Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 7: The Book of Hussein

Luxor is the city in southern Egypt divided into the West and East Bank of the Nile. The two banks on opposite shores of the river are polar opposites, and I didn't much like the East Bank where the hassling was especially bad along the waterfront, and there was nothing aesthetically pleasing about the place, none whatsoever. And this is coming from someone who can see beauty in a junkyard [rf: “hidden gems” post]. The other side- the West Bank- was a stark contrast from this ugly and uninteresting East Bank, for it contained the Valley of the Kings, where Howard Carter discovered the tomb of King Tut:

“At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues and gold everywhere the glint of gold.“

- the famous lines describing the moment of the most amazing discovery he would ever make. Gives me the shivers whenever I read it. Back in the days of ancient Egypt, people devoted a lot of time to attending to the dead. Also, there was a much more intense belief in the power of the written word, literally. The blue and gold paints were still in decent condition, and every inch of the tombs' rocky innards were covered with angular men and women, cartouches, and owls, ankhs, scarabs, quails, reeds, and other hieroglyphs that the ancients seemed to believe would protect and/or assist the dead just by being written- carved- into the stone walls of the chamber. We spotted several carvings of men with dicks erect at perfectly 90 degree angles, and in the coolest tomb (probably one of the Ramses, I forget which), there was an elaborate blue-and-gold painting of the story of the goddess who swallows and gives birth to the sun every day.

We nearly got into trouble with the police here because one of the unofficial guards waited around until he was sure we had taken pictures, then randomly chose Max to threaten with police action if he didn't give payment for the picture.

We were ALL taking pictures.

I just met another Egyptian here in Erbil, and mentioned the opinion that most Egyptians are poor, so this whole corrupt baksheesh culture should be considered in a sympathetic light. The Egyptian shook his head and said it was more than poverty; it was a social sickness. Thinking of this particular incident in which the self-appointed guard quite deviously walked away in order to give us time to sneak pictures, and then returned to catch us red-handed- makes me want to side with the second opinion. They can be nasty. They can be unpleasant. The corruption can be sickening. Perhaps it is a sickness that ought to be treated. The part that makes me mad is that he acted as if he had all the authority in the world to charge us, threaten us, snatch one of our phones without permission, and blackmail us, when in reality, he had not a shred of authority to do any of the above. It also pissed me off when I would go to the bathroom and have to tip someone just for handing me a paper towel, when I could damn well have gotten it myself. Did I ask for the service? Uh, no...Did the owner of the building ask you to stand at the door collecting coins? Uh, no! Well, I can't be too sure about that. And maybe I'm just being an utter snob.

After encounters like this and all the hassling, it was really nice and a huge relief to meet Hussein. Hussein was the taxi driver who drove us to and from Hetsepshut, the pillared structure built right into the face of a mountain, still somewhere on the West Bank of Luxor.

In his hand he holds an ankh, the symbol for eternal life. So much for that.

Dogs mirror the Colossi of Memnon

On the way to Hetsepshut, he showed us a little notebook he carried around with him in the cab, each page filled with a message from travelers from all over the world who had been chauffered by Hussein, messages in their respective languages, including one in Korean. I could tell this little book meant a lot to him. It was like his well-worn passport, except he never went anywhere; people came to him and brought their exotic letters and words and marked his book with them like souvenirs, as proof that he had seen the world through others' eyes, heard their stories, seen what they looked like, heard what they sounded like. On the way from Hetsepshut, I kept asking him where he lived, whether we had passed his house yet, how 'bout now? How 'bout now? Until he got the unsubtle hint and invited us all over for tea. I don't think I had aimed to get invited to his house, but now that I think about it, I guess that's what it sounded like.

We drove toward the road to Aswan. I remember low, colorful walls on either side and a long, straight road. It was around sunset. He parked on the left side, we crossed the street, and followed him past the wall and into his home. It was spacious, there were many rooms with colorful walls in sky blues and sea greens- even a good-sized guest room with piles of thick blankets like in the Princess and the Pea-, but it was all unmistakably poor. The stall-like bathrooms with holes in the ground for pissing and dumping were fulsome-looking, I remember, but the walls were a cheery sky blue. One room was being used as a barn to house his pigeons, chickens, and a cow that had given birth just days ago (so that would make it 2 cows). Pigeons were good for sex, Hussein told us. Was everything slightly exotic good for sex? I wondered. One side of the house was being built up into a restaurant. Rather than saving up a lot of money over a long period of time and then building the restaurant all at once, Hussein was building it up a few stones at a time, making small progress every week or every month, but progress nonetheless. I liked his patience, his self-created purposes. He was going to call his restaurant “Sunset” because just over the back wall of where the restaurant was going to be, the guests would have a great view of the sunset every evening over his neighbor's field of several acres.

During the tour, we'd met his adorable 2-year-old son whose name I can't recall, and afterward, we met the rest of his family- his daughter and his brother's family because his brother had died, or something. There were a lot of women there is all I remember, and they all came forward and shook our hands without hesitation, without the modesty or the downward gaze decreed by their religion when woman meets man, though the older women wore the black burkhas. In southern Egypt, it seemed, Islam took on a more cultural significance rather than a religious one. We sat with Hussein on a wooden bench propped against a wall in the sitting room. The women built a roaring fire right on the dirt floor for the nightly family gathering, and they served us sweet tea. He did not have lots of money, Hussein admitted to us, but he had a large extended family to care for, and that cared for him in return. He was rich here, said the taxi driver, putting his large palm over his heart. In the firelight, Hussein's little son danced around for us in the silly way that kids dance. I can't believe I still think kids are cute after finding out what devils they can be.  I wrote a short message in his little notebook and we all signed it, making our mark in the Book of Hussein.

The next day, I sat in a felucca with two Jews and an anti-Semitic, chauvinist boatman, waiting futilely for the wind to pick up. It never picked up. We picked up and left for the train station.

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 6: Saladin's Kingdom

On Christmas morning 2008, I woke up in a hotel room with three Jews. The night before, while everyone else was asleep, I had gone for a walk around the neighborhood and happened to buy a box of Middle Eastern desserts like baklava and stuff from a sweets shop around the corner. We dug into these before heading downstairs for the usual hotel breakfast, which just barely passed the “edible” mark, despite all appearances. After the first morning, I pretty much just had tea or nescafe. I think this was the day we visited the Citadel of Saladin (12th century Sultan of Egypt and Syria and legendary military commander, who was actually of Kurdish origin!), where we entered several mosques, including the famous Mohammed Ali mosque, and climbed some old crumbling stone-brick structure with towers and steeply spiraling staircases and a beautiful view of Cairo's cityscape of pencil gray buildings that matched the grayness of the winter sky that day, and were hung all over with colorful laundry. I selfishly hoped that the dwellers of this city would never adopt automatic dryers; without the laundry hung over all the balconies, the Cairo cityscape would be dull indeed.

Keeper of Shoes

Modern Cairo through an ancient window

Dave and Alice make their escape

Max surveys his kingdom

Sitting precariously on a ledge

I want to climb a tree in every nation.

Denile is a river in Egypt

Another night, we visited the Cairo tower which was supposed to afford a most amazing view of the city, especially during sunset. We got there after dark, so decided not to go up that night. But I did get a picture of that black vulture-like emblem that adorns the front of the tower as well as the flag of Egypt.

Later, I discovered that this fierce-looking bird was not a vulture, but an eagle- the Eagle of Saladin, the symbol of Arab nationalism, also later adopted by Saddam's Baathist party* and the Nazis. Saladin is turning out to be a vastly interesting historical figure, and I'm now wishing I'd read more about him before going to Egypt, so I could have looked for the eagle carving on the western wall of the Citadel, if it even exists anymore. Anyway, we came back to the tower during our last night in Cairo before heading down to Luxor, but the sunset escaped us once again because the line for the elevator was so long. Nevertheless, the view from the top was pretty nice- like seeing Paris from the Eiffel Tower, except here we could see a huge soccer field, a tiny soccer field, and a swimming pool among other things, and the Nile of course. I dunno why it's the sports arenas I remember. It was freezing so we took a seat at the cafe, which wasn't terribly fancy, but had a small tray of little red stones on the table as decoration that Alice seemed to like. Alice and I had a nice long chat about books. Back at the hotel, as we sat around on the lobby couches, waiting to go to the train station, we played a game called “2 f***u's and a surprise”. Alice won the surprise- one of the little red stones from the Cairo tower cafe.

While waiting just outside the train station, we shared a bowl of macaroni-and-tomato sauce at a hole-in-the-wall macaroni-and-tomato sauce joint whose floor was covered with wood chips. I went exploring and passed many shisha-and-shai cafes full of men with smoke blowing out of their mouth and nostrils, and steam rising from their teacups. And interestingly, I discovered a large shisha-and-shai house where the men sat around smoking, drinking tea, and playing some hard-core chess. Before heading back to the train station, I picked up some sweet Egyptian bread, a bag of honey-roasted chestnuts, and a marriage proposal (I said no). We took a 12-hour train down to Luxor that night, accompanied by all these Egyptian men in dresses (I can't help thinking of them as dresses, even though they're just the traditional Egyptian garb for men) and turbans, a man who made a strange droning sound the entire time, a man who looked as old as the Pyramids who was unable to walk by himself and yet insisted on taking a walk through the narrow aisle every half-hour, taking about half the time it took to build the Pyramids to walk a single train-length. And flies. Welcome to 2nd class trains in Egypt, folks! It felt like the Septa in Philly- dirty, with the token crazy guy(s). The door right in front of me kept swinging open and shut all night because of the men selling tea and bread, and because of that ancient man who enjoyed taking walks. It was a restless night for me. It was a miserable night for one of my traveling companions. (Cipro anyone?) At one point, I woke up from my half-sleep, looked out the window, and saw a beautiful countryside view, of lush, green and golden fields and palm trees, the sky a pale yellow and white. At another point, I woke up, looked out the same window, and saw an amazing deep-pink and red sunrise. Surreal images between sleep, seen through a smudged window of a train chugging through Egypt.

*Months later, I bought a rusty Ba'athist eagle insignia for $5 at an antique shop in Erbil. To this day, I don't know what to do with it.

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 5: Egypt

I arrived at the Cairo airport at night. Crap! Cairo was just as freezing as Lebanon, at least at night. I had been hoping to be greeted by warm, beach-like weather that would magically evaporate my sickness away, but no such luck, even in a desert country! Staring out the cab window, I was shocked by the size and sprawl of the city. The highway we drove through was very wide, and we passed lots of tall buildings and huge billboards and huge everything else. For a moment, I felt like I was driving through Houston, Texas because everything was so huge and sprawled out, but then we passed by several huge glittery mosques and it brought me back to reality. This was Cairo, and it was huge! Or at least it seemed so as I sped through it in a cab from the airport to Hotel Havana. The taxi driver had come from the hotel to pick me up. He spoke fairly fluent English and had the radio tuned to a station playing American music- '80s classics to be more specific. Bon Jovi to be more specific. “I love Bon Jovi,” said Ahmed, the driver. “Me too!” I said. “It's my life,” he rejoindered. I nodded, smiling, thinking he meant something like Bon Jovi was the soundtrack to his life, the music that defined the prime of his life. A minute later, I got smart and realized he was talking about the song “It's My Life (it's now or never!)”.

Once at the hotel, I walked through the corridor along one of the upper floors, wondering what my travel companions would be like. I turned a corner and ran into two strangers- both with blond hair and glasses, a guy and a girl. Suddenly, I felt like Alice of Lewis Carroll's classic tale, after she ate the mushrooms. Had I grown, or had the halls and everything in it shrunk? It turns out, these short strangers were David's friends, two of the people I'd be traveling with for the next 8 days. Introductions were made, and then they showed me into our hotel room where I met David. I put down my suitcase at the foot of my bed and exclaimed over the comparative luxury of this hotel room. I threw myself on the bed and lay with my arms behind my head, and sighed with pleasure. It was nice to not be completely alone in such a big, foreign city like Cairo, and my travel companions seemed like a bunch of good-natured people. It was weird: as I lay there on the bed with my gaze toward the ceiling, I felt like Eric was sitting there on the bed next to mine. They were different, but shared just enough of the same traits to make it certain that they were brothers, especially in the way they spoke. What must it be like for people to meet me and Sarah separately? It must be mind-warping...Anyway, after sharing some stories, we hit the sack early because we wanted to start out super-early tomorrow, my first day in Cairo.

***The next day***

What can I say? I saw the Sphinx! I touched real Egyptian hieroglyphs! I climbed the Great Pyramid! And it was great! Actually, the climb up the inside of the pyramid was arduous, and I was hit with a wave of nausea at the top from dehydration. So at the moment, while we slowly made our way up the narrow, claustrophobia-inducing, railroad track-like path, hunching over for minutes at one point and sweating in the humid, stifling space, it didn't feel that great and I was wishing I was in far better shape. But, on the way back down, I was able to enjoy the iconic moment a lot more and when I got out into the light and the fresh, open air, I felt a rush from the climb, and all I could think was “Woah...I just climbed the Great Pyramid!” Finally, something to check off that damned List. 

"Get outta my ass!"

"Get outta my picture!"

David, one of my traveling buddies

It's the Borrowers!

These are not from a museum!

Two triangles

We had dinner that evening on an anchored restaurant-ship on the Nile. The view on the way down to the ship was pretty, the two lions sitting on their haunches at the end of the bridge, the subtle tones of the sunset, and the reflections on the slow-moving waters of the famed river. We crossed the walkway along the river and saw some strange sights that may go forever unexplained. To our left were dozens of park benches, and each one had a young couple perched on it and acting all couply- which in a Muslim nation like Egypt means nothing more than sitting close and holding hands. One couple though was stretching the boundaries and feeding each other potato chips. Only, when the guy held the chip up to the girl's lips, she completely ignored it and trained her huge mascara-lined eyes on the four of us instead, giving us the most seductive, cat-like look, her pointed eyebrows raised from under her headscarf as if to say “come hither”, her tongue sticking out ever so slightly and lolling about, anticipating the chip that dangled patiently between her boyfriend's/husband's fingers, but her cat eyes still glued seductively on us. 

WTF?

And then a few steps later, another girl in a long skirt and headscarf gave us the same seductive “come hither” stare- though her guy wasn't trying to feed her potato chips- and I did a double take because under the scarf her face, I swear, looked like the face of a man. Again, we'll never understand the real reasons for this flash mob-like charade, but there was something off about this entire walk to the restaurant-ship on the Nile. As I shared with the group later, during the dinner, I thought the entire scene with all the couples on the benches, the seducers, and the cross-dresser was a charade set up to freak out us foreigners, to inject a bit of surrealism into our tourism experience in Egypt. Just a theory! The dinner was amazing, especially the seasoned fried potatoes- the best I've ever had. And we got a basket of that Egyptian bread that looks like a giant version of those air bubbles you get sometimes on pizzas. It's like flatbread, but blown up like a balloon so that the inside is hollow. 

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 4: Saying Goodbyes

The day before I left Lebanon for Egypt, I went around the city revisiting people I'd met just days ago at random shops and restaurants. This could be a clever way of getting to know the city as well as the people who dwell in it, but really, I just wanted to thank them for their hospitality and kindness toward me, a complete stranger. I visited the crystal jewelry shop lady with voluminous wavy black hair, bedecked in gaudy jewelry and bold makeup. She showed me the reindeer she had made completely out of crystal gems strung cleverly together, I browsed through her little shop and bought a couple more things, and we chatted in French over extremely strong (must've been Turkish) coffee and Lebanese pastries. I lingered there a bit too long, said goodbye, and rushed out to catch a cab (not a moped this time) to Gemayzeh where I told the young owner of the Godfather restaurant all about my time in his country which he rarely got to enjoy himself, and promised him a souvenir from Egypt, or at least more stories. I stayed there overlong too, and by the time I said goodbye and rushed out, it was getting uncomfortably close to my departure time, and I wasn't sure if I had enough time to visit the wonderful couple who owned the artisan crafts shop along the Corniche. I hailed a cab and made my way down to the waterfront. Luckily, there wasn't much traffic along the road we were taking, so I got there in a few minutes (Beirut is such a tiny place I now realize). I wandered into their shop, the floor still scattered with real, crisp leaves, and they greeted me like an old friend. I told them all the things I'd seen in their country, about the water in the Jeita Grotto which was the color of that blue-greenish color in the painting that hung on that wall, but ever clearer, even more pure. 

The husband showed me a small teacup with only the dark, sludgy dregs of coffee left, the inner rim stained with a most interesting pattern. The cup had belonged to a customer, and the husband told me that the customer would receive news from Italy, pointing to a particular dark smudge that resembled a lady's high heel hanging off the inner rim's patterned chain. The “Italian shoe” he called it. It took me a minute to realize that he meant it resembled Italy, which looks like a shoe on the map. Cool! I thought. Another instance- like the rock sculptures in the Jeita Grotto- of forms in nature that accidentally resembled something man-made, though there had been no human conscience directing its formation. The wife started giving me a tour of their shop, and at the back of the shop, I gasped because a ginormous wave had just rushed up to the height of their store and seemed close enough to touch. She let me out the glass backdoor, and I stepped onto the platform and approached the ledge, awed by the enormity and ferociousness of the waves. What made the sea so angry? The tides rolled in like a stampede of white stallions and crashed thunderously against the boulders, white seafoam exploding spectacularly outward and upward, rising several feet high at times. My god, what a rush! The exploding waves blotted my camera with blizzard-like spots as I tried to capture them in action. I put down my camera and looked out to sea. Away from the shore, the waves appeared a lot calmer, an endless sheet of ice-blue. Gray sky stuffed with puffy white clouds like sheep in dire need of a good grooming matched the sullen, angry mood of the waves pounding at my feet. 

To me, a short-stay tourist from the West, who'd recently lived a few months in the Islamic country of Kurdistan, Lebanon was a phenomenon, a wonderful blend of the West and the Arab world, like the perfect blend of coffee and cream. What I loved most about Lebanon: one, they go all out for Christmas; two, the people are so open and friendly and welcoming and they (quite unlike Egyptians, as I discovered later) demand nothing in return for their kindness; three, they speak fluent English and/or French along with Arabic, and so the chance that I could communicate with a random person off the street was fairly great; and four, seize the day, seize the moment! This is the mindset of the Lebanese people. War? Bombs? No problem, we'll just rebuild everything the next day and party all night! Of course, with this great carpe diem attitude comes one of their greatest weaknesses- absolute materialism and superficiality. They love to party and look good while they party, and even when they are not partying they like to look good, and when they're completely past that partying age, they just like to look good. Period. Or as the Brits say: “Full stop.” 

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 3: The Pillsbury Doughboy Taxi Driver

The taxi drivers in Beirut are an interesting sector of Lebanese society. Most of the taxi drivers don't seem to speak much English or French, just Arabic. I had some great ones like Hazh who was like a grandfather to me. But I've also had some sleazy-ish ones who ask for friendship and then ask for an innocent coffee date, and I don't really want to guess what was on their mind when they asked for these things and then started driving into an area where people came to “make sex”. Lover's Point jutting out into the raging, deep space-like Mediterranean Sea. 

The worst one, though, was the one who tried to get me to hit his hand with a paddle. I refused of course, and was weirded out, sure, but I chose to stay in the cab and ignore his excessive honking and angry blabbering as well as his annoying habit of honking at all the pretty young girls as he drove by and ignoring the others who actually needed taxis. But after he drove around for nearly 40 minutes and dropped off everyone else until only I was left, I was getting seriously annoyed, especially when he asked me a second time to beat his pale, doughy hand with the damn paddle. I refused again and told him that that was enough ("halas" is such a useful phrase in the Mideast), so he put the paddle back into the side pocket of his door and continued to drive and shout and mutter and honk. My nerves were seriously exacerbated, but I figured I'd just bear it until we reached my desired destination- the ABC shopping mall that was supposed to be beautifully decorated for the holidays and crowded with shoppers.

It was when he pulled out the paddle for the 3rd time and asked me again to beat his hand with it, that I finally decided enough was enough, pushed the door open and jetted out into the night, slamming the door shut behind his fat, protesting head. Seething, I marched down the street past the gridlock traffic, having no idea if I was even going in the right direction; I just wanted to get the fuck away from this mad paddle-wielding doughboy. I stopped to ask two trustworthy-looking girls for directions, but then suddenly I heard him coming up behind me demanding his money. The nerve! The doughboy had left his taxi in the middle of traffic to chase after me and demand money for driving me around in his cab for nearly an hour and pleading for pleasure beatings? The nerve, the nerve! I turned around to face him and cursed at him very loudly. After cursing him out, I marched away down the street until I saw a cab with a decent-looking driver and a young clean-cut looking male passenger inside it in shotgun. “ABC Ashrafiyeh?” I asked, giving him my destination. To my great relief, he nodded and so I jumped into the back seat, shut the door, and turned back to see if the doughboy was still following me. Nope, no such luck. I wished he had been because then I would have taken that paddle and beat him over the head with it. I turned back to face the front and realized that the two guys in front were staring at me like “what's your story lady?” So I told them the entire ordeal, and they shook their heads in disbelief.

Names and backgrounds were exchanged, and I suddenly felt very grateful for their company and wished I could stay with them in the cab for the rest of the night where it was warm and safe and the people were kind and decent and not crazy. The passenger was a 29-year-old native who had lived in Kuwait for several years, had gone to school there, and now worked at a bank (or so he said- that comment is for my fellow agents) in Beirut. Near the mall, he offered to walk me to the entrance because the traffic was voluminous and it would be faster to just get out and walk the rest of the way, so we paid the driver, thanked him and got out. I studied the face of the banker by store-light and headlights as we walked side-by-side in the overall darkness. He had large, dark, serious eyes and a serious face but the most important thing was that he looked 100% sane and walked without a paddle and only a harmless, serious-looking briefcase.  As we walked, he told me about his job and sort of made a point that he lived alone in his apartment which we were approaching. I was feeling needy and a bit lonely at the moment after my harry experience with the Doughboy, and this part of me desperately wanted to accept his unspoken invitation, stranger though he was. We reached the crossroad where his apartment stood to one side and the mall to the other, but despite the millisecond's hesitation, I merely thanked him heartfeltly, wished him a Merry Christmas, and walked away down the street toward the brightly-lit entrance of the mall.

I think I rely too much on fate. If things are meant to happen, they will happen and there's no need to make any artificial moves or conscious efforts to interrupt the natural flow of events. Water over rocks, like the stalagmites inside Jeita Grotto. Fate be damned, I should start taking things into my own hands. “Nothing is written in the stars,” as the Elephant princess says in Wicked. Really? So there was nothing written in the stars about how I would encounter a mad paddle-wielding doughboy taxi driver in Beirut in the winter of 2008? Really nothing? Well, I guess I just got lucky then. I ought to thank my lucky stars.

Tales from the Arabian Nights, Part 2: Water

The next day (or was it the third day? I had delicious sushi-like eggplant rolls at a fancy French restaurant on Gemayzeh which was worth noting, sometime between Music Hall and Jeita), I decided to play the tourist game and visit some actual tourist sites in Lebanon. 

Let me tell you, I had huge plans to visit all the major sites in this country, from Beiteddine to Byblos to the Cedars and everything in between. What I didn't count on was falling sick, yet again! I was so angry at my weak immune system, which seems to have gone haywire ever since I came to the Middle East. Plus, it is freezing in Lebanon at this time of year, which I didn't count on, and for which I was not dressed enough, so it was kinda my fault for not wearing that extra layer, but I still decided to stew against my stupid immune system for not fighting the good fight with all the antibodies it must have stored up in the last two months. Anyway enough strange talk about stewing against sicknesses. 

Before I fell sick, I was able to visit at least a few of the touristy sites here, mainly the Jeita Grotto, the Harissa, and a Hall of Fame museum on the way to the Grotto. And I had an excellent grandfatherly taxi driver named Hazh to accompany me throughout the entire day trip. I was really touched when he went back to his car to pull out an umbrella when it started raining, and held it over my head to protect me from the light drizzle. He was like the grandfather I never had (both of mine, as well as one grandmother died before I was born).

It was Hazh's idea to take me to the Hall of Fame- a very cool idea for a museum. I saw realistic dummies of all these famous figures from the Arabic author Naguib Mahfouz and Van Gogh to world political figures like Clinton (first name Bill) and Bush and Kofi Annan and the Iraqi Minister of Media and Communications and Saddam Hussein, as well as some Arabic musicians and even my friend Einstein was there, looking rather frazzled.

And also the tallest, shortest, and fattest man in the world. The Clinton dummy kept saying over and over again, “I did not have sex with...[that chick in the black beret whom I totally fucked on more than one occasion]”, and the Bush dummy was doing that side-to-side shifty eye thing that Dubya does in real life (perhaps they''ve added a ducking motion by now). The shortest man was less than 2 feet tall and married a regular-sized woman and bore many children, apparently. And according to the tour guide, Einstein was known for taking like 2 showers a year...is that really true? I know he was known for never wearing socks, but the shower thing? And gee, I don't think I could ever marry a 1.5-foot man and have babies with him, so that was pretty crazy to find out.

...................

Water is deceptively simple. After the Hall of Fame, I visited the Jeita Grotto* next- a cave divided into an upper and lower section. The Upper Grotto was just pure limestone- thousands of masses of limestone in surprisingly complex shapes for something that was carved by water alone. While meandering slowly through the cave, so dim and humid, I saw a frog on a lilypad, a little girl in the act of waking, a 3-fingered hand that reminded me of Rodin's “Hand of God” which I'd seen three summers ago in Paris, and dozens of other sculptures, some more amorphous than others, all carved out by water dripping from the cracks in the cave's ceiling over thousands of years. To be precise, each centimeter of rock took 120 years to get carved out. Water, left to its own devices (and given lots of time) works in mysterious ways. 

It must have been really amazing for the discoverer of the grotto: To have move a regular pile of stones and discovered a hole; to have crawled through the hole, and found piles and piles of limestone in strange and beautiful shapes- stacks of rock that could easily be seen as just massive, unordered piles of rubble if not for the element of human imagination. I thought: how boring it must be to work as one of the guards stationed at various points of the cave's man-made path. But after one of them showed me the frog and the hand, I saw the more romantic aspect of his job- he sat here day after day for more than two years, giving shape and definition to these amorphous stacks, carvings, stalactites, stalagmites, and glittering limestone curtains, until he knew this particular patch of rock like the back of his hand (this analogy is used, assuming the back of one's hand is well-studied). It was a slower sort of discovery- like the way water shapes limestone- but full of surprises and secrets that he could then reveal to the odd tourist, like me. 

Towards the end of the path, I looked down the rail and saw at the bottom of the sheer drop a giant eye of the purest blue-green tint. Later, I would take a far-too-short boat ride across this pristine lake located in the Lower Grotto of the cave. The water was cool to the touch, and clear enough to see the sand at the bottom at the shallow ends. The ceiling hung low here and there with sharp dinosaur-teeth stalactites sticking out dangerously so that you had to duck quickly to avoid an undesirable skull-stabbing if your boatman was not a particularly careful driver and didn't do to much to warn you. The boat ride ended far sooner than I would have liked, and in minutes, I found myself once again standing at the entrance of the cave, shivering from the cold and watching the fine rain drizzle down lightly from under my red hood. Water was really deceptively simple.

And terrifying

z

Cold and austere

Pigeon Rock- natural rock formations set in the Mediterranean Sea along the waterfront.

*Unfortunately, cameras were not allowed in Jeita Grotto. I had to settle for mass-produced postcards, which granted, are probably of far better quality than any picture I would have taken in there.