Weekend in Beirut

Whoa! Busy few weeks there. With political turmoil, the pre-Ramadan work crunch, and the departure of several dear colleagues, I've been a busy girl. On top of it all, I can't seem to shake an unusually long stretch of insomnia, which has taken taken quite a toll on my productivity these last few days. Tonight I've got an early date with my bed and some complex survey analysis methods reading (to help me fall asleep), but before that I wanted to post some pictures from my recent trip to Lebanon last month. 

My dear friend H. (of the Pink House Girls) moved to Beirut shortly before I landed in Cairo and we have been trying to get together for about a year now. We finally had a matching free weekend in May and I booked a ticket for a mini reunion and a chance to see the city that had been described to me as the "Miami of the Middle East". 

The weekend before my trip, I had a minor aesthetic disaster at a salon here, and a friend who occasionally works in Beirut told me I could certainly get it fixed there. Lebanese women take their looks seriously. I saw more signage for plastic surgery centers and salons than traffic directionals. Apparently, its somewhat of a status symbol for girls (and guys!) to walk around post nose-job or face lift with bandages on display. Its such a prominent part of the culture that H. has a friend in Beirut who is actually doing her anthropology dissertation on plastic surgery in Lebanon. While I didn't get any new facial features, I did leave with a much more natural hair color. 

We hadn't seen each other in over a year (in which time a lot had happened), so we had quite a bit of catching up to do! We spent the entire weekend eating, talking, drinking, and sightseeing. We took a day to see Byblos, a town with Phoenician ruins on the sea and had an amazing lunch and conversation over a glass of perfectly chilled white wine. 

Moules frites - the perfect lunch :)

The ruins at Byblos reminded me a lot of the ruins in Tulum, Mexico. Is it just me?

Byblos

Tulum

Byblos

Tulum

 I also got to spend time with the sister of a very dear Austin friend, who is studying at AUB. She and H. have gotten to be buddies over the last year - I love how the world is such a small place!

Also, just needed to include this evidence that AUB is trying to one-up UT's tower. This is the main gate of the campus.

H. has promised to visit me in the land of not quite right if things stay stable. We currently have no parliament, no constitution and a shameless military council rewriting the rules in their favor as fast as they can. By tomorrow we should have an unofficial declaration of the winner. The official count shouldn't take much longer than Tuesday seeing as how initial reports cited turnouts of 5-7% in most districts. 

I don't have the energy to delve in politics tonight, and I'm afraid most of Egypt is in the same, slowly sinking boat.