Sylvia's Journal

Before this momentous event we drove up with Monsieur Joseph at the wheel to one of the few remaining spots with cedars in Lebanon. The road was winding and scary at times and made Tessa sick. I am sure the sickness was exacerbated by Monsieur Joseph’s broken French and English and the way his thumbs drummed on the steering wheel. We also had to ask him not to light up, a bad Lebanese habit that, although slightly diminished in the last 30 years, still kept astounding us: drivers behind the wheel, salesladies behind the cash register and tough looking guys in places that say ‘No Smoking.’

When we finally arrived at the Cedars National park we found it covered in snow and locked – no one there. Shivering (wrong clothes) and with snow falling on our heads, we hiked up the road to find an opening in the rusty barbed wire fence. Only Sita, Jim and I ventured through the hole and worked our way down a slippery hill to the oldest cedar in Lebanon, one that was somehow overlooked when the Great Temple was built in Jerusalem.

According to the small sign that that Rotarians of the Chouf put up it was 3000 years old (or 10000 or 1000 or 30000 – someone had altered the printed plate); old, in any case, with a circumference of 16 meters.

Eventually the main gate was opened when a lady of some import arrived with her South American visitors and called the right guy. We sent Monsieur Joseph to retrieve Tessa and Axel who were already walking down the road so that they too could see the old cedar. Everyone hugged the tree to catch some of its life force for longevity and then everyone went inside the small hut and hovered around the, for us familiar, diesel stove with a cup of hot mint tea, complements of the Lebanese Park Service.

To the great disappointment of Monsieur Joseph we declined to see the palaces on the way down to the coast. One of those, Beiteddine, used to be an obligatory stop when people came to visit us here all these years ago. When I left Lebanon I swore I would never stop at the place again. Sita had already seen it during her short visit to Lebanon last year it and the rest was OK skipping the sight as the hours towards departure ticked away; there was some last minute shopping to do. ‘Oh,’ sighed Monsieur Joseph, ‘shopping, why?’

We had him drop us off at our place, unloaded our picnic implements (we had had this fantasy of spreading a blanket under one of the cedars and have our French bread with Camembert and white wine while looking out over the faraway Mediterranean Sea); instead we ‘picnicked’ in the car on the way home.

Just around the corner from Bliss Street it happened: Sita met her wedding dress. It stood in the window of a store called Elissar and Other Stories and was made from fabric from Central Asia: Uzbek, Chinese and Turkman. It cost more than my entire collection of dresses ever owned but the two had fallen in love. She tried it on and the battle was lost. It’s on its way to Haydenville now and we all agreed it was spectacular; one of a kind and, most importantly, Jim liked it.

Tessa bought a narguileh (shisha, hubbly-bubbly, water pipe) that was not made in China – not easy to find – for her Steve and everyone carried at least one shopping bag with stuff to take away from Lebanon. We went back to the Wellington bar in the Mayflower Hotel to toast to the best family vacation ever, and to three couples, us celebrating our 30th anniversary in a few weeks, Sita and Jim to their upcoming wedding and Steve and Tessa to many more good years to come and a more understanding employer.

We had our last dinner with Birgit and Alistair who were all packed to go on their ski vacation in France. And then we said goodbye to the kids, all teary and sad. They should be in Frankfurt now drinking large steins of beer and eating sausages while looking wistfully at the photos and the dress.

For us, the vacation isn’t quite over yet. We have one more morning in Beirut that may include a massage to relax our muscles that are sore from walking so much. After that, we too will hop in a taxi and head for the airport to fly in the opposite direction from Haydenville.

We sent the progeny off by car to see the southern coastline and visit Tyr while we spent the day by foot in West Beirut.

We picked up the CD with the results of my MRI at the American University Hospital. It came with a diagnosis from Dr.El Merhi who mentions a gap filled with fluid, signal intensity, atrophy and shoulder joint effusion. I don’t understand what it means but it sounds a little ominous. We are sending it off to Boston with Tessa and wait for instructions on what next.

We walked around for hours in the city, looking for things that cannot be easily found in Kabul, or can only be found in places that are off limits, like the bazaar. This included buttons, espresso cups, a map of the region we live in and a cookbook to teach our cook how to reproduce the fantastic Lebanese meals we have had here.

We also each had a haircut. I had the fastest haircut ever. In the 15 minutes I was in the salon I never got to find out whether my coiffeur was indeed named Jacques (I assume all male hairdressers go by the name of Jacques). He complimented me on my hair. I told him it was my father’s and sent a quick thank you to the heavens.

Axel went to the barbershop around the corner. It was the same he frequented 30 years ago. It had not changed a bit. Only Jack, the then barber had gone and now lives in Torrence, CA. It was Mr. Philippe who cut his hair. And not only his hair, also his beard, eyebrows, nose hair, neck hair, everything!

At the end of the day all of us, including Alistair and Birgit, went out for Sushi in Achrafiyeh and enjoyed a great meal together. I paid the bill out of the pot of money that is replenished every week I am in Kabul with ‘danger pay.’ That’s what it is for.

If our trip to the Jeita grottos was about nature’s ingenuity, yesterday’s trip to Baalbeck was about man’s ingenuity and what you can do with free labor.

We walked around the massive stones and pillars for hours; first with our guide who looked liked uncle Paul, or, with his sunglasses on, like our Manchester neighbor Bill. Then, after lunch and on our own pace, now more knowledgeable, we went back and toured the site once more.

Just as I remembered from my last visit there, some 33 years ago, we were practically the only tourists. The only other flock we spotted was a busload with Japanese but they were in a hurry and disappeared quickly to their next destination.

In English that took some getting used to our guide explained both the socio-cultural and architectural context of what we were seeing. We marveled at the 1000+ ton stones that were sitting in places that nowadays would require enormous cranes.

The whole complex is a study in patience: the large temple complex took several 100s of years to complete and by the time the last pagan decorations were to be carved Christianity arrived with its own symbols and so the carving stopped. New images and symbols were called for.

Some of the granite pillars had come all the way from Upper Egypt: again, all this is possible with patience and lots of free labor.

For lunch we went easy and chose from a series of prepared dishes in an unassuming local place. There was no wine as we were in a predominantly Moslem region of Lebanon with many of the outward appearances of conservative Islam.

We talked Sita out of buying a Hizbollah tea shirt but she did manage to get a laminate plate with the image of the disappeared Moussa Sadr who never got off the plane he took to Trablous in 1977. In that part of the Beqaa Valley he is still very much present.

On our dizzying ride back over the Lebanon mountain range we stopped at the Ksara Winery that produces the wines we have been drinking. We were too late for the wine tasting and tour but not too late for buying. We bought a few bottles to replace the ones we had consumed at Alistair’s with maybe an extra to take back to Kabul and sneak through customs. We did buy a small bottle of arak because we have this fantasy of sitting on the terrace of our house in Kabul on a warm spring evening in the near future, recalling memories of our Lebanon trip.

The culinary highlight of the day was our visit to La Creperie, a restaurant that is perched on a rock overlooking Jounieh’s harbor in Kaslik. The restaurant is owned and run by Fadi who is the father of my MSH colleague Mayssa. Mayssa and I share a love of Lebanon and so I was introduced to the restaurant some time ago and a visit was on the program. But each day our lunches were so enormous that we did not need an evening meal.

After our simple and small lunch yesterday the timing for dinner at La Creperie was right. We were chided a little to have waited so long (4 evenings) for our meal there. But our explanation was accepted and our reasoning had been right, one should fast most of the day before going to La Creperie.

We were given the royal treatment in every which way as Fadi pulled out all the stops to give us a ‘taste’ of what his restaurant has to offer. We stretched our visit to over 3 hours munching on this then that galette, this then that crepe, liberally accompanied by Bretagne’s best Cidre. The meal was completed with fruit and coffee accompanied by a small glass of a local triple sec called Orangealina that is produced by another fine Lebanese wine estate, les Tourelles.

It was Lebanese hospitality at its best. We were treated as family. This also meant that there was no check at the end and an exhortation to visit again soon. We happily agreed to do so. It is one other reason to bring us back here. Last night’s was probably the most extraordinary eating experience we have ever had here or anywhere else.

Our first outing was by taxi, driven by Eli Adam who used to be a salesman but has been driving a taxi the last 11 years. That he was a salesman is obvious; he likes to talk. Since Axel also likes to talk he got to ride shotgun. I tucked myself way in the back of the family van and looked sideways rather than to the front. Beirut traffic is scary, hence the taxi. Renting a car was only a brief fantasy until we experienced being in traffic on our first day here.

We are hiring Eli for most of the week to take us places. We speak a mixture of French and English with him, in true Lebanese fashion. Yesterday he took us to Byblos , or Jbeil, the place where we are told the alphabet was born.

We had another fantasy lunch, overlooking Byblos’s tiny harbor, eating fried fish, and drinking the wonderful house wine at Pepe Abed’s. The remaining open spots on the table were occupied by the small plates with the famous Lebanese mezze that have become Tessa’s staple.

The restaurant was one we knew from way back. Pepe has died in the meantime and now his son Roger runs the place. The street leading to the restaurant is named after his famous dad.

The restaurant is decorated with photos of Pepe with famous personalities who have come here over the decades; it included a whole series of posed photos with various Eastern European beauty queens. Brigitte Bardo is prominently featured in the famous people gallery amidst sundry local and not so local politicians and world leaders.

After lunch we hired a guide to show us around the excavations of some 17 different archaeological sites, built on top of each other over thousands of years. Everyone was deeply awed walking amidst so much history. The guide then wrote our names in Arabic, in Phoenician and backwards in English.

Eli dropped us off at the kids’ apartment (our progeny as they are referred to by Alistair) where everyone flopped on the beds. Being a full time tourist is tiresome. Eventually we pulled ourselves up and walked around their neighborhood to check out what was for dinner.

We ended up in a street full of bars, still empty at 7 PM. Clearly our eating habits are out of sync with the Lebanese, who enter restaurants just about when we are done. The waiters happily served us beer and wine when they found out we came from a dry place, and asked as, like everyone else does, why the hell do you live in Afghanistan?

I had gotten up early to write about my dreams but got sidetracked by a computer that did not work. It still doesn’t and it took me awhile to adjust to that new reality and get myself settled in front of Axel’s.

The dreams were probably inspired by Ahmed Rachid’s book Descent into Chaos. I have arrived at the place where reading has become stressful – the incompetencies and unenlightened self-interests, pure greed and stupidity have added up to the current reality I live in – can there be more descent, one wonders. Yes, there are another 150 pages to go and the book ends before I moved to Kabul – the bottom is not in sight for the reader, and for me, I wonder, are we at the bottom yet or is there more stupidity to come? Obama can only undo so much.

Yesterday Axel and I took a service (a more or less fixed route and fixed fare taxi) to Achrafiye where the kids are lodged. We brought them croissants and some basic food supplies and then set out on our two hour walk across town, to the tip of Ras Beirut where Alistair and Birgit were sitting in the sun by the water, reading the time away till lunch.

We walked to the part of Beirut that was a nomansland when we lived here. Now it is dominated by an enormous mosque built by the slain leader Hariri, with next to it a large arrangements of white plastic tents with countless portraits of the hero and a few of his slain bodyguards.

The new city that has sprung up over the rubble and debris of many civilizations, destroyed by the same forces that are at work in Afghanistan. It produced something vanilla that could be South Boston or any other city in the world. Fancy but lifeless.

We were all drawn down to the water and the Corniche and ended up walking the entire length of it, my third visit in as many days, but now during daytime, on a holiday. Everyone else was there too.

The reward for our long walk was the lunch I had fantasized about since we left Beirut and that can only be had here: overlooking the water, a mezze, cool white Lebanese wine, and fresh fish that came straight out of the water. I could have done without the small glass of arak and the pieces of halwa dipped in molasses or tahini.

We ate for hours and then swam in the saltwater pool. By the time we got home, at around 6 PM I was still full and so tired from this day of walking and vacationing that I tumbled right into bed for an 11 hour sleep.

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.

Axel sat by the window as the plane descended into Beirut airport. He became very quiet. Later he explained that flashbacks were exploding in his head. I had no such emotional entry in Beirut as everything had so completely changed that I could have been landing in any new city.

The last time we were at this airport was 32 years ago, me to fly in from Amsterdam and Axel to pick up his mother who had escaped just in time ahead of the famous blizzard of 1978 that obliterated what would now have been our small beach house at Lobster Cove.

Alistair stood waiting for us at the airport. I met him first at our house in Rue Nigeria, 33 years ago, when he and his friend Peter were expulsed from what was then still North Yemen. We have all remained friends all these years.

The road to the city used to be long and surrounded by Palestinian refugee camps. I gather they are still there but large buildings have gone up everywhere and so they are no longer in sight.

I kept wondering how a city, so destroyed and bereft from its intelligentsia, stocked with men with guns could have so transformed. Is there hope for Afghanistan? Can Kabul join the modern world, ever? Not with those millions of dollars leaving Kabul every week, thought Alistair.

We drove to Alistair and Birgit’s apartment near the only (tiny) park in Beirut. I suppose that if you are draped along the Mediterranean Sea you don’t need parks.

I had forgotten how French Beirut is even though very few of the old French apartment buildings with their louvered shutters, wrought iron gates, balconies and window bars remain. Most are being torn down and replaced by soulless hi-rises that have no personality to speak of but where rents can be quadrupled.

After a lovely dinner, preceded by cocktails and accompanied by Lebanese wine, we left Alistair with the dishes. Birgit, Axel and I walked down to the Corniche, the place where all of Beirut and surrounding areas comes to enjoy a kind of freedom that is so total alien to us now: thinly clad young women run down to the cornice, along the up and down alleys, in the dark, alone.

Heavily wrapped up women, young and old, stroll with their men from the most western part of the Corniche into downtown.

Young men sit in their fancy cars, doors wide open, treating us to music that may or may not be to everyone’s choice. One mullah type was trying to pick up girls with recitations from the Koran. There were audiences for just anything, whatever works.

Men and women hold hands, men and men, or women and women. Young girls and boys check their phone messages, roller blade, jog, do bike tricks or smoke the hubbly-bubbly. A few diehards continued to fish in the dark, off the rocks where we used to swim.

We walked all the way from Ain Mreisseh to Rue Nigeria where we used to live. I occupied with my ex the 3rd floor, while Axel, Alistair and Peter were on the 2nd floor. It was a beautiful old building with terraces on each side, the biggest looking out over the Mediterranean. Each apartment covered the entirely floor with three large bedrooms, an immense living room, and a large kitchen with marble countertops.

The building was owned by the Khalidy family. The youngest daughter, Ilham (which means inspiration) got a bit testy with us as tensions all around us began to rise and real estate became valuable again. Their testiness was problematic as they also had guns. After we left things got unpleasant and Alistair and Peter left. Eventually the building got sold and torn down and the guys left Lebanon. Many years later Alistair came back to Beirut with his new bride to live where we are lodging now.

I recognized little along our walk on the Corniche. Even Rue Nigeria was
hopelessly altered, not for the better I think – what is it with architects who build new hi-rises in old cities?

I suppose when architecture moves from art to commerce that’s what happens. One day whole cities will wake up and say ‘what have we done?’ All they have left is the pictures and the paintings of these olden days. I made an etching of our house, something I had forgotten; but it hangs on Alistair’s wall as a reminder of both good and bad old days.