Pigeon Rocks

They don't sound like much, but the Pigeon Rocks were a highlight of my week.  My roommate E. and I walked down to the coast heading south on Tuesday and we found them quite easily.  They're well within the city limits and quite hard to miss:

We walked around above, taking pictures and watching the people swimming around and climbing up them.  Then a gentleman (well, several of them after a while) approached us offering to take us out in a boat around the rocks.  It was way too expensive at first, he wanted 37500 (about $25) to take the two of us out, but we talked him down to 15000 ($10) and we walked down the cliff to his boat.  The hike was a little treacherous, but Abu Mustafa was a great and jovial guide:

The boat broke down after that picture because he took his hand off the throttle, but he got it started again quickly enough.  The view from underneath one of the rocks:

The Cedars

It was the last stop at the end of our epically busy day driving north from Beirut but we eventually got to the Cedars, best known as a ski slope but of interest to us because of its small reserve of cedar trees.  After some bus trouble, we arrived maybe an hour and a half before sunset.  I'd like you to remember that when you look at my photographs.  Please.

The Cedars is directly above Bcharre, where I spent some time after my hiking trip at the beginning of my time here in Lebanon.  The view from so far up is quite something, but once you know that a thousand years ago all the mountains were covered in cedars, everything starts to look bare.  Beautiful, but bare.

Some factoids: The cedars of Lebanon were mentioned in the Old Testament and were a source of enormous wealth for the Phoenicians, who sold the valuable wood to Egypt and Palestine.  The original Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem was built of Lebanese cedar, and so were many Egyptian sarcophagi.

But enough history, back to the this millennium.  Once we got to the reserve at the Cedars, we walked around the whole area in about 20 minutes.  There are not a lot of cedar trees left, and regrowing them is extremely difficult.  They grow very slowly, needing irrigation and care until they are 8 years old, and not producing cones until they are 35-70 years old.  Climate change in Lebanon (I mean this in the sense of climate change through millennia, not the Al Gore type although I'm sure that has affected the region too) has made summers longer and winters shorter, meaning that the trees have to grow for longer and longer times before their roots reach water.

The trees in the park were very dramatic, but Cedars don't look like the tree you see on the Lebanese flag until they are much older.  Here's an old cedar tree:

The Souk Soap Shop

A souk is a market, but in very different sense than market as we can conceive of the world in the U.S.  A typical souk is a very (sometimes very, very, very) long alley with stalls on each side where merchants sell their wares.  I had a souk near my dorm in Tunis, and it began with a hardware section, then bread and cakes, trinkets, fruit, meat, and sweets.  Then you walked through a plaza area to continue along your way to find clothing, plates, and just about anything you wanted.  There was no English, no price tags, and no apparent logic to its organization, but I loved going to the souk.

One of the stops on our tour to Tripoli was the Khan al-Saboun, a world famous soap-maker.  We didn't stay at the shop for long, but we got a chance to smell a lot of different soaps and read their creative grammar:

Sorry, I spend a large portion of my days getting laughed at on the street when I open my mouth and speak Arabic so I couldn't resist that picture.  There was also a Quran made out of soap:

Next up: the Cedars.  The pharaohs used them to build support structures for their pyramids.  They used to cover almost all of Lebanon.  And most importantly they are a blog entry not to be missed.

Funny, Current, and not Stereotypical

First You Tube video of the day was terrible, this one should balance it out.

UPDATE: This video has its issues as well.  More here.

Corruption in Lebanon

A great story my professor told today, after introducing the topic of corruption by explaining that other Arabs come to Lebanon to learn all about it:

There once was an old minister who retiring in a few weeks, and he set up a meeting with the man who is going to be the new minister at his house.  His successor, a thirty year old man, arrives at his house and is shocked by the opulence.  How, he asks, did you afford all of this on a government salary?  The old minister points to a bridge in the distance connecting the airport to the city, you see that bridge?  Yes, the younger man says.  I built it and 18 percent of the cost is in my pocket, replies the minister.  You know the road between Tripoli and Hasroun, 18 percent in my pocket.  The old minister continues like this for a while, explaining to the younger man that a palace like his is not possible on a government salary.

A year later, the retired minister meets the current minister at his house and is shocked to see that it is three times as big as his, and after only a year in government service.  He can't believe it, it took him decades to accumulate his house and cars, and after only a year the younger man has more than he ever did.  Astounded, he asks the younger man how he did it.  Well, says the younger man, you see the three new bridges connecting the airport and the city?  No, the older man says, I don't.  You've seen the new road connecting Beirut and Tyre?  No, I haven't seen that either, replies the older man.  Exactly, replies the younger minister, one hundred percent of the costs in my pocket.

This speaks for itself...

I think it says 'I'm a terrible advertising executive with absolutely no creativity to speak of so I resort to stereotypes', but what do you hear?

Citadel of Raymond de Saint-Gilles

My first stop in Tripoli (طرابلس) was this old fort, built in the 13th century.  It has been built and rebuilt through the centuries, the last addition made in the 19th century.

Our weekend tour was clearly planned out, but none of us (the fifty students who the trip was planned for) had any idea where exactly we were going to be stopping and when.  After visiting the most famous sweet shop in Lebanon, Abdul Rahman Hallab, we headed to the old citadel.

My first thoughts are the citadel were (in order) 'god, it's hot', 'wow, this is huge', and 'why are there tanks and soldiers in here?'.  The entire country of Lebanon is a mixture of historical eras, and there were moments this weekend where I could have gone back in time and absolutely nothing would have been different.

Enough of me, but in case you haven't heard enough about the citadel, here you go.  And most importantly, here are some pictures.

The holes they used to pour boiling oil through onto invaders only have sunshine passing through these days:

The citadel was huge, I could not take a picture of the whole building from the outside, this is a general idea of what the inside was like:

The fort's renovators each brought their own architectural styles to the building, but few of the details remain today.  One of my favorite pictures of the day, some detail that remained: