Evidence
A: I wear jumpers in air-con because I am cold
Evidence
B: I experienced the existential moment when you stop and realise
that yes, this is your life.
Evidence
points to the fact that I may, in fact, be acclimatising to life in
Beirut.
So,
since the beginnings and the finding my bearings I've found myself
just living and existing in Beirut. I go to coffee shops, eat good,
cheap Lebanese food all the time, talk about regional politics with
everyone and anyone (a surefire sign of adjustment and staple of
Lebanese culture). I hate to say it (nb: I don't) but this really is
the life.
I spent last weekend with Zeina and went up to the mountains to get out of the chaos of the city for a while. Lebanon is full of mountains and the mountains are full of tiny hill towns and villages where the air is clean, life is calmer and you can get a man'ousheh and a Pepsi for 2000 Lebanese Pounds (less than £1). A man'ousheh is a mixture between a pizza and a fajita that is covered in herbs and oil (Za'atar, seriously the best invention ever) which is baked and folded in half. It sounds a bit odd, it tastes absolutely delicious. Driving out and up you can palpably feel the change in atmosphere and while it takes less than hour to get up it feels like driving into another country. The villages and towns are a lot like Beirut in some ways though. They too, are sectarian, with most of them having a dominant majority community. Now before I came to Lebanon I thought it was divided by Muslim and Christian, down the middle. It is definitely not.
A
lot of people talk about Muslim and Christian areas as if they are
inclusive terms but it couldn't be more different. So far I've heard of
independent communities of (brace for it): Sunni Islam, Shi'ia Islam, Maronite Christians, Greek Orthodox Christians, Greek Catholic Christians and the Druze and this complex patchwork of communities has both divided the country and added to it's cosmopolitan, multicultural identity. In the mountains every village
is a community that has been intact for hundreds of
years. It struck me most when I started comparing it to my family. My
parents were both born in London, their parents were born in London
and Scotland but then after that? I have no idea. We don't navigate
around places in the same way that Lebanese culture does and that
means that when someone talks of home it's not just their home but
the “home” of their uncles, cousins, grandfathers and everything
else. Those places are an integral part of their cultural identity and their daily lives and that means whether you're in Beirut or Brazil or Brisbane you still have a connection to your past and your family contained in a little village perched on the side of a Lebanese mountain. So we drove to Jouar where Zeina's great-great-great
grandfather probably lived, which was utterly beautiful and
surrounded by the most incredible scenery.
It's
only after realising that Beirut is a macrocosm of these villages that
it started to make sense. The idea that people have migrated from
small communities to the city and maintained their identities is a
driving force in Beiruti and Lebanese life. And after a day of
lounging around, eating the most amazing lunch (including raw liver,
try it folks, it's actually really nice) I was rewarded not only with
break from mother Beirut but with this view. Beirut, je
t'aime.
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This
week I also started my Arabic course and I can now inform you all of my
ability to write 20 letters of the Arabic alphabet. This means very
little in reality because at the moment, a) I can only make sounds
like a child without any concept of their meaning and, b) I still
can't actually read properly because of a hideous mount of dot
placing and letter mutating rules, but it's start! I'll keep you
updated on my progress but I am absolutely loving it even if I have
to do homework and haul myself out of bed to sit in a classroom all
over again. Suffice to say that even after being in full time
education for the past 17 years I still think the only thing I'm good
at is learning and I'm not bored of it.
Sorry,
it has taken me so long to get round to posting this but it's been a
really hectic couple of days and i've been doing my homework like a
good boy but I'll update this soon.
Yallah
bye,
Gx.
