Yesterday was Saturday and the Gentleman Friend and I woke up bright and early for a breakfast of knefeh and to be taken to Beirut. There, the GF was to participate in some beach cleaning while I was to meet a relative who is in town for work. I was meeting her for lunch so got dropped off at the entrance to Gemmayze and walked through this beautiful street without cars or dust on a Saturday morning. After a fairly leisurely stroll, I climbed the Mar Nicola stairs, beautiful in the early morning light, and waited outside the Sursock Museum where I knew a new exhibition had been hung on the top floor. The staff arrived and were let in by the guards, and at last at 10 the gates opened and I was the first one in. The top floor did indeed have a mostly-new selection from the permanent collection of Lebanese paintings, not as superb as the last but still very good. Some excellent society portraits, with grotesquely large eyes, and the naive art I enjoyed last time was still there, including a river scene with a man falling over backwards into the water.
I then returned to Gemmayze and went up to Mar Mikhail where I tried out Beyt, the upstairs cafe at Plan Bey. It was really lovely, and I felt bad that we’d not been there whilst living in the neighbourhood. It’s up the stairs of an old mansion building and is basically a full flat, airy and furnished as a sparely appointed old home. There is a balcony courtyard filled with greenery and blessedly with fans directed at each table, so I ordered a Turkish coffee and took one of the corner tables.
Here I got a message telling me that my bid for an editing job had been accepted which was a relief as during the night I’d received an email telling me that my (much smaller) bid for another editing job had been rejected. So that had me in a properly good mood though some details of the contract are yet to be hammered out.
At around 1 I left to pop into our lunch spot, Maryool, to tell them that we’d be three, not four, as the relative’s host was coming along as well. Then I strolled around the area, looking at the trendy little shops, and go to the bookshop to pick up a present for a nephew. I have firmly established myself as the one who gives books whether kids like them or not.
Lunch was very pleasant. This person and I have the most divergent interests and temperaments that can be imagined, but have settled into informality over the years. We talked about the upcoming wedding, about her new work (she had learned that a key to Lahore is that people are not confident about their taste, so she has geared her work to that), and a bit about Lebanon. Her host and employer is a Lebanese American who moved to Beirut a few months ago, and is definitely the local equivalent of an ABCD, but seemed very sweet and occasionally insightful.
Afterwards I went west to Hamra where I was to meet the GF after his rubbish collection. We were to meet at Dar but since I arrived early I went first to a gallery, Dar al Nimr, which had an exhibition of photos of the Israeli apartheid wall and the civil war here in Beirut. The ones of Beirut were not too interesting (though it is always curious to see a spot one knows covered in rubble and razor wire) but the ones of the wall were quite interesting. The gallery itself was a nice space, dark and expansive, and I was intrigued by the labels. Many of the photos had their original captions (these were Magnum photos so photojournalism) and the text was only slightly tweaked for the gallery labels: ‘Gaza’ to ‘occupied Gaza’, ‘villages were attacked and destroyed’ to ‘villages were attacked and the homes were destroyed’, etc.
Then back through the pretty streets, the usual mix of crumbling grandeur, unruly greenery and bland newer construction to Dar. Here the GF was having a late lunch, so once he’d finished we called an Uber and returned to Byblos in time for sunset at the port. On the way back we went to the weekly market, far less empty than usual, and stocked up on many useful items but notably some tiny black avocadoes.
Returning to the flat we got caught in a wedding procession led by a band that was very much into it. It was part hipster band, part band from Paprkia, and the bride led the procession dancing and waving her bouquet above her head. It was a lovely little scene so we lingered to watch and afterwards the band left the church and walked up the way we were going, with one playing idly on his trumpet, another making his drum boom apocalyptically, and a third singing to himself.