Lebanon Travel Adventures
Christmas 2007
Monday, December 24, 2007
The Syrian Embassy in Athens wouldn't give an American resident of Greece
a visa except as part of an organized group tour. The flights from Athens
to Damascus were all full, so joining a bus tour wasn't an option. But
entering Lebanon is the easiest thing in the world. Less than two hours
from Athens, no visas required, 30 days granted with no questions asked.
(to return to the Athens
News short version, click here)
We were met by an expediter from Rida International tours, who put us
in a van bound for the Casa d'Or hotel in Hamra near American University
of Beirut (AUB). Blue skies and warm. Our first taste of Beirut traffic
jams. The different parts of the city are poorly connected, even when
roads are not blocked or narrowed to one lane for security reasons. Major
road construction projects to tie the various neighborhoods back together
have stagnated due to war and political infighting. A reasonable but not
excessive number of ruined buildings with bullet holes, many still
occupied. Lots of armored personnel carriers (APCs) with machine guns at
checkpoints, but everyone just drives/strolls past them with a polite nod.
That first afternoon we took a walk through AUB - ID check at the gate
- and enjoyed the fine sea view and beautiful landscaping. We witnessed
the wonderful spectacle of a river of cats flowing past us. Perhaps sixty,
all colors, trotted intently toward the back steps of College Hall
(truck-bombed in 1991 but perfectly rebuilt soon after). The cats stared
intently at three people wrestling with some equipment on the steps.
Clearly they were expecting cat food. They began to wander off. Per the
internet, the semi-feral AUB cats are famous - a student group feeds and
spays them -- but there are draconian regulations forbidding them entry to
university buildings. Given the usual treatment of animals in the Middle
East, the transformational effect of AUB is striking -- probably the best
thing the USA ever accomplished in Lebanon. (USAID tries to correct this
wrong impression of mine with a billboard every five kilometers showing an
inscrutably avuncular Lebanese man in a sweater, a squalling or maybe
laughing baby, and something forgettable enough that I have forgotten it,
all gifts of the American people.)
We then walked down to the shore road below AUB, and found one swanky
sports club (alas, "askeriye", one of the few Arabic words I can
still read, means "military"), a minor yacht harbor in desperate
need of rehab, and a line of dubious-looking dives with hookahs out front.
We walked west past a rather grimy Luna Park, then trudged uphill on a
narrow dirt road shoulder past the run-down military post to the more
glamorous part of the corniche we should have been on. There we downed a
massive glass of arak (Lebanese firewater, like ouzo but 100-plus proof
vice 70-odd) at one of the cafes above the Pigeon Rocks to celebrate
surviving the lack of sidewalks. Then a taxi back to the hotel for a nap
before finding a Christmas Eve service.
It turns out you can't take a taxi into the rebuilt Downtown known to
taxi drivers as "Solidére" (from the construction consortium
that built it). Since the latest wave of assassinations, the streets are
closed by police checkpoints to protect the dignitaries who live or work
there. But we were dropped off a couple of blocks away, and wandered up
the new avenues, passed elegant but moribund shops, blundered into the
Grand Café, just off the Place de l'Etoile, and ate excellent meze
(Lebanese hors d'oeuvres) at 1100 pm while the place gradually filled up
with well-dressed Lebanese of both sexes puffing away at narguilehs
brought to them by young men in mock-Ottoman fez and baggy pants. A
late-night nicotine culture here.
We then walked past the ruins of Roman Beirut to the rebuilt St.
George's Maronite Catholic Cathedral. The Maronites are a Christian sect
whose permanently bad relations with all their Lebanese neighbors caused
most of them, from the Crusades or even before, to cut a series of deals
with the Vatican, the French, the Israelis, or anyone else naïvely greedy
enough. They dropped Monotheletism, tweaked their Syriac liturgy, and
hired French-speaking nannies (gradually shifting to English-speaking
Philippinas) for their children. But there weren't many children at this
particular mass. Instead, it was short, bullet-headed men in leather
coats, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Karabakh freedom fighters I
used to keep my distance from in Armenia. This is the Church Militant. A
number of them were wearing orange scarves. One tough-looking woman wore
an orange headband. This meant, we later learned, that they belong to the
faction of Michel Aoun, one of the key Lebanese warlords. He badly wants
to be president of Lebanon, and has cut a deal with Hezbollah (the Shiite
group of which the USG intensely disapproves) to block the election of the
less controversial Maronite general the USG has (vainly?) endorsed.
The music was beautiful, a fine mix of Eastern and Western sung by an
invisible alto. We turned right outside the church. The first military
checkpoint let us through, the soldiers confirming (in a mixture of
inadequate French and inadequate English) that yes we could get out that
way. We walked to the next rolls of razor wire to learn that no, we could
not get out. The route down to the bright lights of the Grand Café was
blocked by other barriers. There was a dark and ominous tent city in the
other direction. We flailed around for a few minutes, went back to the
church, and eventually followed someone to where the main highway became
visible. Eventually a taxi passed and took us back to the hotel. But oddly
enough, the almost deserted, heavily armed downtown was not particularly
frightening. The machine guns and razor wire are there to protect us, and
perhaps the bottle of very decent Lebanese red wine at dinner helped.
Christmas Day
Public buildings are closed for the major holidays of Lebanon's many
sects. Therefore, we walked back to Solidere, looking for the Roman bath
marked prominently on our free tourist map. We hit barbed wire. I asked
the guards about the bath, which I calculated was less than a hundred
meters away. Most of the soldiers hadn't heard of it. And no, we couldn't
get there from here.
After some consultation they reluctantly divulged that the Prime
Minister's office was nearby. We tried a long circumnavigation. Though
gaps in the buildings we could see a beautiful new pedestrian mall
fronting the bath, but every access to it is blocked by razor wire. So we
wandered happily around Downtown. In the central circle with the Rolex
clock tower we drank cappuccino while stylish hyphenated-Lebanese moms let
their kids play with their new scooters on the empty streets. Then we
walked up to Achrafieh, a well-heeled Christian neighborhood, for late
Christmas lunch at Relais de l'Entrecote, a Paris-Beirut chain serving an
adequate filet with secret sauce. We then holed up at the hotel for a very
long Christmas nap.
Wednesday, December 26 We took a cab to the National Museum. Sizewise,
it's modest, but immaculately restored after being shot up pretty badly
owing to its position athwart the Green Line. The finds from the 19th c.
BCE royal shaft graves at Byblos are impressive (finer work than that from
the Mycenae grave circles), including royal gifts from Egypt such as an
obsidian and gold snuffbox with pharaoh's monogram in hieroglyphics. Nice
marbles showing odd cultural mixtures. A wonderfully squat Egyptianizing
god-pharaoh in weathered limestone is the centerpiece of the left hall. In
the center a floor mosaic of the seven sages of Greek antiquity complete
with their famous sayings (I wasn't aware until then - Plato for some
reason neglects to mention it - that the Socratic maxim "Know
thyself" is attributed to Chilon, an eminent Spartan predecessor).
We walked back to the hotel via a rather dubious Muslim neighborhood.
The window shopping was interesting. The commercial philosophy seems to be
faith that if one keeps the stock dusted for long enough, eventually some
wealthy and obtuse Gulf Arab will wander in looking to furnish his
seraglio with enormous imitation Meissen urns in pink and green with
nipple-less appliqué nymphets. In such wares Lebanon abounds.
Afterwards we had coffee in his office with an old client/friend of
Regina's, part of a Beirut publishing family. He gave us his very downbeat
Maronite take on the political situation and advised us not to travel in
the Bekaa or the south except as part of a group. We nodded politely, but
by then it was too late to stop us.
We next took a long cab ride up to the Brazilian ambassador's elegantly
chilly residence in Baabda in the foothills above the empty Lebanese
presidential palace. A friend of the Brazilian Chargé in Athens, he gave
us a more diplomatic but equally cynical version of politics here.
Brazil's population includes some eight million citizens with some
claim to Lebanese descent, almost twice the current population of Lebanon,
from migrations dating back to 1876, when peripatetic Brazilian Emperor
Pedro II invited surplus survivors of the Maronite-Druze civil war of 1860
to move to Brazil, but continuing even now. Some of them return to Lebanon
and still speak Portuguese (Regina bumped into two Brazilians in 10
minutes doing some quick shopping a couple of nights later). So the
ambassador has lots of sources, though mostly from the Christian factions.
After two hours, his drivers took us down the mountain and dropped us at
the Abdelwahab restaurant for a superb Lebanese dinner.
Thursday, December 27
Our driver Marwan Fakhreddine was waiting outside the hotel promptly at
8:30 a.m. with a Mercedes van. He's a non-observant Sunni who spent most
of the civil war in Germany, Switzerland, Tunisia, and Libya. We were
delighted to discover his English was much better than advertised. We
drove over the mountain toward the huge north-south Bekaa Valley (choked
with haze, alas), passing many ugly billboards and ruins, including of a
new highway bridge casually destroyed by an Israeli smart bomb in July
2006. After seeing the Ummayyad walled palace/trading post of Anjaar and
chatting briefly with the Armenians who live there (they're more recent
migrants and speak something close to Yerevan dialect - other Lebanese
Armenians were incomprehensible) we drove up the hill to a Roman-period
ruined temple on a hilltop above Majdel Anjaar. Huge eroded blocks of
stone, massive broken granite columns, much less delicate than Greek work
but undeniably impressive. Our request impressed Marwan. None of his
clients had ever asked to see it before.
All along the road to Baalbek we passed posters of Khomeini, of
kidnapped/murdered Shiite imam Mousa Sadr, of current Hezbollah leader
Nasrullah and his deputy, and of dozens of Hezbollah fighters killed
fighting the Israelis in 2006. But no politics intruded on the temple
complex. Enormous, relatively well preserved, a triumph of religious
politics preserved by being turned into an Islamic fortress, Baalbek
deserves the same armies of tour groups the Acropolis gets. We were not
completely alone - a trickle of Lebanese, plus two brave Boston liberals
accompanying a Lebanese-Canadian woman with a language school in Cairo.
And the mayor of Baalbek. He was a clean old man in a dark suit standing
in the "Temple of Bacchus." I came perilously close to waving
him off -- I thought he was a tour guide -- but he identified himself in
time and was cordial. Regina (concerned with my survival) told him I was
Canadian. I felt very sheepish afterwards (identifying myself as a
Californian was the compromise I adopted afterwards. It seemed to work.
Everyone has a cousin there). The souvenir-sellers of Baalbek are pretty
desperate. I bought a Hezbollah tee-shirt in yellow and green but
explained that buying ancient coins was against my principles (all the
nice ones were clearly fake in any case). No trace of animosity, and no
tension in the air that day in Baalbek.
We caught three more temples on the way home, two at Niha and one on a
dirt track in the hills a kilometer or so further up the same road.
Tantalizing country, but we had no time to explore. Lunch at the Monte
Alberto, a hotel-restaurant perched on a huge rock overlooking the mostly
Christian town of Zahle, the capital of the Bekaa. Zahle is full of
temporary-Brazilians, and the main drag is Brazil Street. Back to Beirut
in the dark (Lebanon is the same time zone as Greece, Pacific Time +10,
though considerably further east, so it gets light and dark early…).
Friday, December 28 On the way to Byblos (Jbail), we stopped in
Antelias, a Beirut suburb, to see the HQ of the Armenian Katholikos of the
ex-Ottoman See of Cilicia in southern Turkey as opposed to the ex-Persian,
then ex-Russian one based at Echmiatsin near Yerevan. It's a very tidy
compound, with a cathedral church, Genocide commemoration chapel, tombs of
previous Katholikoi, and museum/library. The lineage is ancient, but the
facilities are new. They don't get many visitors and were quite friendly,
but Armenian ecclesiastical art has limited appeal. The prize relic, the
right hand of Gregory the Illuminator, is kept in the Katholikos's safe,
after it was stolen and retrieved a few decades ago. It is needed to stir
the holy oil the Katholikos brews up for consecrating bishops etc.
Brandished from the battlements in crucial moments it miraculously daunts
the foe, though seldom enough to change the outcome.
We then drove briefly up to the U.S. Embassy. It is on a hillside in
the remote suburb of Awkar (a much more central embassy was destroyed by
an Islamic Jihad truck bomb in 1983 - the new site was hit the next year,
less badly). Marwan had to keep asking for directions, but I could tell we
were on the right track because the weapons at the check points got bigger
and bigger and the troops manning them got more and more tense. It was not
just my guilty conscience - Regina was begging us to turn around - but we
got a glimpse. Bizarrely, this compound fails to meet basic set-back
standards for an embassy, but at least any truckdriver that approaches it
is in for trouble. (Earlier I tried calling the embassy to see if anyone
was willing to talk. It was the holidays, and the only person available
was a stressed junior political officer who referred me tersely to the web
site. An old friend was the DCM, but he left for better things in Brussels
a few months ago).
The Nahr el Kalb (Dog River) was a disappointment. Too much modern
construction and land fill have made the strategic importance of the place
almost unrecognizable. Various large 20th century plaques obliterate most
of the Roman and previous inscriptions, but there are four thousand years
of superimposed foreign boasts at successfully liberating Lebanon from the
turbulence of its natives. Generally, the north coast is horrifyingly
overbuilt, with half-finished or half-inhabited high-rises mushrooming
from the shoreline up to the mountain crest without any noticeable
planning or even economic calculation. The Lebanese make much of their
living selling worthless pieces of mountain to their migrant cousins and
persuading them to build huge multi-generational houses they (and
particularly their offspring) would seriously regret retiring to. The
beaches are indifferent, from the limited glimpses we got.
Byblos is a fine site. It was warm and sunny. The crusader castle is
compact but interesting, and the ruins are mysterious but evocative. We
had a beer at the Byblos Fishing Club, home of a seriously superannuated
ex-Mexican cultivator of Eurotrash, Pepe the Pirate, but ate instead at
Bab el Mina, the restaurant next door. Food was decent. There we spotted
an old acquaintance of Regina's (and Phyllis's) from Athens, and I was
spotted by an EU expat I had met in Thessaloniki. A small world. We
escaped to buy Regina some extremely elegant earrings in the little souk,
then drove back along the coast, fighting horrible traffic from Jounieh
(site of the famous Casino du Liban) and on into Beirut.
Saturday, December 29
Marwan drove us up into the Chouf mountains, past banana and guava
plantations along the coast. The main town, Christian-populated Deir el
Qamar, has some modestly interesting medieval buildings plus a wonderfully
hideous wax museum in the emir's old palace with a grab-bag of Lebanese
and Catholic celebrities. The tickets seemed excessively expensive, so I
went in solo to take pictures and admire the plexiglas plaque
commemorating a recent visit by King Symeon of Bulgaria (no, Bulgaria
isn't a monarchy any more, but VIPs are sparse in Lebanon these days).
Beit ed Dine, an emir's palace across the valley, is amazing. During
the war, it was protected by Kamal Jumblatt and his son Walid, the
hereditary (and Jesuit-educated) Druze warlords of the Chouf. Walid had
the inspiration to rescue the mosaics from most of the early Christian
churches on the coast (at least that part he controlled) and turn the
stables into a superb museum. The palace baths and reception areas are
reasonably interesting, but the mosaics and the adjoining gardens are
superb.
On the way back, Marwan stopped at his flat in a building next to the
family's guava orchard to introduce his wife Rania and their five
impeccable kids. The older ones attend an English-language private school.
All very sweet. Though I feebly volunteered, he was too polite to make us
take off our boots as every civilized person does entering a house.
Instead, his kids all went and put on their shoes too…
Sunday, December 30
We drove past the banana trees and guavas to Eshmun, the battered and
almost unreadable Phoenician temple site, then to Sidon. Sidon is Sunni,
and most of the posters are of the late PM Rafik Hariri and his son.
Hariri left Sidon as a penniless young man for Saudi Arabia. He returned
fabulously wealthy only a few years later. A large new mosque with gold
leaf on the doors on the north entrance of Sidon celebrates Hariri's
father. Per gossip we heard, not he but rather Saudi King Fahd would have
been Rafik's biological father. Lebanese insist there is a strong
resemblance, and in pre-DNA days perhaps Rafik exploited it to make his
first fortune. As prime minister he let the contract for rebuilding Beirut
to a company he owned. Even his assassination doesn't really inspire
people to speak glowingly of him. Not a good sign…
We visited the sea castle and then very well-tended soap museum in
Sidon sponsored by the Audi banking family. The covered streets of the
souk are lively. We saw many banners spread over doorways welcoming the
newly returned participants in the Haj to Mecca. South of Sidon, the local
branch of the Islamic Brotherhoods in Egypt, Jema'a Islamiye, was
celebrating its martyrs in a series of posters.
Toward Tyre things become Shiite. We passed a big, crowded,
tense-seeming Palestinian refugee camp on the right crowned with a huge
poster of Sheikh Yassine, the Hamas leader. Tyre itself is dominated by
the old Shiite militia Amal, with photos of Nabih Berri and missing imam
Moussa Sadr, or occasionally of Berri and Nasrullah shaking hands to
signal they are now working together. Outside town, Hezbollah posters are
much in evidence, but no t-shirts. We passed the occasional Khomeini or
Mousa Sadr banner, along with signs "Lebanon forever" sponsored
by an Iranian relief agency.
Tyre has a fantastic paved Roman road lined with tombs. Just inside
(actually, part of) the town perimeter is a massive hippodrome, the best
preserved chariot-racing track in the Roman world they say. Some rows of
seats preserved, an Egyptian obelisk for the start/finish line, and
foundations for turning posts. But the town itself is nothing to write
home about. We were overcharged for a fish lunch at the port, but it was
tasty enough. The Roman downtown is lots of restored columns but not a lot
of information. Regina put her foot down about not going further south
toward the Israeli border. This was sensible. Sigh…
Monday, December 31
Marwan drove us to Bcharre, a Maronite village overlooking the Qadisha
Valley in north-central Lebanon. We were booked into the Chbat Hotel. That
afternoon we walked to the Khalil Gibran museum (closed Mondays, alas) and
inspected the miraculous healing grotto/spring with ghastly French-style
Madonnas and the Phoenician monumental tomb above. Some pious idiot,
inspired by Lourdes, plundered the poor box and started to build a huge
hospital on the rock near the grotto. Wiser heads intervened too late,
when the building was already complete enough to glue a huge marble
Madonna on top. Now they are wondering what to do with the empty shell of
a structure large enough to give every man, woman, and child of Bcharre a
private hospital room, had they the decency to fall ill of some lingering
disease at the same time. Then we rested for the ordeal ahead.
As we hoped, the New Year's Eve party at the Chbat was a blast -
sumptuous buffet, silly hats, and a room full of young, wealthy Maronites
shimmying to a DJ. I studied the next table, with blurry-faced young
mafiosi swigging Jack Daniels while their designer-bagged girl friends
sent text messages. We enjoyed ourselves but were in bed by 1 am.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Got up at the crack of dawn (9 am), had breakfast, and loaded our gear in
a taxi. Mr. Chbat, the jolly mountaineer, had arranged for us to be
dropped at a convenient point above the Qadisha valley and then met a few
miles away. So we toured a series of fine Maronite monasteries built into
caves in the cliffs of this deep, striking river gorge. (We highly
recommend Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain for a more detailed and lurid
version of a similar walk).
Weather was perfect, and at the Saidet Hawqa hermitage we met a
friendly group of young archaeologists led by Professor Hani Abdul-Nour,
an entomologist-spelunker who has studied the local caves for decades and
found lots of neat stuff, including a cache of mummified medieval
abbesses. The hermit, alas, was at prayer, but Regina stole a look at him
in the back of the chapel. Unlike his medieval predecessors he has a flush
toilet and several square meals a day (to judge from his bulk). Apparently
such amenities are required to attract reliable hermits in today's
sinfully prosperous age. This one was imported from Colombia. The walk up
the gorge included Mar Qanoubine, ancestral seat of the Maronite
patriarchs, and lovely scenery. Then to Tripoli.
The Quality Inn Tripoli is a large, modernish motel with stained
carpeting at the edge of the Tripoli International Fair. This in turn was
designed by Brazilian super-architect Oscar Niemeyer in 1966 and then
promptly swallowed by civil war. His cement mushrooms have not aged well.
From our window we could see, under a huge concrete roof, neat rows of
white canvas tents, a Lebanese Army platoon guarding the UN team that has
reinforced the hotel's threadbare client base since the Palestinian
refugee camp war in mid-2007. But everyone says they still hold events at
the Fair.
Wednesday, January 2
We woke Wednesday morning to a thunderstorm lasting until 11 am. I emailed
my Athens News column from
the business center next to the UN radio room. Rain stopped just as we
left the hotel. The air was washed clean but the old city of Tripoli was
slimy with long uncollected garbage. A dead cat glowered at us from the
gutter outside the vegetable market.
We took a cab to the citadel and braved an unrailed stair to stare at
the river flowing brown between garbage-strewn concrete banks far below.
The fortress was built (or maybe rebuilt) by the crusaders, but most of it
is later. Some stone cannonballs, random early sarcophagi (no Tripoli
museum yet despite years of promises), and lots of damp, vaulted rooms. At
the back of one large, empty hall we saw foam mattresses, rumpled
blankets, and two untended assault rifles leaning against the wall. Not
good military discipline, but I refrained from borrowing one to embarrass
them. Perhaps this is where they park surplus mujaheddin. We crept out the
back way, and thus failed to tip the guard who had opened two
unnecessarily locked gates for us. He almost caught up but by then we were
in the crowd of police outside Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent's gateway.
The grand mosque down the hill is being restored with money from Rafiq
Hariri's son, but is currently a muddy mess. The hamam next door is a sad,
junk-filled reminiscence of grand times in the bath. We would not have
found it had not the sweetly multilingual guide Ali Khawaja found us
staring nervously. (presumably everyone in the old city has orders to call
him if they spot unattended gringos). For the next two hours he led us
through Mameluke and miscellaneous souks, khans, medressahs, and mosques,
and steered us away from the pro-Syria soap factory to the authentic one.
The local population is touchy about religion, and Ali (who wouldn't mind
a beer or two himself) tiptoed around them. I gave the white-bearded,
white-robed imam my best assalaamu aleikum (with the obsolete classical
case ending), and he was cordially high-flown and incomprehensible in
return.
Tripoli is 700,000 or so, mostly Sunni, crowded and pretty poor. Women
mostly in headscarves. Lots of religious dress. Posters of Hariri, late
father and son-replacement, and of a couple of local boys, one the
transportation minister. Ali blamed the filth and dreariness on migrants
from the mountain villages plus 150,000 fairly recent Syrian migrants. His
childhood memories are of a much more gracious city. He put us in a cab,
and we were off to the hotel, where Marwan found us eating lunch. It was
back to the Casa d'Or, only 90 minutes away.
Our last night in Beirut we celebrated by going out to a swanky French
restaurant, Talleyrand in the L'Orient-Jour newspaper building, full of
rich folks smoking large cigars. All the menu items were named after
French diplomatic obfuscations, e.g. "Concertation de…" We
split a paté de foie gras, the cheapest Bordeaux they offered, and duck
(me) and beef filet (Regina). Took a taxi home, packed, and went to bed
early for a 5:30 am wake-up. Regina was sick as a dog hours before the
alarm went off, while I had merely a headache and general queasiness. Odd
that we survived multiple meals in dicey local places with no ill effects,
but were done in by haute cuisine… (Many hours later, shamed into
solidarity with Western Civilization, we advanced an alternative
hypothesis, that perhaps it was tainted dates from the Tripoli souk. The
shrouded young woman who sold them to us had a fierce look about her. She
softened, but only for a microsecond, when I deployed my "Kul sene
w'enta b'kheir." The Casa d'Or front desk had armed us with the
appropriate Arabic New Year's greeting, but all the Lebanese we saw were
felicitating each other on their expensive mobile phones with "Happy
New Year" in English.)
Thursday, January 3
We were a little bleary as Marwan drove us to the airport at 6:30 am. It
is easy to enter Lebanon but hard to leave. Long, slow lines at every
stage, worst being an anxious hour at passport control. Then a sprint to
the plane, with no time to spend our surplus Lebanese pounds
(interchangeable with and pegged firmly to the US dollar at 1500:1. The
euro is heavily short-changed for the moment, but the Lebanese are no
fools and will leap to euros once OPEC does).
An easy flight back, but Greek passport control was almost as
nightmarishly slow as Lebanese. Waited seething for 50 minutes, unable to
switch to a faster line because englobed by a family with eight children.
Regina, who did an end-run brandishing her EU passport, waited stoically
on the far side. My own passport is now shop-soiled enough to no longer be
machine-readable, another delay. Then a taxi home to wade through
accumulated emails.
Bottom Line: Lebanon is safe (unless you cross the street or stand next
to a politician or U.S. diplomat), the food is excellent, the weather is
pleasant, the prices are reasonable, and Baalbek, Beit ed-Dine, and the
National Museum are worth the long wait to get out of Lebanon again.
Byblos is charming. The Qadisha valley is a nice hike though scarcely
mythic. The political gossip is arguably the best in the world. One week
is ample, however, for anyone but a maniac archeologist or assassination
buff. There is probably excellent shopping at the malls, but in terms of
local handicrafts we saw nothing very interesting. But I kept us walking
fast enough that maybe we missed amazing treasures.
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