On Friday, soon after I finished my work the prayer took place at the mosque across the road from the cafe. Soon after it ended the Gentleman Friend arrived, and we hailed a taxi to take us to Al Mina, the port city of Tripoli where we had booked a bed and breakfast in the old bit, reachable only on foot. It was another lovely old Levantine city, built of massive blocks of stone, with arches and tumbling vines. The bed and breakfast was delightful (if somewhat over priced), and blessedly had a fan and opening windows rather than a forced reliance on airconditioning. It is owned by a Beiruti man who returned to settle in Lebanon after working in the US and divorcing his American wife, and this appears to have been a labour of love for hm. It is a beautiful house, sparse and with high ceilings. The owner himself is a very laid back, chill gentleman, soft-spoken and easy to talk it. It made me think how rare it is these days for me to have a genuinely relaxed, low-stakes conversation, with anyone other than the GF, with no sensitivities to steer around.
We had lunch at the Silver Shore, a fish restaurant of some renown. There were Mercedes cars parked outside (big and new, not the shabby 40 year old ones that serve as taxis here), and soldiers waiting in the entrance lobby, and inside there were many men in suits. When they left, one was clearly an important political figure as the entire restaurant straightened to watch him leave and the staff lined up to say farewell, peering through the glass door to the lobby.
We walked around Al Mina, and were greeted with more welcoming smiles than anywhere else in Lebanon. As the sun started going down we went, on the B&B owner’s advice, to the old train station. This was lovely, a derelict station with mortar holes in the walls now overgrown with flowering bushes, the remains of the cafeteria with its bakelite switches, and several steam engines slowly rusting away in sheds. One could climb up into them, though of course it was profoundly unsafe as the metal was rotting, but stepping carefully I could peer into the furnace as well.
On the way back we passed the Souq where the fishmongers were closing shop, and passed through streets lit only by the kebabchis’ flames. There was an immense, monumental Ottoman doorway set in one side, with a massive crumbling wooden door leaning off a hinge, so we walked through what felt like a portal. An immense courtyard, surrounded on all four sides with a six-story building, all flats with lit windows and people busting around inside and in balconies. Even over the arch of the entrance was a flat, and people smiled at us as they saw us. It was clearly extremely poor, poorer even than the places we’d seen in Karantina, and courtyard was heaped with rubbish and pools of sewage festered in the places where scores of children played. But it was magical in the half-light, and the women’s smiles were kind.
Dinner was at a restaurant called Minos, owned by a large man whom even his son addresesd as ‘Captain’. It specialised in fish mezze, and unusually I decided to have a drink with dinner. So we had some home-made arak, very nice but of course most of it was wasted.
The next morning we rose early and after a breakfast conversation with our host about the initiative to legalise cannabis production in Lebanon, we were collected by a young Trabulsi woman from the Gentleman Friend’s workplace. She had kindly offered to show us the city, so we hopped in her car and went off to Trablous proper, for a breakfast of hummus and a stroll through the most famous souq in Lebanon. it was again very beautiful, thick stone arches and small ornamental doorways leading into courtyards and small shrines. We popped into a lovely Mamluk mosque with a painted minbar, and then into of the old hamaams, 700 years old and only decomissioned a couple of decades ago. This had walls painted in those particular Mediterranean colours, bright yet faded reds and blues and yellows, and the ceilings were pierced and set with thick glass in patterns to let in light.
The citadel of Raymond St Gilles was a proper castle, monumental, crumbling, with a moat and a drawbridge. I don’t think we saw more than a fraction of it. On the way out we walked through the copper bit of the souq as I’d hoped to buy a coffee pot I would dedicate to my morning tea, but to no avail: the copper workers are almost all gone, and all the wares are from Egypt or China.
We drove back towards Al Mina and found ourselves a boat to take us around the harbour and cool us down, then back again to Trablous for its special knefeh that is made of a clotted cream rather than cheese as one finds in the south. Then we went to the bus station, and returned to Byblos. A sunset walk and a stop in the farmer’s market to buy some supplies (including some never-before tasted fruits, always a good find), and here we are.
Today, Sunday, has been very quiet indeed. The new season of Serial has started and I listened to the first episode this morning. Very promising. And I read Wide Sargasso Sea, which I have wanted to for years, and even more so since I reread Jane Eyre and loved it so. It absolutely lived up to expectations.