Meanwhile what can I say about Hamra, Sanayeh and AUB? Well, let me start from the beginning. I got to Beirut at 2 am - A, a friend of H's (who I know from Berkeley) had arranged for a cabbie to pick me up from the airport and take me to an apartment used by some artists & activists as a work-place - some of the Berkeley students who were there for the conference were staying there. So when I came out of the airport, there was a cabbie holding a sign saying Reni Desau. Presuming that was me, I said hello to him and he ushered me to his car. And then we tried to communicate with his very very broken English and my zero Arabic. It turned out that he didn't know where to take me and although I had the address written down in English and I read it out to him, it drew a bit of a blank. So had to call A and wake her up - she not only gave him directions to the apartment but stayed on the phone with us until we reached there! After that, she had to tell him that I had only limited Lebanese currency on me (not enough to pay him) so I would pay him partly in that and partly in British pounds. Now US dollars function as a regular currency in Lebanon (anywhere and everywhere you can pay in US dollar notes if you so wish) (one of the only countries it seems where two currencies operate simultaneously), but thats not the case with British pounds. Anyway, he seemed fine with A's explanation so that was that. And thus I got to Mansour Aziz Apartment in Sanayeh.
A run-down apartment building with big rooms, high ceilings and beautiful big balconies. My only photos of Beirut are of the balcony of our apt and a couple from the balcony.
the balcony at Mansour Aziz Apartment
from the balcony
Later, on asking A, she explained that many of the buildings are in worse condition, some might be in better condition but are empty, with the owners waiting for the prices to go up so that they can pull them down to make taller buildings. We could see new and taller buildings, often uglier, that were coming up to replace the older buildings of the area, some of which were beautiful. (I wish I had taken out my camera!!)AUB was a 20 minute walk through Hamra, a cosmopolitan part of the city with lots of shops, cafes, restaurants, hotels, apartments - not glitzy though. Like many universities elsewhere, AUB was bustling with students the next morning. Its also right at the edge of the blue Mediterranean Sea - most enviable. Many of the AUB buildings are made from a whitish-yellowish limestone (I think thats what it is) and entering the university through the main gate the College Hall building looked lovely in the early morning sun. Spent the day in the conference at AUB though did step out for lunch during which I had some fantastic food - unfortunately have forgotten the name of the cafe as well as what I ate but it was this fantastic meat dish made in yogurt (mouth watering as I write). And everywhere they give you this lebanese/syrian flat bread (I think it might be called khubz in Arabic) often with a bowl of olive oil for dipping. I was so obssessed with the meat in yogurt preparation that I had something similar to it the next day at lunch as well (mouth still watering as I write). Okay, just did a google search, and it seems that what I ate was Shish-Barak (mouth watering even more on seeing the photos in the link). Had dinner with Herlily and Cecilia, old friends from Berkeley I hadn't met in 2 years. Then went back to the apartment.
Some of my fellow-conference-goers and the folks who used the apartment as work-place were there and we headed out to a pub in Hamra to join some of their friends. Had my first Almaza (a Lebanese beer) of the trip over a chat with a Palestinian from Ramallah who now lives in Vancouver. It was his first time in Beirut too, also for a conference, but of quite a different kind. His was in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut and was about the Palestinians' right to return. Later in the evening, I found another Palestinian sitting next to me and as a couple of us talked to him, it emerged that he's a puppet artist and has founded an organization that does puppet theatre. Some of the puppet shows they'd done sounded really interesting and quite profound. I noticed the crinkly corners of his eyes which were full of good humour. At one point, talking about politics in the region, he joked about how they were very good at making borders. Humour is one way to talk about it.
Towards the end of the evening a group of people came into the pub and someone pointed out that Reem Kelani, a well-known Palestinian singer, was part of the group. I just looked her up on google and I see a blonde woman whereas the woman I remember had dark hair - maybe I was looking at the wrong woman in the group all along or she's dyed her hair. By the end of the evening the inside of the pub was full of people singing and dancing to Arabic music that I don't think I can really describe.
Can't seem to figure out how to embed a video from youtube here, but here's a link to one of Reem Kelani's songs (there's a wonderful pianist in this too): "Yafa" ("Jaffa")
Written by Jaffa-born poet Mahmoud Salim al-Hout (1917-1998) who represents the generation that lived through the nakbah - the "catastrophe" of the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland in 1948. Al-Hout wrote this after losing all his manuscripts when fleeing Jaffa. The lyrics go:
Yafa! My tears have dried up
I weep for you with stricken eyes
Will I ever see you?
Will I live long enough?
How are your sister towns?
How are they?
I long for them
As if each were a paradise.
And those we left behind?
Those we left for dead.
I'm weary! I'm weary!
But in my weariness I only complain to God
And to no one else.
Yafa. Yafa!
The next day again the conference, a good lunch and dinner, ended the evening at another pub in Hamra. The next day made an early start to Baalbek...
No comments:
Post a Comment