Took a taxi from Ready Taxi from my apartment to Hamra. As I’m walking out my door, the taxi rolls by and it’s George. George took me 13 months ago from my hotel to my apartment when I moved. He picked me up several months ago and remembered me very vividly. Of course it was in a good part due to my over tipping him. He was so happy to see me.
George and I talked about work, the cost of things and other small talk, in a combination of English, French and Arabic. As I get out of the taxi on Hamra Street, I see two muscle bound guys, parading their stuff down the street in their tight tee shirts. Near them but not with them, is a young woman dressed ultra-conservatively with her veil and floor length skirt. This is Hamra!
I get to Bread Republic and it’s the usual crowd of waiters and waitresses and they greet me like the long lost prodigal son. I’m sitting by myself near a table of college ‘intellectuals’. They’re speaking in ‘High EFA’, a combination of English, French and Arabic. And all with air of ‘I’m such an incredible intellectual’.
Although all the seating is outside, there is as thick cloud of cigarette smoke surrounding the tables. ‘Are you going to Damascus? You know we really should go, my Aunt used to live there and I went all the time.” Now the conversation has sifted to the concept around the exhibition. And just as quickly, the conversation has shifted to French. The waitress asks the table near me, are you here for the scallops?’ ‘Chagall is so your thing, I think you have attention deficit disorder.’
There’s an unusually high percentage of hugging going on for this crowd of 40 people. Love is in the air, everywhere. It’s hip, it’s pretentious, it’s all this and so much more. It represents all what I love about Hamra and in one small area is the quintessential mix that is Lebanon.
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
My Dinner Chez Bread Republic
Bought a bottle today
Who buys empty bottles and writes about them, right? Well, at my local supermarket they have a second floor with something akin to NWL (national wholesale liquidators in Queens). They have one liter and 1/3 liter bottles made in Italy, with some sort of locking mechanism. They are called Italian swing top bottles. They even have some with flower design thing going on. It was all of $1 or 2. Similar item goes for 9-10 dollars on Amazon. They are the rage in the office with the hip crowd from Achrafieh, the hip & chic part of Beirut where I live. Well, I live on the fringes of the tres chic area to tell the truth. Perhaps I'll use it to carry my iced Turkish coffee to the office.
New English Expressions I've Learned in Lebanon
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Service with a Story: Tales of Shared Taxi Rides in Beirut
Lebanon does not have a public transportation system, or at least not one that I have discovered. What it has instead are unmetered taxis and shared taxis called “service” (using the French pronunciation – ser VEESS).
I was told that if I wanted to take a “service” I should look for old beaten-up Mercedes Benzes with red license plates and old drivers; they would approach me as I was walking and honk at me. I should tell the driver where I wanted to go and, if the driver was going in that general direction with his other passengers, he would agree to take me.
After a few confident rides I learned the names of other places and started taking the “service” from one place to another. Often they would mistakenly think that my Mediterranean looks meant that I was Lebanese. On those occasions the driver would start speaking to me in Arabic. I would say that I do not speak Arabic and that I was not Lebanese. In disbelief the drivers always ask, “Where are you from?” I would often say that I was from Italy, where my family comes from despite the fact that I was born in New York City. Frequently they would respond by saying, “Pizza! Macaroni!”, to which I would say, “Pizza! Macaroni!”. Sometimes I would be with a driver who spoke Italian or who had been to Italy, and if they spoke English they would tell me how much they loved Italy, Italian food and Italian soccer. Lebanon is filled with Roman ruins and there are many similarities in these two Mediterranean countries.
I quickly learned to prefer the front seat to the back seat. In the front you had a better view of the sights and wouldn’t have to move around. If you were in the back seat you might have to move over to let passengers in, especially since passengers always got in on the passenger side of the car. The worst was being in the dreaded middle seat in the back - they often squeeze 3 passengers in the back seat.
Twice in one week I got the same driver on my way to work. I recognized the newer car, not a Mercedes, from the Christian shrine on the dashboard (flowers, crucifix, pictures and a miniature Bible). The second morning when he picked me up he said, “Didn’t I just pick you up yesterday morning?”. We had spoken in English the previous morning. On another morning I got in the back seat, the front seat was already taken. The front seat passenger who was puffing away on a cigarette looked exactly like Ringo from the Beatles. I kept staring at him through the side view mirror, amazed at his resemblance to Ringo and secretly hoping that my glaring looks and throat clearing would convince to at least blow his smoke out the window. He just glared back at me and continued to smoke. That afternoon I went to Mi-Chaud, one of my local places for lunch near work and there sat ‘Ringo’. We looked at each other with that moment of recognition and then both turned away when we realized the connection. Beirut can be a small world.
Arabic + Statistician = Fibonacci Numbers
I have a statistician in my small Arabic class here in Beirut. There are 3 of us in the class - a female lawyer, a male statistician and myself. This guy is a serious mathematician and knows his stuff.
The other day in class, while we were learning the alphabet, he explained that the Arabic letter 'alef' or A is used in mathematics. He went on to say that there was a connection between the Arabic letter 'Alef', the Hebrew letter 'Aleph' and with the mathematical set theory. This is where the Hebrew 'Aleph' letter is used to represent the cardinality of infinite sets. I wasn’t able to follow him and got lost after a few sentences. After class my head was spinning!
The first two Fibonacci numbers are 0 and 1, and each remaining number is the sum of the previous two. It is a mathematical sequence that was well known in India and is related to Sanskrit prosody.
That night, Fibonacci numbers also appeared in my dream.