Yesterday the Gentleman Friend had to go into the office, in Hamra (West Beirut) and I decided to join him. I dropped him off near his office as he was running late for a meeting, and myself went to Amal Bohsal, an old sweet maker, to try their breakfast knefeh. This is basically a warm slab of soft white cheese with a thin soft semolina layer on top, and doused in perfumed syrup. The Lebanese way is to eat it in a kaak (a light sesame bread) as a sort of sandwich – the Lebanese like sandwiches, for sure. The Nabulsi way is to serve it in thin crisp semolina. I was hoping for the latter but got the former, and was walking through Hamra to find a spot to eat it when I heard my name – the GF’s meeting had been postponed, he spotted me on the street, and so we shared the knefeh. Which is for the best as it is a mightly breakfast.
Hamra is romantic and doomed because it is in West Beirut, but it is also congested and grimy, with far fewer lovely old buildings and jasmine covered courtyards than in the east, no doubt thanks to all the bombing. After my breakfast I found a spot in Mezyan, a cafe where the country’s vestigial lefties and revolutionaries are said to hang out, and which certainly is a very pleasant space and with nice food. Here I stayed all afternoon, doing some writing. The GF came in for lunch and we had a couscous which made me ashamed of the stodge that emerges from my own attempts at it. I did look up a guide to making good couscous and found myself thoroughly intimidated.
At four I left to pop into the office of a travel agency that I hoped would be able to arrange a trip to the Qadisha valley and its cave churches. It was not the most helpful, sadly, as they didn’t really understand what I was after, or my interest in some of the smaller, more obscure shrines etc. Then, as there was still about an hour before the Gentleman Friend would be finished, I walked around Hamra, trying to capture the romance a bit, looping through side streets – the student-y areas to the north, the small Filipino shops to the south – and then returned to Mezyan.
Dinner was at Maryoul, I think my favourite restaurant in Beirut. Once again the food was impeccable, the service delightful and the pomegranate juice undiluted. We again shared a knefeh, this time the Nabulsi kind, and then returned home for a cup of cooked saffron-spiced chai and bed. A pleasant day, though I have skipped out the heavy traffic that blighted parts of it.