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.

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.