Not Quite Eden

Chris and I want a garden.

To homeowners in the suburbs, that may seem like a benign statement. “So make a garden,” you might say. Us urban dwellers know that reality is much different. Houses in the city have small yards or none at all, and if you live in an apartment, well, forget it. Community gardens just aren’t the same. But the place where we live – a multi-story duplex divided into four apartments – has a very large, rather untended backyard full of fruit trees and shady trees and patches of strawberries and raspberries and mint. We don’t want just a garden; we want to turn it into a park.

Funny thing about the yard – I’ve lived in the place for a year and a half and had never ventured through it until a few days ago. Trees line one side of it, and the grassy other side leaves enough room to play croquet or lawn darts or have a catch or whatever it is that people do in yards these days. I envision flowerbeds and rock gardens and patches for tomatoes and basil and peppers and zucchinis and all the wonderful fruits of nature that we can grow. I imagine a pathway with stepping stones leading to a bench beneath the shade of a tree. I look forward to trips to a local hardware store for hoses and spades and rakes and maybe even some of those solar powered lights to line the pathway.

You see, nature is tough to come by in the daily grind of the city, even in one with as many green spaces as DC. To the human mind, nature is sanctuary from stress and anxiety, as studies have shown. It’s a real shame that mentioning “nature” invokes hostile feelings in some people. “Hippies.” “Liberals.” “Treehuggers.” I wonder how the natural world became so unnatural to some people. That saying, “You need to get out more?” It’s true. It makes your life better.

And so would this garden, this park, this sanctuary right in the middle of the chaos of Columbia Heights. Well, mine and Chris’s anyway. It would give us a place to hang out in the summer. We could have people over. I could grill my should-be-famous mini-burgers stuffed with peppers and chutneys and garlic and so many other good foods and we could drink margaritas and beers and play music – sometimes live – and have the kind of summer that homeowners take for granted. We won’t run from the summer heat; we’ll embrace it!

Even the thought of the flowers excites me. I want to plant lantanas of all colors around, and I want to throw wild flower seeds in the back of the yard and let nature provide us with a natural cover for the fence. (I hope Chris can put up with my dictatorship over the flower choices. He’s colorblind, anyway – what does he know about flowers? Ha!)

The landlord has agreed to let us do something, though it is unclear what. We’re offering him free property improvement in exchange for a place to enjoy the summer, so I can't see why it would be a problem. We want serenity. We want refuge from our cramped quarters. We want sanctuary from the stresses of the city and of life.

We want a garden.

Paper crowns and lemon trees

Then we work up.

I knew what lay behind the thick curtain; we hadn’t seen anything but blackness when we arrived, a sort of nothingness unique to the nighttime sea. A glow framed the curtain, and the wee hour on the clock couldn’t keep me in bed. I had to see the waters of the ancients, that amphibious spirit that has possessed me for so long, the realm of Poseidon.

In Lebanon, we had witnessed the sunset over the Mediterranean as we ate dinners of fresh fish and plates of hummus and fattouch. Now we watched the sun rise over the same body of water, and it took us mere hours (minus the calamities from the previous day) instead of weeks as it had when the Romans had sailed those waters. It’s funny to arrive to a new place at night. You awaken to the surprise and wonder of a world that had been invisible under the cloak of darkness. A thin ban of red and another of yellow was visible beneath an incandescent blue of dawn’s early light. At that moment I was right where I was supposed to be, in line with the cosmos, mind, body, and soul unified in the present.

Maybe I slept a little after that, but when the sun rose far enough to turn the sea into a glittering disco ball, I was out on the balcony with a pen in my hand, intent on capturing as much of the moment on paper. Even at 7am the Mediterranean sun is intense; I soon stripped to a t-shirt and felt the natural warmth on my skin. That was happiness.

Chris still slept, but as I could no longer contain my lust for adventure, I grabbed my camera and set off to walk the coastal road. I had hardly begun my wandering when I came upon a winding stairway that beckoned me to descend it. Perhaps it would lead to the sea, I thought, but we were too high up, and it turned out to be a deadend. The vistas were worth it, though.

I climbed back up and continued down the road with some of the sharpest curves I’ve ever encountered. Mirrors have been placed on many of them so cars know when oncoming traffic approaches, and even walking the curves felt harrowing, especially when buses passed. But the views were incredible, almost fantasy-like. Spring was in full force; flowers bloomed from every crevice and the sunshine gave radiance to everything beneath it.

There was too much to miss by sleeping. I returned and tried to get Chris out of bed. Eventually he did meet me downstairs for cappuccinos by the sea, and then we set off on a leisurely walk that would eventually take us to the town of Amalfi. Trepidation followed me for a bit; I was unsure if Chris would partake in the wandering nature of my travel style. But when I spotted a stairway that went straight up the mountain, he was right behind me, puffing away as we both struggled to make the ascent. Some men worked on a house up there, standing on the narrowest of scaffolding and carrying building materials from a truck somewhere above. It looked like tough work.

We were searching for the small church whose belltower we had seen from the main road far below, but in those narrow passageways we could see nothing but walls – we had no idea where the church was, which proved to be funny because as we were talking about trying to find it we were literally standing next to it. A man making a delivery to the church brought the pastor to the door, and he was happy to let us look around.

St. Michael the Archangel was its name. Michael carried a sword in his hand and presided over a church that reminded me of a one room schoolhouse, only the art was sophisticated and the learning was rote. The small organ in the back was broken and probably always would be, since the price tag to repair it was €40,000. I noticed someone had put paper crowns on the painting of Jesus and Mary behind the altar. We later discovered this arrangement in all the churches we visited.

Chris and I like to visit old churches for mostly different reasons, he being interested in the religious part of it while I like the history and mythology part. But we both appreciate the art, the architecture, and the appreciation human beings had for beautiful things – soulful things – in building such structures. Today, buildings are constructed with concrete and glass and right angles. Our sculptures are giant balls and piles of scrap metal someone pretends is an emotion or a metaphor for the human condition. (Ironically, it could be a metaphor for the state of art today.) Our paintings are blobs of colors or blurred landscapes or profane images meant to offend. Our music…my god, don’t get me started on the music. Atrocious. Noise. With scientific studies to prove it.

The ascent to the church was an adventure on which we embarked simply to have a destination to reach at the end of our climb. What followed was one of our favorite experiences of the trip, with Chris talking to the pastor (in Italian) and him offering us posters of St. Michael the Archangel and showing off his collection of homemade booze and giving us a sampling of the lemoncello, which tasted like lemon drops candy.

Ah yes, candy! What better metaphor for the sweetness of that day next to the blue honey of the Mediterranean! The priest gave us directions to the town from the church, though we would have made it there eventually on our own. We continued on through narrow passageways, down steps, and past thousands of lemon trees. Lemons! There aren’t too many things in life that excite me as much as locally-grown produce. Not kidding. Those lemon trees were gorgeous; they complimented the sea as a natural work of art. And the SIZE of some of them! Lemons as big as our heads! I’ve never heard of such a thing and could not get over the wonder of it all.

We winded our way around the meandering curves, stopping at a cemetery that had caught our eye from a distance, a respectfully sad, hauntingly beautiful, and sincerely thought-provoking final resting place for fishermen, lemon farmers, business people  in the tourism industry, and others from all walks of Italian life.

Not far from the cemetery was a fish market with some fun fish and more varieites of clams than I had known existed. Just like produce, I love fish markets. So fresh, so natural, and you know a local fisherman made the catch from the sea and not some factory farm. It’s the essence of living. Small businesses rule! (Or I wish they ruled instead of the mega-multinational corporations that have enslaved the minds of humanity.) If we had had access to a grill, no doubt we would have purchased some fish.

Seafood is fascinating, coming from the mysterious depths of a place most of us will never see. Aquariums intrigue me; a whole other world exists away from that which depends on breathing air to survive. Beneath the surface of the water lies species alien to us land dwellers, often of wild colors and shapes and anatomies. Under all those tons of water is an inaccessible beauty, pure, divine.

Too bad we destroy it with garbage, oil spills, overfishing, and global warming.

After the fish market, we stopped at a roadside café for beers and a break. We’d only walked about a mile but it had been up and down the mountains and more importantly, the café was located at the intersection of the road that goes up and the road that stays down, so there was plenty to watch in addition to the vistas. We only had about a mile to go and enjoyed every step, even with Chris’s blistering feet. It wouldn’t be long before we arrived to the town of Amalfi…

To be continued...

Il pesce è morto

We had a layover in Istanbul on our way from Beirut to Rome. We took a smaller airline, Pegasus Air, and flew into the smaller of Istanbul’s two airports. We hadn’t slept; our flight took off at 6:30am and we were supposed to arrive in Rome some time after 1pm. It was our open night, so we had no reservation because we hadn’t decided whether or not to stay in Rome or go further south. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but neither of us had expected the Istanbul buffet.

It was because we hadn’t slept that I made a choice that would ultimately prove to be very costly in time and money. There it was, all laid out – the tomatoes and cucumbers and three types of cheeses and breads and meats. Oh, the meats. That had to be it. I ate a plateful of food while we waiting to board the flight that would take us to Rome, a flight through which we both slept. We were making our descent into Italy when the first pangs hit me. Ooh, THAT was uncomfortable. Little did I know it hadn’t really started.

Food poisoning. You get it in countries that don’t value governmental health and safety regulations. What I had was enough to turn any government-hating libertarian into a communist. We were going to take the bus from the airport to Rome, a far cheaper alternative to the train, but the buses didn’t have bathrooms in them, and I wasn’t going to make it into town without a bathroom. The train was our only option, though one that cost 17€ ($24) more than what we had budgeted. By the time we got to Rome, I was seriously considering going to a hospital, the pain was that bad. There could be no walking around searching for a pensione hotel for me. To top it off, it was raining and cold, and the train station bathroom cost a freaking euro, and we had no coins. We tried a hotel near the train station but it was too expensive. I needed a bathroom, badly, and we needed wifi to do a search, but where to find them?

A place near the train station saved us. It was a restaurant and normally you had to order dinner to sit there, but a nice Italian waiter named Tom let us in to sit, use the facilities, and for Chris, to drink a beer while he waited for my stomach to settle a bit.  But it wasn’t going to. We sat in there for at least an hour. By then, evening had arrived , and because I wasn’t going to be able to walk around Rome, we made a decision to cut our losses for the day and just head south so we could get to the Amalfi Coast the next day, the main destination of our trip.

But I couldn’t handle being on a train for so long, so we took the more expensive but faster train to Salerno, one that was 30€ ($42) over our budget. At that point, I didn’t care. I needed to get to a bed as soon as possible and try to sleep the illness off. We arrived in Salerno around 10pm to discover that it was pouring rain. We still had to find a hotel, so we tried the one across from the train station. Now, in Italy, it is common to negotiate a room price, especially at 10pm when the room would otherwise go empty. We asked about the rate for a room for a night, but the figure was nearly double what we were willing to pay, so we told the guy what we were looking for. But he wouldn’t even talk to us, not even to point us in the direction of more accommodation. What a snob. I can’t stand people like that. He’d rather make nothing on an empty room than take a few bucks off the rate.

We didn’t walk too far before we found a café of some sort, where Chris asked about cheap hotels in the area. The guy told us about a B&B about 300 meters down the road, so we headed in that direction. 14 Leoni was the name of it, a seaside guest house with views of the Med. Chris negotiated a decent rate, still 10€ ($14) more than what we wanted, but it would have to do.

It was the first time Chris really had to use Italian. The woman who greeted us loved to talk, but since she spoke no English, I was not really a part of the conversation. She was almost motherly in her concern about my illness and at one point shoved some sort of gooey digestif into my mouth before I had time to react. She even gave me a bucket for the night. While we sat in the lobby, the two of them talking and me wishing they would stop so I could go to bed, I noticed two fish in a pitcher full of dirty water, trying to suck air from the surface. They were suffocating, but how do you tell a stranger who has been so kind to you that she is killing the fish by neglecting to change the water?

We finally did get to the room, and I told Chris to salvage at least something in the day and go out and have a beer somewhere but bring me back some Sprite or ginger ale. Salerno is a sleepy town in the off season; it was nearly midnight and he had a tough time finding a place, but he did, and apparently enjoyed it. He brought me back Sprite and ginger ale, the first things I could keep down all day. The stomach was starting to get better. I had a fabulous sleep and woke up to the sea.

Chris had eaten a tiny piece of that awful meat in the Istanbul airport. We’ll never know if it was that unfortunate nibble or the fact that he didn’t eat anything all day, either, but he didn’t feel too well in the morning. My stomach was still cramping but I was able to travel. We went down to breakfast and I noticed the goldfish had died. Il pesce è morto, the woman said. The fish is dead.

We both were dragging, so it was after 1pm by the time we set out for Pompei, the one place in Italy I had not wanted to miss, given my interest in ancient history and the Romans. The train would get us there in a half hour, we were told, so we’d be there by 2pm. The guys in the train station proceeded in their job the way things are done in Italy – as if clocks and schedules did not exist. We bought two tickets and made our way to the platform that the guy told us to go to. Not once had he mentioned it was leaving so we better hurry. We got to the platform just as the train was pulling out of the station.

You’d think there’d be another one, right? Ha! This is Europe. Of course there was a train strike! We went back to the guy at the ticket office and he got another guy who spoke English to explain to us that we should take the bus instead because there were no trains to Pompei for quite a while. And that’s what we did. We went to the bus stop and waited and waited and waited some more. Because of the strike, the buses were extra crowded. When the bus finally did arrive, we pushed each other to get on it and crushed each other once we were. We had only gone a couple stops when the bus became so full that the doors ceased to operate correctly and the bus couldn’t go. We were stuck there for 10 or 15 minutes before enough people finally gave up and got off. Yeah, it was that dumb.

When we finally got going, I enjoyed the ride. It was nice to pass through small Italian towns  and wind our way through the mountains. But we stopped at every corner, it seemed. The bus took TWO HOURS to get to Pompei. It was now 4pm. And then, the fatigue and the illness and the stresses on our budget finally got to me, and I started to cry. Why? Because the last tickets to enter the ruins were sold at 3:30pm. The one thing I had wanted to do more than anything on this trip would not be.

Poor Chris. I didn’t have any rationality left in me. I shut down. I didn’t want to talk. I was so upset that everything seemed to be going wrong that I forgot my number one rule of travel: make the most of every situation.  I could see the ruins from the gate, but I was not allowed to go in. My heart was broken. There I was, staring at Vesuvius, the first active volcano I had ever seen in my life, and I couldn’t see one of the greatest archeological sites on the planet because we were two weeks away from the summer hours and the stupid train strike and the two hour long bus ride and both of us not feeling well and Chris’s feet were blistered and the fish was dead.

See, at that point I thought it was significant because everything seemed to be going wrong and the goldfish died and “goldfish” was the name of our hotel in Amalfi. Pesce d’Oro. We were going there after Pompei. I was so distraught that I wondered if the dead fish were some sort of omen. I don’t believe in omens. But when enough is going wrong, you have to wonder about these things. I told a woman at work about it a couple of days ago and she said maybe the fish dying was a turning point. I laughed at the thought of the fish sacrificing its life so that we could have a good trip, but you know, the universe is a mysterious and wondrous place. All living organisms are bundles of energy and that energy has to go somewhere when we die. So it goes.

Eventually I did calm down. Chris told me we could come back, that it looked cool and he wanted to see it, too. We walked into the modern town of Pompei in search of food. Of course, it was siesta or whatever they call it in Italy and all the restaurants were closed for another two hours. In the meantime, we visited the Shrine of the Virgin of the Rosary of Pompei, a beautiful church. Those Italians sure do know about beauty. Churches like that can make a non-religious person wish he were religious.

There really wasn’t much else in the town. It seemed odd that a town existed there at all after the original town had been buried beneath the lava of Vesuvius in 79AD. I thought about the Pompeians praying to Jupiter and Isis and Apollo and all the other gods they worshipped as the lava covered their bodies, the horror of it, the burning and the suffocation and the knowing that you were going to die a horrific death. But the Pompei ruins aren’t about death. Quite the opposite, actually. Going to the ruins would allow you to see how people lived at that time. You just have to be there before 3:30pm to see it.

We found a restaurant that was open. I was excited to drink my first glass of wine in Italy. Like everything else, however, I was disappointed. The guy had given me bad wine that tasted like vinegar. The food was ok and I was happy to be able to eat it.

The trains were running again; we took one back to Salerno then stood to catch a bus to Amalfi. The sign said one was coming at 8:30, but I was not convinced until we were on that bus and sitting down that something had actually gone right in the day. The bus ride to Amalfi was harrowing. I had to close my eyes at times, because the coastal road is, well, let’s just say you stare straight down into blackness when you’re whipping around tight curves that don’t seem to have enough room for a big bus. We made it to Amalfi and found a cab to take us to the B&B since it was getting late. The guy ripped us off. He charged  20€ ($28) to go 4 km. If we had arrived earlier, we could have had someone from the hotel pick us up. So in the end, me getting sick cost us $108. Much worse, though, was the entire day we lost because of it!

Pesce d’Oro changed everything, however, starting with the bottle of wine the owners gave to us when we arrived. We were about to be awed…

To be continued...

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.