Walking the streets

3/14/10

Today was a get acquainted day. We visited the National Museum in an area of downtown Beirut with new-ish buildings interspersed with cranes, empty lots, and rubble. The National Museum was closed from the start of the civil war in 1975, its collection thrown into the basement in piles of jumbled antiquities. A film at the entrance on the re-building of the museum (it re-opened in 1999) showed artifacts strewn in piles in the water soaked, leaking basement. The collection on display is nice though small, and brings viewers from the Iron Age through the medieval Mamluke period.

After wonderful fruit smoothies at a café overlooking Pigeon Rocks, three story natural stone formations just off of the beach, we joined a five hour walking tour of West and downtown Beirut. Features included:

× The café were Yasser Arafat set up his PLO office in the 1970s, as he was a chain-drinking coffee lover. Two Israeli soldier were shot dead there after the 1982 invasion, at a time when Israelis freely walked Hamra Street and they looked to be fixtures in Lebanon;

× Buildings from the Ottoman period that are slowly being renovated; apparently, rent control in the ”historic” section of West Beirut has hindered renovation and rebuilding;

× The International Trade Center—never occupied as it was being built when the civil war broke out. It was used as a sniper tower reaching anyone venturing out along the periphery of Hamra Street. It was at one end of the Green Zone, the primary battleground during the war;

× The Holiday Inn—it was occupied from 1974 to 1975, and it was at another end of the Green Zone. Empty, pockmarked, no windows, interior walls, it is a depressing reminder of the viciousness of the war;

× The “Deep Trench” area—it is a zone that is still empty, probably being monitored by what our tour guide euphemistically called “our brothers” in Hezbollah. We entered a ruined courtyard in the dark, and written on the wall in graffiti was “we will return”...an ominous note.

× Martyr’s Square--when I visited in 1972, it was a bustling square in the center of the city. The statue at its center remains, surrounded by acres of empty lots, an urban moonscape;

× Rafik Hariri’s burying place, actually a sarcophagus covered with white flowers (replaced every day). It looks like a coconut covered layer cake…

× Wadi Abu Jamil – the Jewish quarter, it was completely razed and is being re-built, the synagogue is being renovated as a “museum” because no one expects it to be used for prayer. Our tour guide requested that I send him my photos from 1972….

My abilities to speak Arabic are being stirred slowly, though there are many different words and sounds than those I learned in Egypt. Sasha, EB’s son, expresses many of the frustrations I have discussed with Lauren. He is using the same book series (Al-Kitab), and it sounds like the linguists who put that together are as stymied as educators in the Middle East on how to teach Arabic. Because no one speaks the Modern Standard language (fus’ha) but that is what is read and heard on radio and TV from news announcers, the schizophrenia of what is spoken and what is read is very challenging. Also, the dialects are quite different and there is no central authority (as in China regarding Mandarin) mandating what everyone will learn. Whatever central authority exists in the religious establishment, it hearkens back to Koranic Arabic, totally obscure from a 21^st century media and global perspective.