LEBANON: Beirut, Byblos, Journiyeh, Tyre

Lebanese Cedar in Byblos

Cole's Arabic program is very intense and most of the students hadn't left Damascus in two months. So as soon as the final was over most of them struck out to Aleppo, Jordan, Egypt or even Dubai. Cole and I had a hankering to go to Lebanon, so within a few hours I found myself in a taxi with Cole and Erika, a journalistically inclined Harvard grad, speeding toward Beirut.


On the way to Beirut, the rebuilding of a bridge bombed by Israel in 2006


BEIRUT
Beirut. No matter who you are its an evocative word, although it depends on your age. For my generation, its a place of Hezbollah rockets and Israeli bombs, while my parents would remember it for the vicious civil war and the news-grabbing kidnappings of the 70s and 80s. My Grandma, on the other hand, wrote to remind me that Beirut was once the swanky haunt of the jet-set, Le Paris de le Este. Surprisingly, it was my Grandma's Beirut that we saw the most of.

It was completely shocking to arrive in a city that's a byword for misery and be awed by brand new high rises, five star hotels, and luxury car dealerships, to ride a giant Ferris wheel, dodge oversize SUVs driven by rich Kuwaitis, and to lounge at a luxurious beach club that we could ill afford. We snacked at McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts and had huge meals at proud Lebanese restaurants where sweaty waiters welcomed us with a "bonjour monsieur". Per local custom we sat down to eat at 11pm and tried our best to keep pace with the exhuberant city, trying without much success to find drinks for less than $10. One night we went to "Facebook Bar", whih served drinks such as the "Poke" and the "Friend Request". We sang Journey and Oasis karaoke songus until 2am when the patrons switched to wailing over the latest Arab hits. Let's review. We went to a Facebook bar. And sang Karaoke. In Beirut.


The waterfront in Beirut


McDonalds and the Hard Rock, a block from our hostel


I wonder if Arabs find him creepy too


Erika very frightened on the Ferris wheel


At the amusement park




The pace of (re)construction


The Riviera Beach Club


The Place d'Etoile, Downtown


Eating at the Place d'Etoile


A restaurant street in the fashionable district of Maneaux


Cole at the Facebook Bar

To top it all off, there's basically an Ivy League school lying right there. The American University of Beirut has bounced back since the Civil War ended in 1991 and marks a stark contrast to Damascus University, where Cole's Arabic teacher was taken out of commission when a ceiling tile fell on her head during class. This place is peaceful and grand, with huge lawns that made me want to play frisbee. And the ties to Princeton are deep (going back to the 1860s) and noticeable (there's a Marquand Hall, for instance). There was a time when those Princeton grads didn't care to join their uncle's law firm after graduation would ship out to AUB to teach whatever they had majored in for a few years.


The American University in Beirut


AUB at night


I wonder if its the art library


BYBLOS and JOURNIYEH
We peeled ourselves away from the good life in Beirut occassionaly to visit other places in coastal Lebanon, which turned out to be equally pleasant, although less dominated by the vacationing Arab elites who distort life in the capital. Cole and I went to Byblos, a windswept port where a 12th Century Crusader church overlooks a Roman temple. In Journieh we stood in line with Iraqi vacationers (yes they exist) to take a massive gondola up to a big statue of Our Lady of Lebanon, sort of like Lebanon's version of the Christ statue in Rio de Janeiro, except with quite a few more Muslim visitors than you would find in Brazil.


Byblos


Crusader church in Byblos


Gondola in Journiyeh




Iraqi tourist at top of gondola


Our Lady of Lebanon at the top of the gondola


Looking towards Beirut from Our Lady of Lebanon


Plaques laid by various passing armies over the ages


TYRE
Another day the three of us went south to within 15 miles of Israel (which the language students in Damascus refer to as "Disneyland" to avoid raising eyebrows), to the town of Tyre whcih had a sleepy port and an intact Christian quarter. A teenage boy, whose striking blond hair must be a reccessive Crusader gene, enthusiastically filled us in on all the local saints and was proud to inform us that Jesus had dropped by to preform some miracles. As far as we could tell the only miracle in Tyre was our finding a sandy cove (most of the Lebanese coast is rocky), where we sat drinking beer, smoking hooka (ubiquitious in this region) and gazing across to the Disney coast visible in the distance.


Modern Tyre


Modern Tyre


Sweets vendor in Tyre


Port of Tyre


Kids showing us around the Church at Tyre


Street in the Christian quarter


Climbing down a part of the Tyre city walls


Lighthouse in Tyre


Carrying chairs and a hooka on a motorbike


Muslim cemetery in Tyre within sight of the ancient hippodrome


On the beach

This was all in line with my Grandma's Lebanon, but it was impossible to avoid the signs of tragedy and turmoil. The old Holiday Inn, towering over our Beirut hostel, was a constellation of holes and craters from the rockets and bullets that flew every-which-way during the Civil War. There was a deadly bus bomb in the northern-city of Tripoli the morning after Cole and I had considered going there. On the 80-mile drive south to Tyre we passed a dozen Lebanese army checkpoints, two UN military checkpoints, a restive Palestinian refugee camp and inummerable Hezbollah banners, some proclaiming, "Our Blood is Stronger, We Freed the Prisoners," referring to the recent lopsided prisoner swap with Israel.


The Holiday Inn in Beirut


Around the Palestinian refugee camp in Tyre


DAHYA
Hezbollah is the Lebanon that's been on the news in recent times so its not surprising that Cole, Erika and I had a certain fascination (hightened by fear) of the group. Erika had a friend who visited the Hezbollah War Museum in the Beirut Hezbollah district of Dahya. We couldn't resist going on a search for it so we got into a cab driven by Marios, a Chrisitan who spoke excellent English, Spanish and Portuguese.

We drove just two miles south, barely out of sight of the new high rises, when Marios announced that we were on the edge of Dahya and asked if we had cameras, which we did. He laughed nervously, eyeing us in the rear-view mirror. "Don't remove those cameras. Here are Hezbollah everywhere watching, and everyone has eyes on everyone. They see everything," he warned. "If they see you taking pictures it will not be problem--they will talk with you for maybe two hours and then give official permission." The trouble, he explained, was that he was a Christian and if interrogated his ID card would reveal his Christian name. "They will not be liking me, a Christian, bringing foreigners to Dahya." With that we were content to observe the scene discretely with our eyes.

Dahya looked like a modern gold rush town with earthen pits, scafolding and building cranes cluttering amidst the cinderblock apartment buidlings. "This is where Nasrallah lived," Marios pointed, as we drove down a street especially busy with cranes and dumpsters. Amidst the dust and the rude hum of jackhammers I had that sinking reallization that this place was familiar, that I'd seen these apartment blocks two years ago, in the shocking pictures that turned world opinion against Disneyland's retaliatory airstrikes. At every street corner a Hezbollah man dressed in a plain brown t-shirt and a short beard stood directing traffic with scratchy walkie-talkies. Marios drove around town pulling up to them asking for directions. "Selam Aleykum," he would begin unnaturally, unused to using the Islamic greeting rather than the non-denominational 'Merhaba', "where's the Hezbollah War Museum?" We were eventually directed to the Hezbollah information center which told Marios that the exhibit had moved to another city. So we made our way out of Dahya, turning onto a broad new thoroughfare under construction. Marios, only too happy to be leaving Dahya quickly, claimed that the new road, like much of what we saw in Dahya, is funded by Iran. "Iran, they give so much money to the Hezbollah, millions and millions of dollars." He pointed to the rather ordinary looking people on the streets. "These people they look poor but they are very rich, they have too much money.", he said hostily. With the help of Iranian petro-dollars Hezbollah was rebuilding their headquarters bigger and better than ever.





Map of the places I visited in Syria and Lebanon