and then our exile

Back from the Lebanon. An hour-and-some bus ride to the border across mountains with snow to be confronted with Syrian officials. The experience was eloquently summed up this way: "these guys are bastards". End of story.

Rude sarcasm, and jokes at the expense of one who feels he's being played with, whom you have just made miss his bus, who does not yet know how to play the game of results and who slept for about three hours the night before. It became one of the four times in my life that I have been red-hot-angry to the extent that adrenaline enters blood. Then speaking Arabic in a wordflow, mistakes aside, even so. A few days ago Ph-R-D said to find a salafi to argue with to improve my wordflow, but I do not need salafis when I can do this. One thing Syrians officials in general cannot stand is losing face, and I did not know 'haqeer' was such a strong word. "I heard this guy screaming at Basit and thought oh my what has Basit done now." E. saved the day, he knows how to play these people at their own game, which is something I still need to learn.

Lebanese officers were friendly—not can I be your special buddy but in that they give you your rights as a human being.

Then Beirut. Landed in a strange city without native currency or sense of direction, we started to walk. "Well, at least we don’t need to go that direction anymore." Foggy, the sky and the sea the same colour so you could not sea where one became the other. Walked for about four hours, aimed for the American University. Stopped at a supermarket, walked through the aisles in awe. Stopped at Virgin Megastore, spent an hour going through books. Walked through the Martyr’s Square, past the ta’ziyya mourning Hariri, past the tents of the Lebanese nationalists camping out in protest, playing music about Lebanon. His picture is everywhere you turn, ‘martyr to leadership and independence’, his death seems to have fanned a true nationalistic fervour. Problem: we went on Sunday and everything was still closed for this mourning. Various streets we were turning onto were blockaded by soldiers with assault rifles, but they were not rude. I think we left the Martyr’s Square an hour before [this protest]. Streets practically deserted, except on the waterfront—walked the Meditteranean promenade, hundreds of people chillaxing on a warm afternoon.

Beirut is infamous for fisq, and I think I would say it is not wrongly so, and it /is/ far too Western, but I still like the city (jury's still out on the people who live in it). These were boggling my mind: there were rows of pansies lining the sidewalk. There was green. The air smelled like the sea. The streets were clean. The masajid were clean. The buildings were clean, and weren’t thrown together with raw concrete, they had aesthetics and beauty. Even the gutted shells of bullet holes from the last war were not "messy". Children were riding bicycles. People drove like they were sane. It is the city Damascus could be if they took any care whatsoever—Damascus could even be greater, they could revive things here, if only...

inshaAllah will go back there for a few days at some point.

Anyways.