Jordan Challenge 37: Up All Night in Beirut

Lots of people know New York City as the City that Never Sleeps, and I had a great time testing out the title with Chris a couple years ago. So naturally it seemed like a good idea to try out the same strategy in a new place, with Mike and Cooper totally on board. I am proud to say that Mike, Cooper and I proved that Beirut is a very easy place to have an all-night adventure.  Should anyone at home wish to try it, you can start with this handy step-by-step guide.

Step One: Begin the Day as Usual
For Mike, Cooper and me this meant breakfast, some further exploration on foot of the city, and some quality time reading at a cafe on Rue Gouraud.

It began like most other days in Beirut -- putting in some time with some caffeinated beverages and reading materials at a lovely cafe.

Step Two: Go to a Soccer Game
Funny the things you take for granted.  Beirut is the first city any of the three of us had ever been to where political tensions could be measured by whether spectators are allowed to view the national team play its soccer matches. Luckily for us, according to Mike's journalist friend Steven, things were pretty calm the week we there, which meant that Lebanon could actually play its match against Uzbekistan in front of fans rather than an empty stadium.

Nothing says carefree like a solid wall of riot police ringing the field for the entire game.  This is also the only professional sports event I've ever been to where my entry was seriously delayed because every single fan was subjected to airport-style security searches as the stadium gate.

My favorite fan was sitting about 4 rows down. She had the Lebanese flag painted on her face and also covering her hair.  It was probably due to her attentive support that Lebanon was able to score the single goal that ended the game in a tie.

Step Three: Fuel Up at (Where Else?) Le Chef
Le Chef is something of a local legend.  It doesn't look fancy from the outside, but the food is awesome and you can't miss the distinctive tall, thin waiter who is always there waving people inside with a gravelly-voiced "Welcome, welcome".  Once inside he gives you a menu, which is a bit superfluous because he has already decided what you will order, and resistance is futile. Le Chef had its 15 minutes of fame in 2006 when, under Israeli bombing, internationally-famous foodie Anthony Bourdain, insisted on pressing on with his show at the restaurant before cancelling the rest of the Lebanon series.

If you don't go to Le Chef while you're in Beirut, you may as well stay home. It was, of course, the perfect dinner for our Up All Night experience.

Step Four: Take Up Residence at One of Gemmayze's Charming Bars for a Long Night of Drinks and Conversation
After taking care of the all-important dinner requirement, it was time to move a few doors down the street to one of the many small and friendly bars on the block for drinks and Intelligent Discussion of Important Things. For our political science-heavy contingent (Cooper actually got his degree in economics but if pressed he could play a political scientist on TV remarkably well), that can only mean one thing.  Not celebrity gossip or whether this season of Mad Men was good as the others, but whether the nation-state is inherently a social construct that encourages immoral behavior.  You know, the usual 2 am chit-chat in a bar. We managed to keep the debate alive till about 3:30 am, when we didn't run out of ideas, but the bartender ran out of patience with us and a few other stragglers and suggested we take our witty and urbane ideas elsewhere.

Our good-natured waitress snapped this picture about 2 minutes before she broke the news to us that we would have to move our weighty political discussion to another venue -- perhaps the UN?

Step Five: After Closing Down the Bar, Explore the City
Once our bar had closed it was time for some general city exploration in search of others that might still welcome us with open arms.  Our thought was that the high-end hotels with their rooftop bars along the waterfront might be just the trick.  But alas, we discovered that the high rollers there apparently turn it in by 4 am, too.  However, the security staff did seem concerned about us, and I think noting our less-than-glamorous clothes, decided we might be in desperate need of wet wash cloths for some on-the-spot freshening up, and bottles of water for rehydrating.  We accepted their charitable contributions to our cause and made our way onward to the Corniche.

Around 4 am, and the guys were getting punchy and I was getting bossy.  Hence, the order for them to pose among the statues.

Step Six: Head to the Corniche for the Sunrise
So, obviously, when all else fails (and especially when you're starting to get sleepy) the thing to do is to head to the waterfront.  We were not alone in this conclusion and we spent a pleasant hour or so waiting for the sun to come up by trying to sort out the late-nighters from the early-morning types who inhabited the space with us. 

Mike and Cooper, hiding their sleepiness fairly well.

Mike also took the opportunity to play around with the settings of his camera.  Here is his Artistic Black and White Shot.

Step Seven: Declare Victory and Head Back to the Hostel for Some Well-Deserved Rest
Around 5 am the sun came up, and we watched it make its appearance and then did some more people-watching as well.  Then we gathered ourselves for one last long walk back to our hostel and some serious sleep. Victory!

We did it!  Pulling together one last burst of energy for the long walk home.

Jordan Challenge 36: Untangling the Politics of Lebanon

One of the many things I've learned from my ten months in Jordan is that I absolutely love Beirut.  As my good friend and fellow political science Fulbrighter Mike and I often concur, it is a political scientist's stomping ground of the first order.  No decision could have possibly easier, then, when Mike and Cooper graciously invited me to join them for a return trip to Lebanon for a week.  Although the three of us are, admittedly, a bit nerdy in our fascination of the politics of the place, I am proud to say that we also got in touch with our more adventuresome side and did a Middle Eastern version of one of my favorite things from my year of 52 New Things: 24 hours without sleeping (this time in Beirut instead of New York City). But work before pleasure (even if learning the politics was pleasure to our rabidly political brains), and the story of 24 hours on the go in the not-so-sleepy city of Beirut will get its own post.

Mike and Cooper on the Corniche at the beginning of our week-long quest to learn more about the complicated realm of Lebanese politics.

If I could neatly explain Lebanese politics in a single blog post I would be brilliant and probably worthy of some sort of important prize, because that is an impossible task.  So, I shall not attempt it, but rather content myself with briefly mentioning two of the obvious features that make the politics of the country at once impossibly complicated but endlessly fascinating.  The first is Lebanon's sectarian make-up and the second is its neighbors.These two things cause tiny little Lebanon to pack a punch far greater than its size -geographic or population-wise - would normally warrant.

 When Lebanon got its independencefrom the French in the 1940s, there was a national census that found that Christians were a slight majority of the population. A system of governance was set up that gave different sects different roles in the government. The demographics have shifted over time because of a number of factors including the outward migration of Christian Lebanese to other parts of the world, differential birthrates, and the influx of Palestinian refugees in 1948 who now number some 400,000 (in a country with only 4 million people). But there has never been another census -- one of many points of contention among politicians and the citizenry. The system still works by setting aside special roles for each religious group -- Christians still hold the Presidency, Sunni Muslims the Prime Ministership, Shia'a Muslims the Parliamentary Speakership. The fourth largest group are the Druze (a religious sect that broke from the Shia'a in the 11th century), and they have often constituted a sort of wild card in parliamentary politics, where their votes and positions are needed to form a viable government or bloc on an issue.


At various points in time Lebanon has been occupied by both Israel and Syria, and has been engaged in its own civil wars, with those two neighbors also playing pivotal roles in aiding particular sides in the fighting. These two countries also played important roles in the emergence of what is probably the most well-known faction to Americans, Hezbollah. In the 60s, 70s and 80s Palestinians organized through the PLO and Christian militias known as Phalanges with the backing of Israel fought each other, and the situation became an outright Civil War in 1973. The civil war gave Syria a reason to come in as an occupying force in 1976, which it did, and then Israel came in to occupy the southern part of Lebanon in 1978. Hezbollah emerged in 1983 as an Iranian and Syrian-backed resistance movement that used terror tactics to drive out Israel. Now in 2012 Hezbollah continues to control a lot of Southern Lebanon. It also holds twelve seats in the Lebanese Parliament and considers itself still at war with Israel, in part because of some disputed territory still under Israeli control called the Shebaa Farms.

A place I never knew existed, much less ever imagined I'd visit -- the Hezbollah Museum in the town of Mlita in Southern Lebanon.  If you want to understand Lebanon, you have to learn about Hezbollah.  And to do that, go to the source.

This centerpiece exhibit features captured and destroyed weaponry from fights with Israel.

The occupation by Syria was also highly controversial and the cause of much fighting, which came to a head in a terrible car bombing in 2005 of former Lebanese Prime Minister (who was running again for office), Rafik Hariri. Hariri had been a very successful businessman-turned-politician. He was seen as a good coalition-builder and who had been increasingly moving to a position of demanding Syrian withdrawal. His assassination was credited with galvanizing a critical mass of the country and a political coalition known as the March 14 Alliance into demanding Syria's withdrawal. Although the Alliance eventually succeeded in forcing a formal withdrawal, Syria's presence remains a reality in many ways in Lebanon and Syria's civil war has spilled over into the North. A coalition of groups, including Hezbollah and its fellow Shiite group Amal, known as the March 8 Coalition continue to back the Al-Assad regime in Syria, while the March 14 Alliance opposes it.

The memorial to Rafik Hariri is a permanent tented display next to the giant mosque he paid for and had built for the city of Beirut.

With Hariri in the upper right, the other images are of other people who were killed the day of the bombing.  The total eventually extended to 23.  One of the deaths I thought was most tragic was of the young man in the lower left hand corner.  He was a paramedic in the convoy who was on hand in the event of just such an attack.  He burned to death when the blast caught his ambulance on fire.

As I hope even this extremely brief and superficial description of a few salient features and events illustrates, Lebanese politics is not an undertaking for the faint of heart. But we threw ourselves into it. We read books on the subject while we were there, plied Mike's friend and former student turned Lebanon journalist Steven with many questions, visited Beirut neighborhoods and areas of the country that visibly identify themselves with various political factions and discussed, discussed, discussed.

Book club!  In between our wanderings, all three of us were reading books to help us make sense of what we were exploring.  Mike and I were reading Killing Mr. Lebanon, the story of the Hariri assassination, and Cooper tackled Warriors of God, the story of Hezbollah, both of which were written by the journalist Nicholas Blanford.

And of course, we had to discuss -- at great length -- our questions and discoveries, preferably over sunset waterfront dinners such as this one we were having in Byblos.

As I told Mike and Cooper at the conclusion of our week, I now believe I know quite a lot more, but understanding is a whole different thing. It's a good thing I love Beirut, because I think the path to clarity on this one is long and winding, and maybe even never-ending. That's hardly a burden, though, when the quest for understanding is happening in such an amazing place, with two fabulous and equally curious friends and travel buddies. I'd be ready for another round just about any time.

 
  

Jordan Challenge #35: Wet Hike Through Wadi Mujib

I just got back from a week in Lebanon with my good friends Mike and Cooper, tackling challenges galore there, but before I record them, there are a couple others I wanted to write about that happened before I left.  For this one, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my fabulous friend Grace, who chose this as her birthday activity, to Kelsey who did most of the logistics, and to Sarah M, and Nathan, who rounded out the crew of Mujib explorers.

One of the lesser-known features of Jordan (at least to foreigners) is Wadi Mujib, the country's "Grand Canyon". It is a giant gorge that enters the Dead Sea, and has the claim to fame of being the lowest nature reserve on earth. In the winter and early spring it is closed because of the danger of flash floods, but in the summer you can throw on a life preserver and try out the "wet hike" experience.  Most of the trails are long and very difficult, and hence require guides.  But the Siq Trail is self-guided and shorter, so that is the one we took.

Ready for anything ahead -- me, Grace, Kelsey and Nathan..

The thing to know about wet hiking is that it really lives up to its name.  We were forewarned to leave everything, including sun glasses, back in our car because we would get totally soaked, and there were places where the water would reach above our shoulders.  Happily, Kelsey had a waterproof camera, and she did bring that, lashed tightly around her wrist, and I have her to thank for all of the fun pictures in this post.  This is definitely a case where the story is in the pictures, so I'll let them tell it.

Watching Nathan tackle the first waterfall, I must confess I was feeling some trepidation.

Turns out that the climb was slippery, but kind of fun.

Sarah and I pressing forward.  Something I learned that day is that pounding water has a lot of force behind it!

Success!  Kelsey, Sarah, Nathan, Grace and I standing in front of the waterfall at the end of the Siq Trail -- all of us, as promised, completely soaked.

Coming back we slid down the waterfalls we climbed up before.  Here's a Grace-ful landing by the Birthday Girl.

In case anyone was wondering, Fulbrighters do float!  But beware -- they also get bruised and a bit beat up by the rocks lurking below.

When we were headed back home, Kelsey shared a secret with us, her favorite abandoned building in the city, discovered on one of her many runs throughout Amman. We just had to explore it, and once we were on the roof, realized it would be the perfect setting for a band doing photos for an album cover.  That was obviously too good of an opportunity to pass up, so here is what we would look like if we were a band in addition to of a bunch of Fulbrighters who just waded our way through an adventure-filled canyon.

Nathan, Sarah, me and Grace working on our sullen/thoughtful rooftop band pose, but not quite there.

Like any good band, we need a little drama.  Here Grace gets kicked out and Kelsey shows us some attitude.

I had just about accepted the fact that a wet hike just wasn't in the cards for this year of Jordan Challenges when Grace and Kelsey made it so.  Sadly, things are winding down for both of them (and me) as our school years are over, and technically our work is just about done.  But I'm glad we're making the most of our last few weeks together, and Wadi Mujib was surely a "mostest" in lots of ways.

Jordan Challenge 12.3: Petra Comes Full Circle

The first time I visited Petra was in June 2010, on an extremely memorable visit with Siham and Connor.  That time we saw the Siq, the Treasury, the Monastery and all the other sites that have made Petra world-famous.  On that visit we also spent an unforgettable night in a desert cave, hosted by our new friends, Khalid and Ibrahim.

My all-time favorite photo: Siham and our friend Khalid from two years ago, and our first trip to Petra.

Ibrahim, Siham and Connor at Little Petra -- also two years ago.

 Last year, I was lucky to return to Petra with my friends and former students, Kate and Alexsis, when the three of us were in Jordan and the West Bank, doing research on the Millennium Development Goals in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Alexsis and Kate from our Petra visit that was almost exactly a year ago.

Given that I knew I'd be living in Jordan for ten months, and hoped that I'd have multiple visitors, this year one of the Challenges on my list was to try to see Petra in three different ways.  Earlier this year I did two of them; Petra by Night with Chris, and Petra for Morning People with Paul. And last week I completed that challenge with my Petra Full Circle visit.  The visit earned the name in two senses; first, in going there with Siham, we were able to go back to the place that we had discovered for the first time almost exactly two years ago.  And second, in visiting with Siham and Leah, we were able to take the entire project encompassed by first 52 New Things and then the series of challenges of the last two years back to the beginning in a sense. And of course, as is always the case when the three of us embark on an adventure, we had a lot of fun!

As my colleague Amy pointed out, wasn't it clever of me to dress in matching stripes?

Siham and Leah enjoying the fact that the tour buses had totally cleared out of the Siq, leaving it all for us.

A shot of the Monastery taken by Leah -- the reward for climbing the 850 steps to get there.

The best jump shot of the trip award went to Leah this time, posing in front of the Treasury.

Jordan Challenge 34: Go Snorkeling in the Red Sea

Despite the brief nature of Leah and Siham's visit, we managed to get in what I like to think of as the Triple Crown of visiting Jordan: Petra, Wadi Rum and Aqaba.  Aqaba's claim to fame is that it sits on the very small bit of coast that Jordan has, which borders the Red Sea.  This makes Aqaba important commercially as the country's only port, and for tourism as it's only seaside city. But what is most spectacular about Aqaba is what lies beneath in the form of a vibrant coral reef just begging to be explored.

The beaches south of Aqaba are beautiful, and who wouldn't want the occasional camel adding to the scenery?  But the best part is what you can't see: the incredible coral reef just a few meters out from the shore.

Since we only had a day to spend, we headed pretty directly to an area known as South Beach and got fitted out pretty quickly with our snorkeling gear.  Siham wasn't feeling well, so did some sunbathing while Leah and I followed our aptly-nicknamed guide, Shark, through a reef called the Japanese Garden.  It was spectacular! There were corals in all kinds of shapes, sea anemones, starfish, pipefish, jellyfish, and brightly colored tropical fish. 

A dried-up version of the sea urchins we were swimming with.  Our guide, Shark, plucked off a spine and ate it, claiming it was full of minerals.Siham tried one and said it tasted like the ocean.

It really did feel as if I'd been shrunk and was swimming in the most exotic fish tank I'd ever seen. If time allows, I would love to go back and do a "try dive" with oxygen to be able to go deeper.  But for now I'm just grateful to have been able to see this unexpected side of the desert kingdom of Jordan.

Taking in the sun after we did our snorkeling.  I wish there would have been a way to capture the reef in pictures.  The fish were so beautifully colored, and there was a bright purple coral that I wish I could captured on film.

Shark insisted that try on the sea urchin as an accessory back at the dive shop where we rented out equipment.

Sometimes Life Comes Full Circle

So, last week I got about as lucky as a person possibly can when my friends Siham and Leah came for a visit.  It was only a bit more than a week, but we managed to pack it with all sorts of activities, including meeting all the students in both my classes as well as many of my Fulbright friends.  We also went to Petra (completing my goal of Visiting Petra Three Ways), Wadi Rum and Aqaba (where I was able to cross snorkeling in the Red Sea off my list). 

With the women of my Pressure Groups class during our end of the year dinner: Feda'a, Amani, Leah, Siham, Rola, Heba and Areej (Abdulazeez missed the photo op by thoughtfully rushing to the pharmacy for medicine for an emergency burned hand)

Enjoying the excellent night view at Books@ Cafe with Fulbrighter friends: Grace, Christina, Leah, Elizabeth, Siham, Jayme, Cooper and Kelsey

At Al-Quds restaurant sampling mensaf: Cooper, Mike, Leah and Siham

Posing with my Health, Environment and Human Rights class students after they completed their presentations: Siham, Mary, Noura and Leah

I plan to do some separate posts on some of these activities, but I also just wanted to take a minute to reflect on the fact that it was Leah and Siham who co-originated the idea of 52 New Things that started this blog and Siham who came with me to Jordan two years on my first trip here. (And while I'm thanking people, I should also point out that another close friend of all three of us, Jamila, set up our original connections here in Jordan for us, and would have been here too, had she not been racing a deadline to complete her PhD at Oxford.) As my adventure in Jordan draws closer to its conclusion -- I have less than a month left here now -- I'm so grateful to them both for helping me to create the path that led me here for this year, and for coming to explore the results of my time in Jordan together.

Siham and Leah (hiding out here in Wadi Rum): hard to imagine a better pair of travellers, explorers or all-around friends!

Jordan Challenge 33: Be Part of a Winning Trivia Team in the Middle East

So, life suddenly got very busy in a hurry here.  The coming week is finals here at UJ, Leah and Siham are in town for the week, and my love-hate relationship with my oven took a turn for the worst yesterday when it exploded in a giant ball of fire that that left me with a burn on my left hand and singed off my eyebrows and a lot of the hair around my face.  I'll do separate posts on most of that, but realized that I haven't been keeping track of Jordan Challenges very well lately, when in actuality, I just helped achieved a small victory for Fulbrighters everywhere last week during a short trip to Jerusalem.

The trip to Jerusalem was actually very serious, and will be the subject of its own post at a later time.  Last week I was fortunate to be able to participate with my excellent fellow Fulbright friends Mike, Luke and Cooper in a tour of the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank.  The tours are conducted by Breaking the Silence a group founded by former Israeli soldiers to share the realities of the occupation with civilian Israelis and ex-pats like us.  It was sobering, to say the least, and I will write about it on its own in a serious post that I sincerely hope my friends, family and students will read about and discuss. 

But on a lighter note, I am happy to report that I can now add "Trivia Night Champion in Jerusalem" to my CV.  The guys, who the rest of the Fulbright group collectively refer to as the Carpetlanders (because you cannot help but notice the carpet as a particularly salient feature of their very spacious apartment) are my close neighbors.  This has been an enormous stroke of luck for me, because they are tremendous people who I love hanging out with (as well as being awesome and generous cooks).  The facts that they like to cook pad thai and other complicated dishes and I like to bake cookies and we all love to discuss current events  have paved the way for a symbiotic relationship that a biologist might point out as exemplary.

The Carpetlanders: Cooper, Mike and Luke.

When we checked to the Abraham Hostel in Jerusalem, they asked if we might be interested in participating in a Trivia Night competition, and the answer was an obvious yes.  The Carpetlanders are also resourceful and inventive, and had recently created a new dish, the Shwomelette.  A Shwomelette is an omelette filled with shwarma meat and chopped tomatoes and onions, preferably procured from Reem, the best shwarma stand in Amman.  So, our team became the Shwomelettes, to which the guys insisted on making my participation also clear, so we became the Shwomelettes Featuring Trish (SFT).

I am pleased to say that we dominated the competition.  We knew, among other things, the capitol of Uzbekistan (Tashkent), the first pair to successfully summit Mount Everest (Hilary and Norgay), and the country that recently had a law proposed to allow a man to have sex with his wife in the hours immediately after her death (it was not passed, but it was Egypt).  Clearly, we Fulbrighters are veritable fonts of useful information.  Among the other teams only one, the Three Hamasketeers, matched our score, and we failed to break the tie in two elimination rounds.  So, we did the only logical thing and declared both teams as Trivia Night Champs and split our enormous earnings, which just covered a single drink for each us for a mutual toast in honor of our worthy competition and the importance of Trivia Nights among travellers.

Team Shwomelette Featuring Trish and the Three Hamaskateers pose for a victory photo.