Tom is in Cairo at a teacher conference. This weekend I got to go to a conference as well, here in Beirut at the new Beirut Art Center--a beautiful new place in an industrial area, with a spacious gallery, meeting room with outdoor patio, and theater for showing films. The conference, funded by a Swiss foundation, had to do with “landscapes of belonging in the eastern Mediterranean” --a rich topic! I got to hear speakers on Iraqi refugees in Syria, including Kurds who choose to live in the squalor of Palestinian refugee camps so their children don’t have to go to school with other Iraqis, Arab Jews, Turkish Kurds, and Armenians’ memory of catastrophe.
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We have an election coming up here on June 7. Posters of various candidates proliferate, a different guy (they seem to be all men) in each neighborhood. I heard today from an American widow friend whose husband was Lebanese and who has lived here for many years that she got a phone call asking if she would like to see her daughters. One daughter lives in Paris and the other Texas. The caller represented a party that would pay to fly them in for the election! Apparently there are several parties doing this!
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We have an election coming up here on June 7. Posters of various candidates proliferate, a different guy (they seem to be all men) in each neighborhood. I heard today from an American widow friend whose husband was Lebanese and who has lived here for many years that she got a phone call asking if she would like to see her daughters. One daughter lives in Paris and the other Texas. The caller represented a party that would pay to fly them in for the election! Apparently there are several parties doing this!
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Seen around town:
Too Cute to Shoot (thankfully, a photo studio)
Green Salon
Blue Building
Blue Snack
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