T-minus 9 days...

T-minus 9 days until I step onto one plane in Lebanon and 27 hours later step off another in the US.  I've started doing a myriad of 'last' things:  final lunches with friends, final purchases or payments for utilities and other goods, final drop of ranch dressing squeezed out of the last bottle I'm willing to buy before I move home...

I've just started to let it sink in that I'll really be heading home soon.  I very much like to be where I am, and not think of other places.  Today I told myself, "In a week and 2 days, you WILL be back in South Carolina.  Start getting your brain there."

I've started to take note of things I will miss about Lebanon, and in the past few days allowed myself to look forward to the things I will get to enjoy in my home country.

A few of the little things that have come to mind as I've been traipsing across the city:

From Lebanon...

Things I'll miss about Leb (other than the wonderful people, akeed):

• Every food establishment delivers
• Granite counter tops as a default
• Nice place mats and place settings in all restaurants
• Getting to speak in 1-3 languages at any time.  3anjad?  Akeed.
• Getting to walk so much!  I've really started to love walking every where I go.  It just feels nice.
• How ridiculously accommodating pharmacies are.  You just go in, describe your symptoms, they ask you a few questions, and give you what you need.  They'll even say, "Oh, you only need 10 of these so I'll just give you one sheet out of this box."  Merci ktiir!
• Being able to cross the street whenever and however I like.  Just walk out in front of the cars; they'll stop.  (Incidentally, if I die within 3 months of returning to America, there's probably a 85% chance that I will have been hit by a car while crossing the street, Lebanese-style.)
• Cooking on a gas stove...  It just heats so quickly.

to South Carolina

Some things to look forward to in my return the the states:

• Not cooking on a gas stove...  It's hard not to burn things.
• Not fighting off carsickness every time I'm in a car
• Not having perpetually crispy clothes from line-drying all of the time
• A phone that just keeps the capacity to work with little-to-no effort from me... No more checking my credit and buying little cards and typing in little numbers all the time
• NOT getting shocked my my refrigerator/washer/computer all the time.  Ugh!
• That one time of year when the electricity goes out and it's novel...  "Ooo!  No electricity!  Crazy!?  Quick, light some candles and we'll play cards and talk and have fun."
• Walking (or driving) the streets without incessantly being offered a taxi
• Shopping carts that have wheels on the back that only go forward and backward.  Carts here have casters on all 4 wheels and roll in all directions at anytime.  It's disastrous, and annoying.  

Of course, these are mostly the little things in life.  If we wanted to talk about big things, like friends, family, hospitality, and affection, that's a whole other post with a whole other tone...  I'll probably get around to writing that soon.

The count down continues...

An investment

Earlier this week I made an investment in my future children's literacy.  There are some children's books about Lebanon that I really like.  I spent the first part of the year moping around wishing I had kids so I could get them the books.   Then one day I asked myself why can't I buy them for my future kids?  Because I don't have any.  But I might.  But I don't yet and might not.  One day I decided to go for it and get the books anyway.  I'm sure I have many friends whose children will love the books if I never have any future children.  Of course, then I had the chilling thought that my future children might not want to read about Lebanon.  How weird would they be!?

The books are from a series called Lebanese Heritage Books by Youmna Medlej and Joumana Medlej.  They are printed separately in English, French, and Arabic, and each tells the story and history of a particular piece of Lebanese culture or geography.  I stumbled across one a few years ago while visiting Jeita Grotto, and I fell in love with it.  Imagine my delight when I learned there were 12 more of those books about many of Lebanon's other treasures.

For now I've just bought 9 of them.  I figured I read through those and then gauge if I want the others or if I will have room to get them home in my luggage!  If you are interested in getting them for your kiddos and don't live by a Lebanese bookstore for some odd reason, you can order a PDF copy as well.  The titles I bought are pictured here.  You can guess what I'll be reading for the next little bit...

Would you wipe your baby with bat blood?

So, here in Lebanon there is a tradition/folklore/practice that if you wipe your baby down with bat blood, he or she will never grow hair in the treated area.  When we first heard this, we were like "No way!"  But after talking to others, we've found that there are people who testify that friends who were wiped with fresh bat blood didn't grow hair on their arms/legs/underarms.

This led to a lively discussion among my closer friends as to whether or not we would do this to our babies...  Is the gift of hairless armpits to my daughter worth chasing down and killing 2 bats?  Will she ever wish she had hair on her legs?  How much would I pay for said bat blood?  Would I prefer to give my child the option to be au naturale?

I pose the question to you.  If it were scientifically proven that you could wipe your newborn baby with bat blood, and it would not harm the child or expose him/her to dangerous disease/bacteria, and that the treated areas would never grow hair, would you do it?  If so, which areas would you treat?

(Readers, for this to be fun, you have to comment, especially moms and Lebanese friends.  Everyone, please chime in!)

10 Ways You Know You're Becoming Lebanese

1.  You drink soda out of a can with a straw.
2.  You ate lunch at 3 and dinner at 11.
3.  You say things like "April one" and "June fifteen."  You don't realize that you're not using ordinal numbers until someone points it out.
4.  You start asking people how they found something, and you don't mean how they physically found it.  I.e.   "How did you find the film/restaurtant/waterfall/Lebanon?"
5.  The answers for  "How did you find your meal?" (see #4) are "very nice" or "not very nice" and the answers for "How did you find the movie?" are "It was good/not good/beautiful."
6.  You say you'll 'pass by' later, and you really mean that you'll stop in later.
7.  Heeeeeeeeyyyy!!!   U staaaart using all of the emoticons u caaaaan muster!!!
8.  You "missed call" someone, which means that you call and let it ring once and then hang up.  This could mean a variety of things depending on the situation...
9.  You now find French, along with the more obvious Arabic, popping up in your daily speech.  "Merci."  "Bonjour!"
10.  You demonstrate the true meaning of hospitality every time you invite someone in to your beautiful homes.  Thanks for all you've done to welcome me friends!

Day 27: Listening To

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have Arab theater class at LAU.  Our teacher is an actress here in Beirut, and she also participates in something called drama therapy which is used in prisons and psychiatric hospitals.  Today we watched a documentary called "12 Angry Lebanese", which is about the making of the first drama therapy play performed by inmates here in Lebanon.  While we listened to the documentary in Lebanese Arabic, we were able to follow along with English subtitles.  I highly recommend it if you are interested in theater, therapy, or prisons. You can watch the trailer here.

Day 25: People

Went to a great new restaurant today, and the servers were really nice and fun.  They posed for a picture for me (in their fun uniforms):

Day 24: Weather

It's just starting to get chilly here in Lebanon, and by chilly, I mean lower 70s, and you can wear a cardigan at night.  It's nice to be able to layer.  Not looking forward to rainy season officially starting though.

Clear skies for now.

Day 23: The View

So, I'm breaking from the photo-a-day mold, but I just have so much to tell you about.  I'm going to give you a bird's eye view of my Thanksgiving Extravaganza.  Two full days of Thanksgiving!  Here we go...

Thursday, November 22nd:

10:00 am:  Wake up.  Slept in.  Win!
10:30am:  Nicole, Hudson and Elam come by, and we head to Krispy Kreme.

Day 22: In My Town

The big hullabaloo in America today is over Thanksgiving, but my Lebanese friends are celebrating their Independence Day.  It's nice because it's a holiday for everyone, even though we're celebrating different things.  Happy Independence Day to my Lebanese friends!

Day 21: Calm

AUB's campus was pretty empty today because it's Independence Day here, so I wandered around and took in my favorite spots, like these benches, which are never empty!  Sometimes it's just nice to be out and about in the city without the crowd.

Day 19: Letters

So, clearly I'm running a couple of days behind here.  Sorry!

To make up, I'm going to post 2-a-day for 2 days. Here's day 19:  Letters.

Being a big city and all, Beirut has graffiti.  What makes it fun for me is that it is often in Arabic, which just adds some pizzazz.  I can't read this whole thing, but from what I can tell it's the letters for ghraafeetee _____, so it's graffiti something, in Arabic, in graffiti!

Day 18: Made Me Smile

Saw this plate in a store.  Somethings just get lost in translation...

Day 17: Fruit

...and vegetables.  One of the great things about Beirut is the produce stands (dekene) on every corner.  They have a great selection and they're cheap.  This morning I went down to my corner stand and bought 1 green pepper, 1 yellow pepper, 1 big head of romaine lettuce, 1 big o' bunch of cilantro, some cucumbers, a bunch of bananas, and 1 red onion for $2.33.  It's so sprawled out I couldn't get everything in one picture, but someday I'll do a whole blog post on it for you.  Until then, sahtein!

Day 16: Something I Wrote

Showing off my Arabic skills...

Christi
Beirut, Lebanon
2012

Day 13: Landscape

The city offers more in the way of cityscapes than landscapes, and if you wait until night to get a "landscape" shot for your blog, you might get something likes this. The lights are still up from Adha, so I hope you enjoy Hamra Street tonight!

Day 7: Light

I'm totally going to take this post in a different direction than you might expect.  First, Lebanon is hot.  I know there is snow in the US, but we are still wearing tank tops here.  All this heat has changed something in me that I never thought could be changed:  I have become a light eater.  I'm the girl who loves burgers for breakfast, who ate chili dogs during halftime at my high school soccer games... Confession:  I sometimes crave hot wings when I'm nauseous to "calm my stomach." I have a stomach of iron.  But here, sometimes I'm just too hot to eat, let alone eat anything heavy.  There are days when I even eat meals without meat.  Unfathomable!  In the wake of this sudden change in my dietary habits, I've found a new go-to meal.  I present to you the very light, but tasty and filling, Pasta Chicken Salad from Universal Snack.  Their menu describes is as "chicken, pasta, corn, green pepper, lettuce, cucumber, tomato, boiled eggs."  It is delightful.  Sorry this isn't the greatest picture; these are leftovers from my fridge.  Grace please!

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Day 4: What I Read

Today some friends and I traveled south to Saida (Sidon) and Sur (Tyre), two of my favorite places in Lebanon.  We stopped in at a local church for the Sunday morning service, and although my Arabic is very poor, I attempted to follow along in the hymnal.  "Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee" was particularly fun because it I know the words in English and the music is exactly the same for the Arabic version.  The words, however, are still mush.  

"Mortals, join the happy chorus, which the morning stars began;/Father love is reigning o’er us, brother love binds man to man."

Day 2: Lunchtime

Today, my lunch was what we made in my Lebanese cooking class this morning!  The appetizer in the front is mtabbal, a baba-ganoush like dish made from eggplant.  The main dish to the right is maghrebine, made with lamb, chicken, vegetables, and a great gravy-like sauce (yum!).  The bowls in the back are the mouhalabieh, a dessert made with rice powder and rose water.  As the say in Lebanon, sahtein!

Eid Mubarak!

Eid Mubarak (Happy Eid)!

It’s Eid al-Adha (the first day of Adha)!  Adha is a fun and important holiday here in Lebanon. The streets are bare, school is canceled, stores are closed, families get together, and sheep are slaughtered.  We actually saw a sheep being slaughtered on our way to breakfast this morning.  Eww...

Eid al-Adha (festival of sacrifice) is a Muslim holiday that honors Abraham, or as he is referred to here “Ibraheem”,  who was obediently willing to sacrifice his son. This story is found both in the Qu’ran and the Bible. God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son but before he before he lowered the knife, God provided a ram to die in his place. After understanding the basis of Adha you can see that the slaughtering is really an important part of the tradition, celebrating that God provided a sacrifice for Abraham. 

Some Muslims go on hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca, and return home for Adha to decorated homes and celebrating.  A hallmark custom of Adha is giving to the poor; many families give to poor during this holiday to demonstrate their care and concern.

The Lebanese celebrate with a big family meal and sometimes gifts.  Some families pray and read from the Qu’ran together.   And I can hear music from our living room right now; it's been playing all day!

I think most of my Lebanese friends who read this are going to think, "Well duh!" and most of my American friends will be like, "No way!"

Well, to whomever you are, Happy Adha!

Wasta, Wasta, eh, eh, eh

There's a special word for a special concept here in Lebanon.  It's called wasta, and it basically means connections.  Special connections.

Here's a little story of how we started getting some wasta of our own:

First, let me say that I love my apartment here.  My roommates and I think every day that we have a great apartment.  It's clean; it has great furniture; it's in a great location, and all for a great price.  We are very content to live out the next several months here.

To stay in Leb this year, we need to get residency, which is a year-long visa.  There are several things to you need to get residency and among them is a paper from your landlord saying that you have a place to live.  For many reasons, some lost in translation, our landlady refused to give us this paper.  Uh-oh.  We had about a week to find a new apartment (not-so-easily done) or find another way around this proof-of-housing thing.

Our Lebanese friend told us that the mayor can give us a form proving our hosing.  The mayor?  Really?  Let's just say that a mayor here in Lebanon works a little differently than a mayor in the US.

So one Monday morning, on a wing and prayer, we headed to find the elusive Mayor's office and see if he would help us, and he did!

We took the receipt from paying our building fees (with our address) and our passports in, paid $10 and got an official paper saying we lived there.  In the course of getting everything done we made a friend as well...

It turns out, the mayor was very impressed that we could find our apartment on an aerial map of Hamra hanging on his wall.  Then, we discovered that he studied at a university in Senegal that my roommate Jessica visited for a summer.  They bonded over their ability to speak a tribal Senegalese language.  A few more minutes and we were fast friends with the mayor.  He even said to call him Papa Mayor.  Wasta!

My Roommates with the Mayor of Harma and Kraytem

Our Proof of Residence from the Mayor, just
dripping with wasta...

There is a downside to wasta:  we usually end up on the losing side of the wasta battle.  For example, the Lebanese are pretty good at recognizing lines, unlike a lot of other countries where people just push in closest to the front.  Sometimes, because we are American, people will just get in front of us or shop or restaurant owners will help other Lebanese first, kind of like a "taking care of your own" mindset.  I didn't get to go with my friends to General Security the other day to apply for residency (I have shingles so I'm home-bound), but I heard that they we're wasta-ed out of the front of the line for about 2 1/2 hours.

I'll never forget the time that some friends and I were getting our nails done and our technicians literally left us mid-manicure and went to help 4 other technicians do the hair and nails of a woman who just walked in.  When I asked my friend what was going on, she said that the woman must be really important, and we'd just have to wait for them to come back to us.   I shake my fist at thee, wasta!

Anyway, I'm sure that about the time I have enough wasta to help me out, the school year will be over and I'll be heading home.  Here's to us all finding just enough wasta to help us out, but not enough to ruin everyone else's day.