The morning started late. We decided to go down to Karantina which lies just across the big road from us. If one Googles it the main thing that comes up is a massacre of Palestinians that was one of the sparks of the civil war. Once, appropriately, it was a lazaretto, where travellers were kept in quarantine before disembarking. Over the years it’s been the Brick Lane of Beirut, where waves of immigrants settle and then move into the city. Today it’s the site of the dump.
Mar Mikhail in the morning was its beautiful disshevelled, fragrant self, or at least the backstreets were. Across the road in Karantina it was quite different, and we soon realised why the bit we entered into seemed to have had none of the cafes and art galleries we’d been assured we could find. They must have been elsewhere, for the part we entered was clearly the old refugee camp. The women largely had their heads covered and had hard, though not unwelcoming stares for us, especially (for some reason) for me – perhaps I was just clos eenough in appearance that they thought I might be Palestinian?
There was generally a welcoming feel to it; a couple of times the Gentleman Friend was heiled by people sitting on the side of road and asked where he was from. Once it was a large Moroccan man and his Syrian friend; another time it was a small group of young boys who looked like they had stepped out of the Goonies, with colourful, characterful boys of all shapes and dispositions. One of them, the plump outgoing one, on hearing the GF was from London, spread his arms wide and said, ‘Welcome to Beirut!’ and swiftly corrected himself to ‘welcome to Karantina!’
Indeed, it did feel like a little island separate from Beirut, with its own pace and people and way of life.
At one point a glider flew overhead and a swarm of boys ran out of a houes to watch it, faces upturned.
We went for lunch to Tawlet, which was an immense success. Many had told us we should go there and we had resisted, as it was described as a buffet which conjured a vision of a long buffet line along silver chafing dishes, with a traditional musician of uncertain talent playing in the corner and villagey implements hung on the walls. Instead it was a small, stylish cafe run by the people who also do the Souq al Tayeb, with the walls covered instead with embroidered local herbs (high quality embroidery), and bottles of organic pomegranate molasses and orange blossom water labelled with the name of the producer. The buffet was a remarkable spread of mezze: a foraged herb salad, tabouleh, raw goat kebbeh, two absolutely fantastic lentil/ chickpea dishes, various dips including the best beetroot I’ve ever had (I dislike beetroot), a pulau that reminded me of the one my grandmother used to make, with meat cooked till it was falling apart in strings, and the rice plump and separated and full of flavour. Drinks included the best rosewater I have ever tasted, complex and lingering, and there was an array of desserts including a very curious traditional celebratory halwa which was like a spice bomb in the mouth. Really superb. It was expensive, but worth evey Lebanese pound.
Despite not having had breakfast I overate, and so collapsed on returning to the flat, rising long enough to finish off and send some work. Which I have done (I have developed an advanced technique for sending email attachments that works if they are not more than a couple of hundred kilobytes).
Tomorrow morning, bright and early, we head south.