Susan visits

The first brave friend to make the trek to the Middle East. We toured the south, Saida (Sidon in English), its souk, soap museum, and famed falafel stand, and went on to Sur (Tyre), its Roman hippodrome and Byzantine ruins, and the beach. Great mezze meal--her first, complete with nargileh. A hair raising minibus ride back to Beirut tested our mettle.

Photos: Susan and the Mediterranean and at a ruins sites, both in Sur. And with the argileh.

And here are three murals we saw outside a school in Sur. One shows a Lebanese soldier stepping on an Israeli who is trying to set fire to Lebanon. Curiously, the Israeli has light colored hair. Another is a Lebanese (or Palestinian?) on the wrong side of a barbed wire fence, looking in at an Israeli cultivating a rich field, presumably planted by man #1. The third has a man with some kind of beast pulling a plow. The animal is about to step on a land mine.

And a sign on a vehicle used by mine clearance workers.

Back in Beirut in one grateful piece (each, that is), we walk to the rebuilt downtown area via more Roman ruins, and enjoy mezze number two.

Saturday morning we picked up a rental car and headed over the mountains to the Bekaa Valley and the astounding ruins at Baalbek. The pass we crossed still had a lot of snow and was down to one lane at the top)! T did a great job of driving.

Driving into the town of Baalbek I finally get a photo of the Israeli tank caputred by Hezbollah, which now sports a huge cutout of a political candidate.

Baalbek! Our 5th or 6th trip, and the first time we have seen any tourists. A good sign for Lebanon.

To the left are Susan, Tom and Cleopatra... She (Cleo) used to be on the ceiling outside the Bacchus temple (above) but fell down one century or tother.

We spent the night in Zahle, a Christian town about half an hour from Baalbek, on the Birdawni River. Mezze number three (see photo).

Next day, we head back over the mountains via a cedar reserve. Not a lot of cedars (but some that are 2000 years old) the forests having been cut by Phoenicians to build boats and send the lumber to Egypt(cedar oil was used in mummification) and beyond, the Romans and the Ottomans, who dramatically reduced their numbers. Now they are confined to a handful of reserves. Photos show an area planted in baby cedars, S and K under a cedar, and another old tree. It is sad how few are left; we had to go quite a ways into the reserve to find any cedars.

Susan says Beirut traffic is like a dance. Yes--a modern dance of weaving and blending wordlessly (well, usually), first appearing to be chaos but then an underlying form, somehow in sync (ditto) and with the occasional dramatic interruption.