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
zCold 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.
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