Weekend in Beirut

I went to Beirut this weekend for a quick trip. The visit was prompted by one of my colleagues who is heading back to Canada this week; he had never been and expressed an interest in going. I was hoping for Damascus instead, but another fellow pressed for Beirut, and so it was. The three of us boarded a plane Thursday evening and one hour later we were there.

From the first moment, the trip was an unexpected joy - a cheap flight on Royal Jordanian , no visa requirements and no hassle at the Beirut airport (a happy surprise). One companion is an architect, the other a historic preservation expert and we made excellent travelling companions: same interests, same pace, same tastes. Our shared top priorities were: good coffee, good food, good wine, at least one good bar and lots of walking in the city.

We found it all, and then some. Beirut was a beautiful, beguiling place. We kept trying to pin down what we were seeing. Some comparisons included: Paris (amazing cafes, intellectuals and universal French chic); Marseilles (edgy port city, salty sea air and amazing seafood), Belgrade and Istanbul (grand city of the Ottoman empire filled with boulevards, ancient minarets and byzantine churches); Berlin (the scars of the war, the green line between north and south beirut, the underground culture), Montreal (the beautiful young people, the club and bar scene), all in the context of an arabic speaking, middle eastern city filled with funky 60s modern buildings.

We stayed in the neighbourhood of Gemmayzeh/Jmeyzeh (depending on how you choose to spell it...) on the edge of the former battleground that divided the city during the civil war. The evidence of bullet holes and shell damage still persist years after the end of the war. (Pictures below of bombed out buildings and cinder block facade repairs). Despite the scars, the neighbourhood is booming with restaurants, bars, art studios, local shops, and the like.

We walked everywhere: across the green line, through the revitalized and completely repaired downtown - with the most beautiful flower plantings I have ever seen anywhere - and into the Hamra district in South Beirut and along the sea wall "corniche" boardwalk looking out over the mediterranean. The food was absurdly good everywhere we went - from lunch counter experience (fresh flatbread and local cheese and olives) to slow food restaurant in the evening. We collectively had one of the best - if not THE best - meals of our lives in a wonderful restaurant called Bread. I intend to go back.

After walking the city for a day and a half, we hailed a cab on Saturday afternoon and headed north up the coast to see the port of Byblos - founded by the Phoenecians 7000 years ago. Layers of historical remnants remain - the original Phoenecian port and sea wall that created an amazingly sheltered harbour on the rough mediterannean coastline; greek temples; roman baths and colonades; early Christian churches; and later medieval ramparts topped off by a crenellated castle built by the crusaders in the 12th century.

We returned to Amman on a late flight, talking all the time about how we might be able to swing a 6-month assignment back in Lebanon. We landed at the airport at the same time as a flight from the Gulf - Dubai or Jeddah or Abu Dhabi - and realized that we hadn't seen a man in a keffiyeh (headscarf) and white dishdashah (long tunic) the whole time we were there. It came as a surprise and a reminder: we were gone from the mediterranean and back in the land of the bedouin.

NYT article about Amman

The New York Times had an article today about pedestrian-friendly public spaces in Amman - for those who are interested:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/world/middleeast/24amman.html

The institute mentioned in the article is where I'm working and I now live very close to rainbow street mentioned in the article - my apartment is just around the corner from the place with the park benches shown in the photo on the first page.

(Thanks to Rick for sending the article!)

new digs, old buildings

I moved on Saturday to the downtown Jebel Amman neighbourhood. These are a few pictures of the new apartment and its view.

The neighbourhood is great, the space is large, the floors are marble - which is very cool in warm weather - and the furniture is "habibi" style - ornate beyond your wildest dreams. I am particularly relishing sleeping in the "Louis XV" by way of The Brick bedroom suite.

As for the view and the neighbourhood, in the nighttime view above, the faint green-ish lights demarcate all the local mosques. My first night here, I sat out on my balcony and listened to the different calls to prayer echoing through the valley. Other worldly and beautiful. In the distance, the columns and dome that are on the top of the opposite hill - Jebel Hussein - is the citadel, a protected area that is a mixture of Roman and early Islamic ruins.

After moving my (meagre) stuff last weekend, I went on a site visit to the north with a consultant who is also working here. He was doing some surveying work. I was tagging along. After driving around the municipality, we meandered down a few dirt roads, and at the peak of an out- of-the-way hill, on the outskirts of a little village, we came across some old stone structures. Probably the original village, the buildings are many hundred years old or likely more. This cluster of buildings should probably be on a protected list, so we checked with our colleague working on historic preservation. She had never heard of the place.

The village's more recent settlers simply take the original buildings for granted, allowing them to slowly weather the passage of time. Now lacking roofs and with walls tumbling in, they serve a variety of purposes: sheep sheds, donkey stable, random storage. Here are a few more pictures:

bird song, wolf tracks

I am back in Amman after a long flight which involved a lengthy delay in Istanbul. Wow, that is one busy airport. Living in North America, one tends to forget the role and scale of cities like Istanbul: a place that has served for centuries as a regional hub, the ancient seat of an empire, 5x more people than Toronto. The airport has a continuous stream of final boarding announcements to mysterious (to me, at any rate) destinations like Doha, Muscat, Tashkent, Tehran. Spending 6 hours there reminded me of Prague's Ruzyne airport in 1990, where the giant, clattering, digital departure board spelled out destinations like Ho Chi Minh City and Ekaterinberg and Donetsk. Names you never witnessed (at the time) in North American or Western European airports.

Back in Jordan, I have arrived to springtime. 20 degree temperatures, early flowering trees like apricots and almonds in blossom, and birdsong from first light. 2 days in, I am still waking up at the first call to prayer - at 4:30am or so. Unable to get back to sleep, I read my book, watch the sun rise and listen to the birds. As the jet lag eases, I expect I will start to sleep through the night. When I came last time, I knew I was on regular time when I started to sleep through that first call to prayer (thank you, God). A family of songbirds is doing their best to prevent that, however: they have nested in the building's airshaft and their chirps echo into the apartment's (three) vented bathrooms and throughout the apartment from the early morning onwards.

I came back to a full house here in Shmeisani. When I left Amman, I had been living in the apartment alone - with another colleague living in a unit downstairs. Now both apartments are full to bursting with the consulting team - 2 others here with me, another 3 downstairs. All are very lovely fellows and there is a nice, social atmosphere. I have learned that foreign consultant living is a little bit like civilized university dorm living, at a higher salary. I like it, but to get a bit more of my own space back, I will move this weekend to an apartment in downtown Jabal Amman. This upcoming apartment (my third in as many months) overlooks the Roman citadel and is old and big and ramshackle and affordable - a bit like my apartment in Toronto. It is probably too vast for one person with 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a big eat-in kitchen and 2 living rooms (standard in this country where a strict distinction is maintained between the formal place you entertain guests and the cozy place you share with your family - a tradition that I gather dates back to the bedouin tents). So I will indeed get a lot of my own space back. I will look forward to visitors! Photos are forthcoming.

The shirtsleeves temperature and blooming gardens couldn't be more of a contrast to my time last week in Canada, especially Deep River, which was cold and snowy and beautiful. I am hanging on to the memory of cross-country skiing across the Ottawa River to Quebec and seeing dozens of wolf tracks criss-crossing the ice along the way. After returning to Amman, I got an e-mail message from my brother saying that a person who had been skiing along the river a few days after I was there, suddenly found himself surrounded by 5 wolves. (Does that constitute a pack of wolves?). This was in the daytime. I have never heard of this happening before. He scared them off but it was a sobering experience, I'll bet. When I tell this story to my Jordanian colleagues - and that it might just as easily have been me surrounded by wolves - I can tell that they don't think it is neat or interesting that there are a lot of wolf tracks out there in the snow. Or that there is snow at all. Crazy Canadians.

A Change of Scenery

I am in my hometown of Deep River, Ontario for a week, spending time with my mother who recently had hip replacement surgery. (She is making excellent progress). It’s cold here – minus 20 celsius or so – and underneath a 5- centimetre layer of dry, powdery snow, there’s a thick foundation of ice from a freezing rain storm two weeks ago. It is too treacherous for my mother to go out, so I am spending my time running errands like going to the library and the post office and the health food store in the mornings, and getting out into the bush or onto the frozen Ottawa River on my cross-country skis in the afternoon. I am not sure if there is place on the planet more fundamentally different from Amman.

Chatting with neighbours, sitting in the doctor’s office waiting room, or waiting in the grocery store check-out line, there are two topics of conversation that have the town abuzz. The first is the upcoming ‘Silver Spoon’ cross-country ski race this weekend that annually attracts competitors from across the province. The second, and vastly more interesting topic, is the disappearance two weeks ago of a local resident who has vanished without a trace. A 41-year-old man, single, originally from Australia was invited to a dinner party on a Sunday night (or so the story goes) and failed to show up. When he didn’t answer his phone, the hosts went to his house to find his lights on, wallet on the table, no signs of violence, but no signs of him, either. The Deep River police were called, and, in turn, the OPP. The search was on.

In addition to pasting up missing person signs up all over town, the OPP also pulled out their fleet of snowmobiles and proceeded to tear around the bush, looking for signs of the vanishing man. This is where the two topics of conversation collide: it turns out that in all their enthusiasm, the policemen dashing around on skidoos ruined the lovingly groomed ski trails. The town’s cross-country skiers and race organizers are livid. How can things be put to right in time for the race this weekend!? Outrage!

Truth to tell, I haven’t seen evidence of the destruction where I have been skiing, but there is nothing like a good story to spread around a small town to keep conversation lively, especially when the police are involved. Meanwhile the fellow is still missing. Maybe he has holed up in an ice-fishing hut in the middle of the Ottawa River to wait out the winter?