وين الثلج؟

Karim left Beirut early this morning, after having been here for five weeks or so. He’s heading back to Sweden and the cold and snowy winter I’ve seen lots of pictures about, but nevertheless feels very distant and surreal as Lebanon is experiencing a very mild winter.

Too mild according to some, especially the ones running the country’s ski resorts in Faraya, the Cedars and Laklouk. The lack of snow in these mountainous resorts is an economic disaster, as Lebanese as well as foreign visitors cancel or postpone their reservations.

Quite a different story in Scandinavia this year, I understand. As far as Beirut goes, it’s already empty without Karim. Woke up this morning and opened the cupboard only to not find his stuff in there.

Hopefully, he’ll start longing for the Levant in no time, and comes back to Beirut soon. Myself, I’ve got three weeks of non stop studying ahead of me now, as the end of the semester draws near and we have lots of work due the next couple of weeks. So, goodbye life, hello library.

Also, if you’re in Beirut today any of you, As’ad AbuKhalil, more known as the Angry Arab, is speaking tonight at seven o’clock about Palestine in the Lebanese context. Will be interesting for sure.

بيروت و الشام بكنون الأول

So, winter has definitely come to the Mediterranean now. After a sunny and warm November, apparently someone up there thought we had had enough of nice weather, and decided to show us what Lebanese winter is about. The weather started changing actually, when mum and dad arrived from Sweden. I was lucky to have them visiting for a week, which was very nice. I think they enjoyed their stay as well, even though dad had a hard time getting over the fact that traffic is crazily noisy and ruthless. You do get used to it though, quite quickly as well, and I’m sure that for them going back to the quiet and calm Swedish streets with rule-abiding drivers was equally as strange as when first experiencing traffic here.

While spending time with mum and dad, I’ve also tried to keep up with uni work, which means that I’ve been extremely busy, hence the absence from here. We’ve done lots of nice things though: wandered around Beirut, visited Damascus and met with friends of mine. And, when I after one week dropped mum and dad off at the airport, I picked up Karim. He’ll be staying for more than a month, escaping cold Sweden and spending Christmas and New Years with me. Love it! And best of all, Monday we’re off to Oman for ten days of warmth and sunshine, stunning nature and new exciting places, away from big city noise and stress. Merry Christmas!

First though, I’m finishing what I need to do for uni before Christmas break. Quite a lot actually, especially since I’ll be away and won’t do much during that time. Like in Sweden, the semester continues next year and goes on until early February after which we’ll have a short break before spring semester starts. I’m very happy that I’m staying next semester as well: though I’ve improved my Arabic skills a lot since coming here, I still need to work lots more to be more or less fluent.

Inshallah I’ll be speaking without too many mistakes when summer comes. With some hard work, I think it’s doable. I’ll do my best! Anyways, summer is far away right now, here in Lebanon as well as in Sweden. Sure, the winters here aren’t nearly as bad as the Scandinavian ones, no way. But I won’t say they’re nice. Walking to school this morning, getting soaked by passing cars and rain coming from literary every direction, I felt very glad we’re going south for a while. Oman. Mmm. Can’t wait. I’ll keep you posted on what we’re up to! First though, some pictures from mum and dad’s visit.

Off Hamra Street, close to my place.

Immediately when they arrived, we headed across the border to Syria where we stayed at my friend Caroline’s place in Damascus, the world’s oldest still inhabited city. Amazing place.

Caroline lives with some 10 or so other people in a beautiful old house right in the middle of the old city. Basic, sure, but very nice. Especially all seasons except winter; the house is built around an outdoors courtyard and has a big roof perfect for parties and chilling in the sunshine.

Breakfast on the roof. Don’t think omelet and foul ever tasted better?

Mum found a new friend, the cat who calls the house her home.

The Umayyad Mosque, one of the oldest and for sure most stunning mosques in the world.

Souq el-Hamidiyyeh. Unfortunately, there’s no souq in Beirut anymore: it got destroyed during the war and didn’t fit with the posh rebuilding of the downtown area after the war.

Dad with Caroline’s friend Abdou

Back in Beirut. This is from a manifestation against something that tragically happens way too often lately: women coming to Lebanon to do domestic work – house keeping, nannying, cleaning – are found dead under “unknown circumstances”. In all, there are some 200 000 women from mainly Sri Lanka, Ethiopia and the Philippines working in Lebanon right now, too many of them under really bad conditions. Hopefully the drawing of attention to this exploitation can help changing the situation. Right now, for many women, it’s outrageous.

Before leaving, we met Sanna for one last night of yummie mezze: foul, hummus balila, fattousch, spinach fatayer, batata harra, grilled halloumi…

Then Karim arrived! Unfortunately, the rain didn’t leave with mum and dad.

كيفكم؟

I haven’t disappeared, though that’s how it might seem. Mum and dad are visiting from Sweden, and I’m super busy doing stuff with them while at the same time keeping up with everything at uni. Bare with me please, I’ll be back soon!

كل عام و انتم بخير

Weekend started early this week, due to the Eid el Adha, a three day holiday which together with Eid el Fitr, at the end of Ramadan, make up the main Islamic holidays. The university is closed of course, and the city is wonderfully quiet and calm. Unlike most mornings, I didn’t wake up today to the noise of honking cars trying to make their way through the morning traffic.

The holiday is a major family event of course, and the Lebanese that I know are all heading to see their families today. Not an option for someone thousands of kilometers away from her relatives like me. But I have something else to look forward to, dear Caroline is coming to Beirut for the weekend, and I look forward to spending time with her. She’ll be my pseudo family for the weekend.

Eid el Adha takes place on the tenth day of the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. The people over at Al Jazeera have been writing easily accessible and interesting about this year’s Hajj on their Middle East blog, making a nice complement to the prevailing images in much of Western media showing little less than the masses of pilgrims jammed around the kaaba.

Omar Chatriwala for instance, tells us about the railway being laid as we speek by thousands of Chinese guest workers – the Chinese have for quite some time now been investing massively in both Middle Eastern and African countries – to facilitating the three or so millions of pilgrims doing the Hajj every year. Also interesting is the huge facelift of Mecca that Ayman Mohyeldin writes about, where modernizing and expanding the Grand Mosque is the biggest of some forty construction ongoing projects in the holy city

I’ll leave you with that for now. Eid mubarak and have a nice weekend – even if it’s just your normal Saturday and Sunday off, which is not too bad either.

مغامرات الأمير أحمد

Friday night, I had a very nice cinematic experience when I went to see The Adventures of Prince Ahmed with Hanna and two Danish girls working in the Palestinian refugee camp Ain al-Hilweh (the largest of Lebanon’s 12 camps). Unlike your usual visit to the movies, this was a cine-concert: a screening accompanied by live music. And a very nice one, indeed.

First, getting the cheapest tickets like we did turned out to be a good move since they put us in the very front: not ideal maybe for getting the perfect view of the screen, but excellent since we were close to the band and the live performance. The movie itself is a German film from 1926, all animated with the story being told through images, silhouettes on colorful backgrounds, and a few written sentences appearing now and then to let us know what the characters are saying and thinking. And, of course, through the music. I like the idea of mixing these two art forms, especially the letting a contemporary band put music to a film from 100 years back.

And the animation is just amazing. The film is based on themes from One Thousand and One Nights, so we get to meet familiar characters like Aladdin, a magic horse, the stereotyped Arabic sheik and your usual Oriental femmes fatales of course. Though in line with the Orientalist – that is, the idea that the Orient is antithetical and, consequentially, subordinate and inferior, to the West – image of the Arab world that so persuasively has shaped Europe’s ideas of the region for decades, the film is nevertheless very cute and a beautiful piece of art, and you should definitely see it if you get the chance.

عطلة الاسبوع الماضية

Autumn has definitely come to Beirut now. It started getting colder a couple of weeks ago, which means you need a scarf or a sweater also during the day, and something to keep you warm in the house at night. It’s usually nicer outside actually, I haven’t really been cold at all outside, but the flat gets quite chilly late at night and in the mornings. Don’t want to think about how it’ll be in a month! Hopefully, inshallah, the heater will be doing a good job and we won’t suffer too much.

What Beiruti winters are known for though, is not really the cold but rather the rain. The city gets lots of rain during winter, flooding the streets, stopping traffic and making walking an interesting act of skipping pools and jumping across streams of water. Usually though, the showers are heavy but quick. Not like that perpetual damp and grey and icy cold stuff that we Swedes are used to at all. So, think I’ll be quite alright spending the winter here!

Speaking about rain, Alia made these the other day, when her shoes got wet from a sudden shower. Cute, aren’t they?

Here’s the shoe designer herself. Friday afternoon I think, at De Prague in Hamra.

Went out dancing Friday with some people including sweet Hanna and Isabell, friends from AUB. When leaving the club, some random guy came up and gave us this huge chocolate cake. Odd, but very nice!

This is what the cake looked like before we even made it back to their place!

Sunday, we went for a hike in pretty Qadisha valley in northern Lebanon.

Qannoubine monastery hidden among the mountains.

Finally, a shot from Caroline’s visit to town last week with friend Johan who’s also in Damascus to improve his Arabic.

كل شيء مهم

So, I’ve been kind of quiet for a while, and apparently I haven’t written a word here for ten days or so. The reason for that is I’ve written a lot stuff elsewhere: assignments and reports on Frantz Fanon and anti-colonial movements in Algeria and Ireland, interviews and grammar for the Lebanese class and all sorts of random things for the Fusha, or classical Arabic, class. Somehow I’ve had a very busy week, not because we’re in a super busy period or so because we’re not, but because things just added up. It’s especially the colonialism and post-colonial class that keeps me busy at the moment. Traboulsi, the teacher, is both challenging and inspiring and I leave class every week intending to read and read and read to get a better picture of stuff I don’t know nearly as much about as I’d like to: the Russian revolution, colonial India, Foucault, Chinese-Japanese relations, German philosophy, the inter-war period in Europe, Hegel of course, and Sartre and Nietzsche and Habermas, and Wittgenstein and… Latin American politics, Canadian politics, decolonization of the African continent and… well, world history in general of course and… yeah, you get it. Lots of things on the to-do-list. Or actually, it’s more of a will-do-sooner-or-later-and-will-then-be-a-smart-and-insightful-person-list. You have such lists as well, right? I like them! Mine is very fluid and keep getting reconfigured all the time, and so long and extensive as well, and not possible (or meant to) at all to get through, so there’s no real pressure on ticking things off it all the time. It’s more like an imaginary challenge, a never-ending reminder of how much there’s to know out there. Ideas, traditions, contradictions, fantasies, stories, knowledge, images, representations – it never ends! Exciting. Yep. What I’m very excited about now though, is to head home, have a snack, relax and maybe chat a little with Alia or watch the next West Wing episode. Think I’ll save Foucault for tomorrow.

القشطة الهندي

This delicious fruit is called qashta and is in season now, so it can be found in all of Beirut’s little fruit- and vegetables markets. I hadn’t tried it before coming, since Sweden of course isn’t the best place for tasting yummy tropical fruits, and I can’t remember seeing it in other places I’ve been either. Once I tried though, I fell in love right away with this chubby little fellow. It has a white, creamy and super sweet inside packed with black seeds and tastes purely delicious. With a cup of green tea in a sunny spot somewhere on campus, it makes a perfect start of the day.

بلاد بارد

Back in Sweden for a quick visit, and of course November isn’t the ideal time to visit this Scandinavian country. Late autumn spells rainy, misty, grey and damn cold. Saturday, Karim and I drove out of the city only to find out that the weather of course was even chillier in the countryside. The temperature quickly hit zero, even a couple of degrees below. Brrr! Feels good knowing I can put my sandals back on when returning to Lebanon in a couple of days.

يوكا

Ok, so it’s not Bikram Yoga Malmö, my friendly yoga studio back in Sweden, but still. Sivananda Yoga Center in Gemmayze is a nice place to be none the less. They teach classes every night of the week, some very basic and then one or two more challenging, in their tranquil and charming studio in one of the old houses lining Gouraud Street.

From time to time there are yoga workshops during the weekends, and I’ve also heard rumors about tasty vegetarian dinners. I hope they are true, as I’ve discovered during my years eating vegetarian food that yogis and people into various Eastern spiritual traditions cook delicious food. Gotta have something to do with those good vibes, right!

So far, I’ve only been to a couple of classes at the studio, as I’ve been in the city for less than a month, but I look forward to going as often as I can. Ideally, I’d love to practice more or less every day, but they unfortunately don’t have enough classes that fit with my schedule. Of course I can lay out my mat at home, and I do sometimes, but I really like practicing with other people and just don’t find the same energy when I’m alone. Same thing with all sorts of exercise and physical challenges really.

If only all studios had such extensive and generous schedules as Bikram Yoga Malmö, with classes from 6.30 in the morning to late evening! I really miss going there, and would love to see the first Bikram studio in the region (apart from one in Dubai) opening in Beirut. I wish! Good thing, I’ll be paying a quick visit to Sweden this coming week, and I look forward going to as many classes as I can. Namasté!