Sylvia's Journal

There is a brief moment in this city that all is quiet. Sometime between 3 AM and 5 AM. I caught the tail end of it this morning.

For a short time there are no construction sounds, generators, people partying loudly or the revving of motors that are too big for their cars but not big enough for the men that drive them. There is only the sound of thousands of birds, the sparrows and doves that inhabit this city, their chirping drowned out the rest of the time.

Yesterday morning I was a medical tourist for a few hours to have an MRI done of my right shoulder at the American University Hospital. MRIs are not easily available in Kabul. I hoped to find out if something had gone very wrong last October that would explain the continuous shoulder problems.

Alistair accompanied me by foot to the hospital. After he had made sure that everything was going according to plan he left me in the hospital’s radiology department and joined Axel and Birgit for a visit to the organic farmers market across town.

After a couple of hours I left the hospital and realized that I could go anywhere I wanted, sit down on a terrace, window shop, or buy an ice cream, anything. I called Axel to find out whether I should join him at the farmers’ market but they had already returned to the apartment. I had no intention to go back to an indoor place when I could be free and footloose in the city. And so Axel walked down to join me. We went on another trip down memory lane.

We found the place where Axel lived when he first got to Beirut, the cockroach-infested apartment above the Socrate restaurant. We walked and we walked until I had blisters on my feet, ending our visit to Ras Beirut in a tiny café at the edge of the water, just below the Corniche. We watched men fish while we drank our small cups of Turkish coffee, qahwe wasat.

At 4 PM we retrieved the girls and Jim from the airport and deposited them at their cozy little apartment in an old building in Achrafiyeh, the place that we hardly ever visited when we lived here because it was Christian and you had to cross the dangerous Green Line, a no man’s land filled with the debris of war, to get there. It was another world from the West Beirut we lived in, even though it was just a 15 minute ride away.

Now that we are complete we can get on with our vacation. We have some sketchy plans that include day trips to Byblos, to the Beqaa valley and Baalbeck and a dinner at the restaurant of one of my young colleagues in Boston. We have hired a driver and van to take us to all these places as driving ourselves would undo the effects of a vacation.

But first we are going to relax all day at the Sports Club by the ocean to anchor this vacation. After today we will get busy again.