs all the time.

Egypt: One pound features on one side an old mosque and on the other the temple of luxor and some writing even older than the Phoenician - hieroglyphics. Five pound note features cool ancient Egyptian stuff on one side and a mosque on the other.

Northern Ireland: A 5 and a 10 pound sterling note issued by the Ulster Bank I picked up during a trip to Belfast. On the front of both are some hills and haystacks, the city of Belfast, and the Giant's Causeway. The back features the Ulster crest with its motto "nihil impossibile erit vobis" which I'm guessing means something like "nothing is impossible." Quite a good motto considering Ireland has been at peace for more than a decade now. The two bills are identical except for their color.

Turkey: A one lira Turkish note I picked up in Istanbul, which isn't very common since they use one lira coins. It features a picture of Attaturk on one side and what looks like a dam on the other side. I admit I don't know much about Turkey to know what the significance of the dam is.

Mexico: A 50 peso note from I picked up when I was driving from Monterey, California to BFE Texas. I stopped in El Paso and walked across the bridge to Cuidad Juarez, which is now apparently a warzone. On one side of the bill is a picture of Jose Maria Morelos and some canons. As an American I do know something about Mexican history; however, I have no idea who that guy is. On the back of the bill are some guys in boats with what looks like giant nets. Also, there are butterflies and some scary looking masks.

Australia: Five dollar bill. It's a rainbow colored piece of plastic with a clear window in the corner. On one side is Queen Elizabeth, England's queen, because Australia never broke away from the monarchy like we did in America. (It's a source of political tension and the subject of many songs by Australia's greatest band, Midnight Oil, whose lead singer quit to be a member of the parliament.) On the other side I'm guessing is the parliament building and I don't know what else. It's really a mess of a design with drawings and scribbles everywhere. You can barely see the Australian flag on it, that blue cloth with the Union Jack of Great Britain in the corner.

France: Fifty franc note featuring aviator and author of Le Petit Prince Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who, as we learn from the bill, died when he was 44 years old. What we don't learn from the bill is that Saint-Exupery's plane disappeared in 1944 during the war. He had joined the French Free Forces after French cowards signed the armistice with Germany. They actually found his plane a few year ago in the Med. The bill has pictures of Le Petit Prince on both sides and some airplanes. Considering France's long intellectual, artistic, political, and everything else history, Saint-Exupery seems like an odd choice to feature on currency.



Jordan: One dinar, featuring on one side King Hussein and on the other three guys riding camels who are supposed to represent the "Great Arab Revolt." Not a great design for combating global stereotypes of Arabs, in my opinion, but a pretty bill.

Poland: A fifty zloty note featuring some king who looks like he belongs on a deck of cards on one side and drawings of some Polish cities on the other.

Bulgaria: A two leva note featuring, if I can remember the Cyrillic alphabet correctly, some guy named Paisi Hilendarski, who lived from 1722-1773. He must have been some kind of scholar because there is a drawing of what looks like a university on his side of the bill. On the other is the Bulgarian lion and some Cyrillic scribbles. St. Cyril, who invented the Cyrillic alphabet, was Bulgarian.

Hungary: A 200 forint note featuring some King Robert on one side and the ruins of a castle on another.

Romania: Another plastic bill, a five lei bill, but this one is cool. The clear window is a music note. One one side is composer George Enescu and on the other is the music conservatory with some lines of music and a subtle piano in the background. It's very nicely designed, and I give props to anyone who puts the arts on their currency rather than politics.



Iraq: This is the only bill I have for a country I haven't visited. It's a 250 dinar note with Saddam Hussein's picture on it given to me by an Iraqi colleague.

USA: George Washington's face on a $1 silver certificate back when US money was based on more than just a theory and debt to the Chinese. A one million dollar bill featuring the Statue of Liberty on one side and Mount Rushmore on the other. It's fake, of course. A 9/11 deception bill featuring George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld on one side and some kind of retarded stuff on the other.

Also in the book are a postcard featuring Ireland's great writers I bought in Dublin and an old photograph of my last purely Irish ancestor holding my baby grandmother.

I wish I had kept a Belgian franc note, a German mark note, an Austrian mark note, an Italian lira note, and a Dutch guilder note but for some reason, despite going to each of those countries multiple times, I never kept any (I have coins.) I also didn't keep any British pounds, Czech crowns, Slovak whatevers (guessing crowns), or Swiss francs. And I spent my five euro note in Charles De Gaulle airport while waiting for my connecting flight to Beirut last year.

Int...ern...et...Co...nne...ct...ivity

Since my darts opponent has left Lebanon, I have spent some time making this animation using MS Paint about one day in my life as the user of the internet in Lebanon.

Even though because I used MS Paint the pictures are pixelated,it is still better viewed with a full screen.




Music is:

ATB First Love
Smetna (from The Bartered Bride)
Beatles Revolution 9
Breeders Cannonball
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Underwater (You and Me)
John Fogerty Centerfield
Beatles Norwegian Wood