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

SYRIA: Damascus, Seidnaya, Maulula, Sayyida Zeyneb

DAMASCUS

There's no better way to perk up after a red eye than an arrival in a completly new country. In the Damascus airport I was whisked through customs by a friendly official, picked up by two guys with gentle Damascene accents and driven through dense cinderblock neighborhoods where mothers tended to children playing in small roadside parks. Everyone was as wide awake as I was and no one seemed to notice that it was 3am. This arrival was a reminder to cas asside preconceptions of the region, which I tried hard to do. Nonetheless I still found my overactive imagination worrying that cars were going to suddenly explode in the street. I guess I shouldn't have watched The Kingdom and Syriana three times.
One of the many Christian shrines near my hostel

Damascus by day was pretty sweet. The Old City, roughly a square mile, is a chaotic maze of houses and shops that haven't changed too much since Alladin's time, except for the occasional car wiggling its way through the alleys and the confused net of electrical wires strung under the crooked shutters. Under normal circumstances I have a decent sense of direction and my Lonely Planets don't fail me, but in the Old City I found myself lost half the day. I bumped around like a lab rat in a labrynth until I had seen practically every minaret, private shrine to the Virgin Mary, ice cream stand, wedding dress shop, tombstone carver, ancient gate, nut confectionary, falafel booth, cloistered mosque and covered souq in the Old City. The highlight was the stately 8th Century Ummayad Mosque built over a Roman temple and Byzantine basillica, well before anyone had any ideas as to what Islamic architecture would eventually look like. The huge courtyard was packed with worshippers from all over the Near East, many bused in from Iran to pray and weep at various Shiite shrines in the city.

Shoe shop

The main part of the covered souk (market)


Popular icecream shop Water seller
Souk
Ummayad Mosque

Inside the Ummayad Mosque

Pastry shop


The newer district outside the old walls


New friends at the schwarma shop

In the basement of the National Museum



Headstone carvers


Headstones, including one for the Hezbollah martyr in the family


Restaurant in a typical Damascene house

Poster shop selling posters of a) The three Shia martyrs b) Nasrallah c) Ayatollah Khomeini d) Assad (obviously) e) Arab pop stars f) Female pinups

The fetid latrine that is the Barada River

Possibly the worst beer in Eurasia: Barada, named after the river shown above

Shrine of Hussein in central Damascus

At the shrine of Hussein. The first person to spot the infidel wins $5.

Damascus by night from the heights of Mt. Qassion

And every last bit of it, from the crumbling alleys to the windows of the taxis was covered with portraits of the Assads, the deceased Haffez looking like a dignified Republican congressman, next to Bashar, his beady-eyed son who seems more like the neighborhood peadophile than a ruthless Baathist dictator. His posters proclaim, "I believe in Syria," but it's hard to know if Syrians believe in him. Do the taxi drivers plus my Palestinian Christian hostel owner post picutres of Assad out of fear or admiration. We can probably guess, although I've heard that the terrible anarchy in neighboring Iraq has made Syrians more sympathetic to their dynastic strongman, who lives in a severe concrete fortress/palace overlooking the city.
Assad at the Hijaz train station, built in 1917 to transport Syrians to Mecca.


The "Badass aviator Assad" sticker which is found on many taxi windows

"I believe in Syria"

SEIDNAYA and MAULULA
The following day, while Cole took a crushingly hard Arabic final, I took a day trip north of the city to the Marionite shrine cities of Seidnaya and Maulula. Each picturesque town was set into a mammoth strip of sandstone that would have fit into Lawrence of Arabia or any John Wayn movie. Each town had a handful of monestaries built to Saint So-and-So, monestaries that had attracted pilgrims since ancient times but had since been rebilt in the last century and carefully maintained in the current one. I watched black-robed priests baptize a less-than-amused toddler and hordes of Arab Christians pray in the musty shrines. At the Seidnaya monestary, a few groups of Muslims, looking out of place with their covered heads, came in to pay respects to the saint in question, who was apparently sacred to them too. I was the dust and weat of the day in a Damascus hammam where I was directed to scrub myself with a fistful of hay. Good stuff.

Monastery at Seidnaya

Baptism ceremony

The town of Maulula


SAYYIDA ZEYNEB
We felt like staying in Lebanon for a while longer, but I had a flight out of Damascus so we drove back. On the day I left, I convinced Cole to take me to Sayyida Zeyneb, a major Shiite shrine and ground zero for the roughly one million Iraqi refugees who have flooded Syria recently. Security was tight that day, as in the many Syrian guards stood around more nervously than they had when Cole had visited earlier. The day before was an Islamic holiday so the place was overflowing with devotees, dressed in every manner of Arab outfit, from white Gulf Arab gowns to Palestinian kefiyes to the shapely turbans of Shiite clerics. The crowds shuffled around the courtyard making their way to the shrine, honoring a member of Muhammad's family. The inside was so packed that we couldn't have prayed even if we wanted to. As the only foreigners or non-Muslims in a shrine filled with religiously charged Iraqi Shias, we hardly felt at ease but we didn't have any problems or even attract too much attention. Nor was it a problem walking around the neighborhood, which was surprisingly orderly and functioning despite being populated by displaced Iraqis. It was not a place of fetid hovels and starving refugees. It was, however, strongly religious, without a single uncovered woman to be found anywhere. Posters and trinkets glorifying the Shiite martyrs, as well as Hezbollah and other groups were all over the place, more so than anywhere I noticed in Syria or Lebanon. The influx of restive Palestinian refugees once tipped Lebanon toward civil war. It makes me wonder how the new wave of pissed off and highly religious Iraqi refugees will alter the balance in their host countries.

Pressing our way into the Sayyid Zeyneb shrine

An Imam at the shrine

A Hezbollah exhibit at the Sayyida Zeyneb shrine
America, corrupted Gulf oil monarchies, and Israel--the three adversaries of Hezbollah and their ilk. I wonder if these are real Israeli flags.

Assad, Syria, Hezbollah and Iran. Even as the the Assads have brutally supressed Islamic challenges to their own rule, they like to portray themselves as the champion of Hezbollah and the Islamist cause.

The Sayyida Zeyneb neighborhood

Fish seller at Sayyida Zeyneb