It's Not the Heat, It's the Humidity aka Welcome to Beirut

Despite growing up in DC I don't think I truly appreciated that statement until this evening. Although we spent the day outside of Beirut in the north of Lebanon (more on that to come), tonight we decided to head to the downtown area, wander a bit and have gelatto. Despite being 20 degrees cooler than it was in Damascus and being night so there was no sun, the humidity makes it feel almost 10 degrees warmer so by the time we wrangled our ways through the traffic and dark, narrow sidewalks we were drenched. In a few minutes I'll take a shower and climb into bed . . . a bed upon which, as I noticed this evening, is the "extra pillow" housekeeping brought me last night that has a monogrammed pillow case. I didn't pay any attention to it at the time the woman dropped it off -- thought it was weird they were bringing me an extra pillow when I already have 4 on the bed-- but tonight I looked at it and realized the initials on the monogram aren't HV (Hotel Vendome) or even IC (Intercontinental, part of the family of hotels to which the Vendome belongs). Nope-- the intials on the pillow case are TS, which begs the question, do they have premade pillow cases with all the possible combinations of first and last initials or do they make them up each time a guest checks in to this particular room (because neither Eddie nor his mother have the monogrammed pillow-- just me).

But enough about my hotel room (which I adore-- not just for that pillow and the four others but also because it's the shades of robin's egg blue and gold I love) and on to what we did today. As I mentioned yesterday, our first order of business today was meeting the patriarch of the Maronite Catholic Church at his summer residence in Dimane, the mountainous northern region of Lebanon. The drive up was beautiful, at first along the coast and then climbing up into the hills. There were about 15 of us at the meeting with the patriarch. We gathered in a room in the residence and were served strong coffee out of tiny cups before His Holiness came in to the room and greeted each person and then took a seat at the center of the semi-circle of chairs and chatted with a few of the guests while many of us were busy taking pictures. The meeting lasted about 10 or 15 minutes, after which we lingered a bit in the residence before heading off across to the other side of the mountain to the home and church of St. Charbel, a 19th century Lebanese monk who followed the example of the desert mothers and fathers and lived as a hermit in a cave for the last 25 years of his life. Evidently he's a big deal in Lebanon as his picture is all over the place

Our next stop was across the mountain from St. Charbel's, the Khalil Gibran museum in his birthplace (and final resting place) of Bsharri. The museum is built into a rocky hill and was pretty interesting. In addition to being a writer, he was also a painter (although as Dr. Ayoob said, he was a much better poet than painter) so the museum mainly is a venue to display his artwork and some artifacts relating to his life.

We left the museum and headed for the Cedars of Lebanon. Used for everything from mummification in Egypt to the building of Solomon's temple in Israel, the cedars were famous in the ancient world and a lone cedar is the central symbol of the Lebanese flag. What I didn't realize is that there are actually hardly any cedars left. Centuries of deforestation by the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Israelites, Romans, Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, etc. have left very few of the trees remaining. It was sad to look out over the bare hills and realize that at one time they would have been covered with trees for as far as your eyes could see. What few trees are left are protected so we stopped to wander through one of the old groves. The smell was wonderful and in one area, there's a tree that died in 1985 and rather than cut it down, it was stripped and an artist spent 15 years carving various images of Christ into the trees, including one image of the crucifixion with Jesus at the top of the tree hanging on the cross and Mary Magdalene carved below towards the bottom of the tree.

After the Cedars we stopped for lunch at a restaurant overlooking the valley and then drove to the monastery of St. Anthony in Qozhaya. St. Anthony is THE father of all the desert mothers and fathers of the fourth century and the oral tradition states that he came to Lebanon and stayed with his disciples in the cave at Qozhaya. The cave is now a chapel and the monastery is built into the hill-- quite a spectacle to see and even more of a spectacle to reach as we wound down winding, narrow roads to reach it. Not only does the monastery feature the dramatic location, it also houses the oldest printing press in the Arab world that is credited with saving the language from extinction when the area was ruled by the Turks.

Well, it is well past my bedtime here and I realize I haven't been that eloquent in my blog posting tonight so I hope the pictures do justice to what I'm feeling too tired to describe . . .