A breakfast recipe for egg lovers

One of the consequences of going on a trip to Europe or a place like Lebanon where food is a kind of deity is that the return home leaves one with a lust for those flavors. In the United States, olive oil is as foreign to the diet of folks as Budweiser is to the lips of the Taliban, whereas no table in Italy stands without it. It's expensive here, but for me, there is no other oil. So many foods that are inexpensive staples in Italy have price tags that are not budget friendly in the United States.

They say you shouldn't go to the grocery when you're hungry. Likewise, you shouldn't go to the grocery when you've just spent ten days along the Mediterranean. I made that mistake yesterday. My receipt is as tall as I am. Granted, we had depleted all comestible resources prior to our departure, so I had to resupply the cupboard with items you should always have around, like tomato paste and cans of black olives. But I also succumbed to the temptations of smoked salmon, a jar of imported pepperoncinis, fresh olives, feta cheese, premade falafel, and even three types of meat! Meat! I buy ONE type of meat a week! Yet I came home with chicken breasts, pork cutlets, and ground beef!  On the menu this week: burgers on the grill with worcestershire, fresh basil, and a host of other spices; chicken shawarma with dill cucumber yogurt sauce; and some sort of pasta with chicken dish, since I bought three boxes of pasta (they were on sale for a dollar each!)

Yesterday I learned that poaching an egg was not a skill I have been blessed with, but I managed to get it decently right on the third egg and we had eggs benedict, though I used toasted Italian bread rather than English muffins, and I used hickory smoked rather than Canadian bacon. (Italian bread, English muffins, Canadian bacon? Why do we have to name everything after a place?) Chris said it was his favorite breakfast that I've ever made him, and he loves my Saturday breakfasts.

Today he didn't have my breakfast because he had to be early to sing for church. He missed out on another great one! Here's the recipe based on two eggs. Measurements are approximate because I just dump.

2 eggs
1 ounce smoked salmon, torn into small bits
3-4 tablespoons of crumbled feta
1 large leaf fresh basil, cut small
1 teaspoon chevril
1 teaspoon garlic salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon Aleppo pepper (god save the Syrian people)
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon olive oil

That's it. Throw it all in a bowl, scramble, and put it on the skillet. I served it on top of a piece of toast - Italian bread or a baguette would have been better than the whole wheat bread I used. The whole thing took less than fifteen minutes to put together.

Three Days in Beirut

I slept on a flight for the first time in my life. I mean really slept – for nine hours in a row. The last site I remember was somewhere in Canada. By the time I woke up we were somewhere over Croatia or Serbia. I suppose the tension leading up to the trip was higher than for others…I had been sick of work and Washington and really needed to get away.

The arrival to Beirut was a sort of homecoming. The flight pattern took us directly over Ras Beirut and Hamra, the place that held my heart captive in my absence. The city seemed to glow brighter than I remembered; although a new skyline of incandescent skyscrapers accounted for some of the radiance, most of the light came from Saturday night traffic. Indeed, it was the first thing Chris noticed and his introduction to the functional insanity that we call Lebanon. I watched, amused, as he experienced his first near-collision in a Beirut taxi as we made the fifteen-minute-turned-forty-five trip from the airport to Hamra. We gave up on the cab and walked the remaining blocks when we were close enough, dropped our bags, and headed straight to my friend Amigo’s pub.

Chris and Amigo got along well and we had a blast. Two Armenian guys with whom I had the pleasure of drinking many times were the bar’s soul patrons; I struggled to recall their names though we had conversed many times about serious subjects and some not so serious. It was from them I had learned about Lebanese-Armenians and with whom I had shared my first basturma. They returned to the bar on our second night at our request.

It was disturbing to see the bar so empty on a Saturday night. Part of that is Amigo’s fault – he doesn’t allow single young men into the bar because he is afraid they are there to hook up with girls – but a lot of it has to do with the economic times in Lebanon that are a result of the conflict in neighboring Syria. Not only have the tourists stopped coming, but many Lebanese have gone abroad to seek better and more stable opportunities.

We saw evidence of the economic conditions the next day as I took Chris on a walking tour of the city (a tour that was to have adverse consequences for the entirety of the trip.) I led him on a path from our hotel to the sea; he marveled at our proximity to the water when it first revealed itself to him from behind the buildings of the American University of Beirut, mere blocks from our starting point. We descended a graffiti-covered stairway next to the university and ambled down to the corniche, where I had walked and contemplated the complexities of living so many times, as I wrote about here. The weather was strange; rain surrounded us but it was sunny where we stood. Once or twice the sky opened for thirty seconds or so and zipped right up again. Clouds had disappeared Mount Lebanon, and it would be two days before its snowy peak appeared to us.

The walk to downtown is not that far in comfortable shoes – perhaps twenty minutes at a steady pace. Chris seemed to be more interested in the mammoth yachts in St. George’s Marina than in the bombed out Holiday Inn hovering above it. Both told a story about Beirut and about life after the apocalypse, where the haves have everything and the have-nots live in bullet-riddled memories of a glorious city. The haves have taken the sea away from the people; highrises have blocked the view for those who had one for decades, and the monstrosities have blocked the sun from the corniche, leaving the people to walk the promenade in shadows for much of the day. Worse, though, is how the highrises have blocked the sea air from the city, trapping the city’s pollution inside and leaving it to suffocate under the Mediterranean sun. Haves and have nots, the story of the world. It’s a wonder the Earth still spins, isn’t it?

Downtown Beirut is a testament to man’s propensity to create beautiful things. The architecture is an amalgamation of styles that has transformed the city into something unique to the world. Mosques and churches abound, many of them centuries old. In between our bouts of wandering, we stopped for part of a Greek Orthodox mass and most of a Maronite Catholic mass, the latter being more annoying than interesting because the priest undertook what is possibly the longest consecration in the history of Catholicism.

In that same span of wandering, Chris entered the big mosque, the one I jokingly refer to as the St. Hariri Mosque because Rafik Hariri built it on top of a much more modest mosque and he is buried there. You can only say that to certain folks – to some Hariri is a deity. To his credit, he did pull Beirut out from the rubble, though his company, Solidaire, and its development activity are a major source of tension. Instead of rebuilding downtown for the Lebanese people, the post-war development, led by Solidaire, catered to wealthy Gulfie tourists and the Lebanese elites. When the tourists stopped coming to Beirut, so did their money, so a number of downtown stores sit empty, a physical manifestation of the economic consequences of the conflict in Syria. It’s somewhat ironic that  the Syrian situation has had such an effect on the area. Hariri was assassinated in a car bomb in 2005 by pro-Syrian agents, most likely Hezbollah. The empty shops seem like Assad’s last “Fuck you” to his dead enemy.

I took Chris to Gemmayze, a Christian district just over the dividing line between East and West Beirut. The district is full of bars and lounges and is something of a miracle considering its proximity to the “frontline” of the war. There is no shortage of buildings pocked with the scars left by bullets and bombs, but the life beneath them makes them something of an afterthought, at least in the evening hours. It was Sunday afternoon, however, and nothing was living. We scoured the area looking for an open bar to rest Chris’s blistering feet; the distance we had to walk because everything was closed made them worse. We did find a spot, however, with a bartender named Wissam who may have been the friendliest guy in Beirut. He was a young Shia who, from what I could tell, had discarded religion and possibly had been estranged from his family. He was, after all, employed as a bartender, one of the four jobs he worked to make ends meet. His situation is not unique in Beirut; sometimes it feels like the Lebanese are mere servants to their Gulfie overlords.

We walked around a bit more, through an Armenian neighborhood, the dull financial district, and back through downtown to Hamra. Sometime that evening we napped, though not really by choice, as the time change had caught up with us. We eventually awoke to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day at Amigo’s. It was an evening of Guinness, a failed attempt at live oud music (the original guitar), a late night seedy club, and dawn munching of chicken shawarma from Beirut’s famous Barbar.

We slept late the next day. I treated Chris to a Lebanese dinner at Raouche that night, laughing as he practically yelled at me for ordering plate after plate of food – hummus, fattouch (salad), labneh (yogurt), soujouk (spicy sausages), and grape leaves. The thing I had missed the most about Lebanon was the food, and I made sure to have one of everything I loved in those three days. This dinner, for me, was the highlight and what I had been looking forward to more than anything. Mezze is like tapas, probably more familiar to Americans, in that you order several small plates of food, but Chris didn’t know that. That’s why it was so funny when he couldn’t believe how many plates I had ordered.

We ate well the next day, too, at Pepe’s Fishing Club in Byblos, where we chose our own red snapper to go with hummus and a salad of tomatoes and feta cheese. The bus ride from Beirut did not end with climbing through a banana grove like the last time I stopped in Byblos; by then I had been on that road many times and knew where to tell the driver to drop us off. No bus stops in Lebanon; it’s a miracle there are any comfortable buses at all!

Lots of old stuff in Byblos – it is the oldest continually inhabited city on the planet, founded by the Phoenicians 5000 years ago. The highlight is the thirteenth century citadel from the Crusades, but Roman ruins, Phoenician ruins, Persian ruins, pagan ruins, and buildings from the Ottoman Turk period can be found in the area. Largely spared damage during the Lebanese civil war due to its homogenous nature, it’s a good place to see what Lebanon was like before the country tried to commit suicide. (So it goes.)

We watched the sun plunge into the Mediterranean and just like that, the day was over, as was our brief Lebanon adventure. We flagged down a minibus on the side of the highway to take us back to Beirut, where we’d spend our remaining hours playing darts and drinking Almaza at my friend’s pub. I confirmed my status as darts champion of Hamra (haha), and a taxi took us to the airport at 4am.

Soon, though, disaster would strike…

When Johnny comes marching home, he'll have no arms, but at least he'll have a plasma TV.

I am fairly immune to marketing. I can remember once buying Coronas on the first truly warm spring day of the year because those seaside ads made me long for summer, but most pitches leave me more annoyed than wishing I could have something. That's because I don't buy things. My wages go towards experiences, as these are what enrich us mentally and spiritually as human beings.

I can't remember ever wanting things; for the longest time my worst material vice was an inability to refrain from collecting books. I'd buy stacks of them from used bookstores despite having a profusion of unread volumes at home. It was fun to discover new titles hiding among shelves full of pages that others had discarded. And for what? That was as perplexing as the ink that occupied them. Mine ended up on some of these shelves when I decided I'd had enough of Washington and trekked over to Bulgaria for a few months at the end of 2007. Now I wish I hadn't purged my library. I often find myself lacking memory of this fact or that character or just need to look at words well-strung together to inspire my own broken paragraphs. The information is glowering at me from a laptop screen, but the internet is soulless and will never replace the physical manifestation of thoughts that we get from books. Reading is more than just eyeballing words. The act of reading is not only a mental and spiritual exercise; it's a corporeal experience. To hold words is to touch ideas, to transform the abstract into something concrete. You don't get that with electronics.

Electronics. That reminds me to get back to the point: not wanting things. I don't know where it came from. I can't say exactly when I realized how much unnecessary crap people buy just as I don't remember when I began to see the world as a place we were all condemned to share so we might as well make an effort to get along. I can go through all the moments of my life again and again, all the things I've seen, all the people I've met from all over the world, but it seems to me that the instinct has always been there.

I don't know why it isn't there in everyone, but we've gotten to the point when the lust for things has broken our society. Some people's whole lives revolve around the things they buy, the giant televisions and the movie downloads and the technology that brings them a zillion channels at the click of a button. The same people who line up for the latest gadget often bitch about politicians being "idiots;" they can't make the connection between their consumption habits and the type of people who are being elected as policymakers. The economy collapses because of crooked bankers and you hear blame assigned to people who took out mortgages they couldn't afford without recognizing that they are just one layoff away from falling into that category. People bitch about high gas prices yet drive everywhere, many of them driving gas guzzling rolling mammoths with no thought of the consequences of such behavior. They buy clothes without thought of the children who sewed them together half a world away or drink coffee without thought of the slaves who grew it in countries without labor laws or unions to protect the workers. And if you bring it up, they call you a hippy or liberal or something they think is an insult. They get angry or they ignore you, dismiss you. And then it comes time to vote again and the cycle starts over because they refuse to change their consumption habits. Only economic downturns slow the pace of stupidity.

But who's to blame? Surely someone is responsible. If it were wholly the responsibility of  consumers, surely more people would choose to do the right thing in their lives. A lot of them just don't know. Many of them are so disconnected from the world that they can't grasp the fact that what they buy affects everyone in the world.

Here's where experience comes in. 

It's easy to see pictures on the news of gun-wielding men, heads enscarved, goals to annihilate Israel, and say, "I'm fine with my tax dollars going to Israel." But try doing it after a beautiful Palestinian girl, no more than ten years old, a refugee, a beggar, one day after many stops asking you for change when you're sitting with your coffee at a cafe and starts looking at the book your reading, picking out the few words in English she knows. She was proud to show me.  She doesn't go to school. She never will. She'll never have any life other than begging, because Palestinians don't have rights in Lebanon. They are a people without a country.

Her entire family begs or sells gum or trinkets on the street when they have something to sell. Her brother is a year or two younger than she is; both of them are well-groomed and cared for, but their clothes are always slightly too small and too worn. They stick together in the same area, hovering around cafes, not shy after years of begging to survive. It sucks.

I use that as a microcosmic example, of course. I'd been involved with the Middle East for a decade at the point when the girl came up to me and read a few words off a page. I had already met Palestinians who had been tortured by the Israeli military and Israelis who had been injured by Palestinian bombs. I had already worked with Palestinian civil society organizations who were trying to bring democratic reform to Palestine and Israeli organizations who were trying to bring peace to the region. I did not need to let editors of news organizations (or worse, blogs) dictate my ideas of the place because I had experienced the story.

It's not only Americans - the world is full of disconnect. One of my pet peeves is Arabs who bitch about US oil "imperialism" but who fill up gas guzzling cars and drive everywhere, exhibiting the same behavior as those they condemn. Find me a Lebanese person who walks to work, for example. Examples of hypocrisy and ignorance abound across the globe; no citizenry of one nation is "dumber" or "more evil" than another. Americans do seem to be more disconnected from the world than most, however. Supporting wars in foreign countries that you can't even point to on a map is pretty damn stupid. If you don't know where it is, how do you know what is going on there? 

You don't.

You'd think that with the advances in transportation and technology we've made, there would be more people seeking out new information and experiences. But we could be getting worse. Now we can willfully choose to see only what fits with our worldviews and never encounter different ideas and experiences.

“We want to give everyone in the world the best personalized newspaper in the world,” Mark Zuckerberg said about Facebook.

That is the basic recipe for ignorance. And why can it happen? Marketing. Facebook is making billions of dollars from advertising revenues because people won't stop buying shit they don't need. Newspapers, the ones who have trained storytellers to report the news, are struggling, and many of them have turned to sponsored content, which appears to be an actual news story but is in reality an advertisement some company paid for. Television shows produce dangerous lies about places such as Hamra Street, where I lived and where I'd rather be more than anywhere, because they think it will get people to watch the show, and more people watching means more advertising revenue. "Reality" is getting further and further away from reality.

Are we ever going to be able to return to reality?

<-- I'm going here on Saturday. This is the street that the fearmongering television show "Homeland" portrayed as a tank-lined, terrorist-filled street. The reality is that it is full of bars and restaurants and shopping. The real danger is the people who are buying shit they don't need, ensuring that our lives continue to be dominated by corporations that pursue profit at whatever cost to human beings. War, slavery, poverty...these are the results of such behavior.

Change your consumption habits, and you can change the world. It's not hyperbole; it's reality.

Oil and Water: A Recipe for Fire

I often forget how over the course of my professional life I have been privy to a lot of information about people and world events that many people are not. I had one of those days this week. And knowing just amplifies the stupid that passes for discourse among those who believe they are entitled to their opinions, no matter how uninformed they are.

The world is a small place, much smaller today than it was even a few decades ago, and it isn't difficult to connect with nearly anyone in the world with a little work and a little luck, and it certainly isn't difficult to be informed. You have to if you want to truly understand what is going on on this big rock we call home. However, too many of the globe's denizens don't or can't make the effort, and for most people, that's fine. They don't go spouting off about things about which they have little practical knowledge or partake in nefarious activities based on ideological brain blindness. It's the vocal minority of ideologues who make a mess of the world, the miscreant shepherds leading the unassuming flocks astray.

We saw plenty of it upon the death of Hugo Chavez.

He was hailed as a hero by champions of the poor across the globe, at least those who claim they are champions of the poor, but only when it's convenient for them. They pick up pieces here and there that fit in nicely with their ideologies without concern for the consequence food chain. This holds true for ideologues of all flavors.

Chavez supporters can be broken down into a few groups:

1. The poor in Venezuela who received homes and other gifts from the Venezuelan government under Chavez. It's understandable that they would support him.
2. People who hate America and saw him as “standing up to the United States.” Among these are Castro, Assad, and Ahmadinejad, dictators who don’t hesitate to murder their own people. Also, the Arab world put out plenty of praise for him, even as it bitches about its own dictators who pull the same tyrannical stunts as Chavez.
3. The above-mentioned champions of the poor, including many American liberals and Western leftists, who can’t or won't see through Chavez’s do-gooder veneer to the powermonger core. The end does not justify the means. The end does not justify the means. The end does not justify the means.

Chavez may have begun his presidential ambitions in earnest, and people who know him say he really did care. But like so many leaders in third world/developing/exploited countries, he succumbed to the lust for power that swallows the souls of weak men. We’ve seen it over and over in Africa, where leaders arise from the masses with the genuine desire for reform, but once they sip from the cup of power, they morph into dictators, ensuring that Africa remains mired in “almost.” Once upon a time Chavez may have had democratic ambitions, but he was no democrat.


You don’t change a country’s constitution to eliminate term limits for yourself if you’re a democrat.

You don’t intimidate people prior to elections, threatening their jobs if they don’t vote for you, and use thumbprint machines during voting if you’re a democrat.

You don’t prevent journalists from publishing stories about you if you’re a democrat.

You don’t close 34 private television and radio stations in one year or build up state media if you’re a democrat.  You don’t monopolize the airwaves during an electoral campaign and preempt the opposition’s few chances to get their message out on television if you’re a democrat.

You don’t give housing to people in exchange for votes if you’re a democrat.

You don’t expel human rights organizations from your country for publishing a report that is critical of you if you’re a democrat.

You don’t seize control of your country’s supreme court if you’re a democrat.

You don’t befriend thugs and tyrants who don’t hesitate to murder their own people if you're a democrat.

You don’t run for a another presidential term when you are dying of cancer if you care about your country.

You don’t champion the poor and keep them just poor enough that they can’t challenge you.

You aren't embalmed and entombed in a "Museum of the Revolution" like Ho Chi Minh, Lenin, and Mao if you are a democrat.


More than half of Venezuela belongs to lowest class of people, and two-thirds still live in poverty, though their lot in life has improved a bit. But at what cost? Since Chavez took office, crime has grown rampant, especially violent crime, and the central government has consolidated power, stifling civil liberties and crushing the private sector. Sure, unemployment is down, thanks to public sector jobs. That’s not sustainable. It’s paid for with oil money. Venezuela has been gutted; the private sector is weak and the country’s institutions are weaker. The country had one of the lowest rates of economic growth in the region during the 14-year reign of Chavez. Inflation is high and shortages of basic goods are commonplace. In the end, he exploited the poor for power.

There is a reason that Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Peru, and Colombia haven't jumped on the Bolivarian Revolution bandwagon. Those last three have had great success in lifting their citizens from poverty, and they did it without throwing civil liberties and the private sector down the toilet.

As much as I hate to agree with organizations like the Heritage Foundation, in this case they are mostly correct, except that they portray socialism as the root of all evil and part of their beef with Chavez is that he nationalized Venezuelan oil so American oil companies can't grab it. Also, one of their criticisms of Chavez is that he conducted “an inflammatory campaign aimed at deepening polarization and inciting fears.” Um, can we say "GOP strategy in the US." Hello? Earth to Heritage? And Chavez supporters in the West? Earth to you?

You can’t claim to support human rights and deify someone like Chavez. You don’t get to pick and choose. You can’t accept the qualities while ignoring the glaring authoritarian actions. There’s one word for that type of person: hypocrite.

Beams in too many eyes.

Two weeks!

It's nearing midnight, the proverbial bewitching hour, and I'm stuck at home with a mammoth headache. Popping ibuprofen hasn't helped much. At least there's meaningful baseball on now, as Australia and Taiwan are playing the first game of the World Baseball Classic. Don't think I'll be watching the games at 5 and 8am tomorrow...

zzzzzzzzz

What? You mean it's morning? Wow, I forgot what it was like to get a full night's sleep without waking up. Chris was in Rockville last night. It was great!

Speaking of Chris, we'll probably go to Palm Sunday mass at the Maronite church downtown Beirut since that's his thing. It'll be in Arabic, but a Catholic mass is the same in any language. He'll figure it out.

The church is next to the gigantic mosque that Rafiq Hariri built after downtown Beirut was destroyed and where he was buried after his assassination. The Maronites didn't like that it dwarfed their church, so they decided to build a massive bell tower to compete. It looks like a clunky minaret.

This is the back of the church, by the way. Beneath it are Roman ruins. Behind me is a TGI Friday's. If you wonder why I am so fascinated with this city, just look at all the contradictions you can see standing in this spot.

Two weeks from today we'll be there, touching down and going straight to Amigo's pub and drinking Almaza as soon as we drop our bags in the airport. Heck, we might just go straight to the pub. It'll be 11pm by the time we get there, but it'll be a Saturday night, early for Beirut, and we'll still have several hours to enjoy. Nothing like getting your first taste of the Middle East in a bar. It will change his perception immediately. That is my intent.

Now, I lived in Beirut for a year spread out over a two-year time period. But I had been working in the Middle East for a decade before I stepped foot in Lebanon. I had been to Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey, but never for more than a week. Beirut, well, Beirut was nothing like any of them. It felt like the center of the universe from the moment I stepped out of the airport. That was for a two week trip for work, but I knew instantly that it would become a big part of my life. I felt like I was supposed to be there.

I still do.

I'm already there. I'm not sure I ever really left. Maybe that's why I struggled at my last job and why I feel a bit depressed about this one. How can you be totally engaged in something when spiritually you are an ocean away?

So you see, I HAVE to get Chris to fall in love with the place, so I have to show him the side of Beirut that he will identify with. Seeing the similarities of foreign lands is something many people have trouble with. I have no idea how Chris is; not only is this our first trip abroad together, but he hasn't been out of the country in twenty years. And I have a desire to return to Lebanon for another long stint. He has to love it.

But how can you not?