http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Middle-East/2012/Jan-29/161430-invented-palestinian-confronts-gingrich-report.ashx#axzz1ksh24ewL

Just to verify the quotes I found the video of the debate on YouTube, here:

I specifically wanted to comment on Gingrich’s quote because of the ignorance it suggests about the situation on the ground:

“My goal for the Palestinian people would be to live in peace, to live in prosperity, to have the dignity of a state, to have freedom. And they can achieve it any morning they are prepared to say, ‘Israel has a right to exist. We give up the right to return. And we recognize that we’re going to live side by side. Now let’s work together to create mutual prosperity.’”

If Gingrich had read much of anything on the Middle East–even a basic classic like From Beirut to Jerusalem–he’d know that most Palestinians asking for “right of return” are not those living inside the borders of what was originally designated to be Palestine, (those who would be the primary beneficiaries of the two-state solution he seems vaguely to be advocating) but in refugee camps in neighboring countries like Syria and Lebanon.  I can’t speak for the other states where there are Palestinian populations, but here in Lebanon, they have virtually no rights, are terribly poor, and are often openly despised.  Gingrich seems to think that Palestinians are refugees and non-citizens here by their own choice, and that if they’d just settle down and stop clamoring to return to their original homes, they would be quietly absorbed into the surrounding population, (from which he apparently believes they actually originated.)

Well, regardless of what Gingrich believes about the origins of the Palestinian people, what matters is what Lebanon, et al. perceive those origins to be.  And Lebanon, at least, is not about to grant citizenship to its Palestinians, nor, I’m pretty sure, is Syria.  (Jordan actually has, I believe, but they are well-known to be an exception in their dealings with both Palestinians and Israel.)  So if the Palestinians living here in Lebanon give up their “right of return,” where exactly is Mr. Gingrich suggesting they find “prosperity” or “freedom,” much less “the dignity of a state”?  Does he suppose that, given the rest of his Middle-East policy, he’s going to have enough clout to pressure Lebanon and Syria into accepting them?  HAH.  Or perhaps he thinks, once he’s got an independent Palestinian state established, then all those refugees can somehow squeeze into the West Bank and Gaza?  (There goes the “prosperity” part, for sure.  And what makes him think they’d be any more welcome there?)  It sounds to me like he’s just using the age-old tactic of throwing in a lot of “feel-good” words to garner votes from people who don’t listen too closely.

Let me be clear: I am not trying to “take sides” in this matter, generally speaking.  Nor do I wish the tenor of this blog to be heavily political.  And I realize I am commenting on only one part of a much longer debate segment.  But Gingrich’s ignorance is somewhat astounding.  And he wants to be President of the United States?!  When I, of all people, know more about such an important issue than my potential president, I get a little scared.  I hope he finds time to read a couple books before he starts tinkering around with international relations in earnest.

I’m sick of politicians (and people in general) who don’t seem to realize that problems which hang around for a long time are still there because they are complicated, not because nobody before has thought up the inanely simple solutions such politicians suggest.

I’m receiving too many requests, however, for blog updates to keep on ignoring it, so I’m going to try to sum up all the holidays briefly in this and the following post, and then move on to other things.

For Thanksgiving, we had some Lebanese friends of my host family over and introduced them to traditional American dishes.  The best was the pumpkin pie–made from scratch, since there’s no canned pumpkin available here.  We also had cranberry sauce, brought in cans from the last trip back to the U.S., and a turkey, because the stores were just starting to stock turkeys for Christmas.  And David had miraculously managed to find some yams somewhere–a rarity here, and too pricey to eat much even when they do show up.  Imported foods in general are rare here, and especially any kind of produce.  (Speaking of which, we recently found four boxes of macaroni and cheese at the tiny little supermarket across the street.  Bonanza!!!)  We told the story of Thanksgiving for the guests (and for Tommy’s general education) and played cards and generally had a good, if quiet, day.  Oh, and I should mention that this was all actually the Saturday _before_ Thanksgiving, since the guests were unavailable that Thursday.

Not long after Thanksgiving came the ten-day Shiite holiday of Ashura, a sort of Muslim version of Lent, during which Shiites (and only Shiites) mourn the death of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad.  If you’re not familiar with the succession disputes which followed Mohammad’s death (and which led directly to the Sunni-Shiite split,) it’s worth looking it up on Wikipedia, because it’s history of vital importance to the Muslim world (and if recent history has taught Americans anything, it’s that we need to know a lot more about that world.)  For those ten days, most people wear black and refrain from listening to music, laughing loudly, and often from other kinds of entertainment as well.  Out of respect, we also tried to abide by these rules of decorum.  This was very difficult for me because of its falling during the Christmas season, when I really just wanted to be singing Christmas carols and wearing bright colors and putting up decorations and generally celebrating life, and I’ll admit I was pretty depressed for most of that time.  (On the other hand, we had the interesting experience of getting one taxi driver who had cranked his music up really loud and sang along with it, as if daring anyone to suggest he should turn it off.  “Well, that’s one guy who doesn’t care who he offends,” I thought.  Then I noticed a Palestinian flag hanging from his rearview mirror.  Palestinians are mostly Sunni, and they’re not exactly made very welcome here in Lebanon, so I’m guessing he may have been giving vent to a chipped shoulder.  I hope it was therapeutic for him–anything to keep the peace around here!)

On the last day of Ashura there was a procession through downtown Tyre–many long lines of men and boys (including, it seemed, every Boy Scout troupe from miles around–yes, they have Scouting here,) dressed in black and beating their chests, followed by a few lines of women dressed in black and some walking barefoot (in imitation of the women in Hussein’s family being led away as prisoners after the battle in which he was killed.)

Then, at the end of the whole thing, there was an ambulance and a couple of nurses with empty wheelchairs, all keeping a close watch on the last group in the procession, composed of (mostly young and, it appeared, very macho-feeling) men who’d decided to go with the more radical tradition of self-flagellation and head-cutting.  Fortunately nobody appeared to have collapsed.  (Most of them also seemed to be in a very good mood, considering they were supposed to be mourning.  Of course, when you’re seventeen and have just shown the world what a big tough man you are by parading around covered in your own blood, what else can you do?)  It was a bit disturbing, realizing I was looking at actual blood from self-inflicted wounds, and not some kind of stage makeup.  Maybe not as disturbing as it should have been, but I’ll never forget the sight of dried blood-drops on the sidewalk afterwards.  I mentioned this later to an older Lebanese gentleman–one of my students–and he seemed pretty disgusted by the whole display, and was very quick to assure me that the cutting is actually very rare, (except in the village of Nabatiyeh, which is rather infamous for its Ashura commemorations.)  From this (and others’ reactions as well) I gather that it’s not a very popular tradition.

I followed the procession down most of the parade route, taking pictures–as many seemed to be doing.  The marchers were in mourning but most of the spectators seemed to be enjoying the spectacle and the holiday more than anything else.  At the end of the procession there was a bandstand with speakers and some sheikh (a religious scholar) preaching a sermon, at which point most of the spectators sort of melted away.  I was actually very curious about what he was saying, but it was in Arabic, so I melted away too.  A bit later, however, I was walking down the quay that runs all around the peninsula on which Tyre is located, and I saw a girl standing on the rocks, waving a flag with a picture of Hussein (a very popular Ashura decoration,) and I thought it would make a great picture.  So I asked her if I could pull out my camera, and she said yes, and then she turned out to speak English pretty well, so we talked a bit.

She asked me if I knew the story behind Ashura, and I said yes, and she asked me what I thought of it.  This actually wasn’t the first time I’d been asked–they seemed to be everyone’s first two questions–and by now I was getting the feeling that they were looking for some sort of specific answer, but I could never come up with anything better than, “It’s very sad.”  I mean, it’s your classic tragedy; what else is there to say, right?  Not being a Shiite, I don’t exactly have deep emotional or cultural connections to the story, myself.  But she explained that there were many lessons to be drawn from Hussein’s death.  Naturally I asked her for an example, so she told me that a big one is the example he set in choosing to fight a battle he was clearly going to lose (being vastly outnumbered,) rather than surrender–even knowing it would surely cost him his life.  “We are not like those, what is the word, the people who blow themselves up,” she clarified.  “We value our lives.  But we will still fight, if anyone attacks us, not to give up, no matter what.”  She didn’t exactly say who “we” were, or who might be going to attack, but I think I can make an educated guess, or perhaps three educated guesses (which may have all been intended simultaneously): 1.) Shiites, against persecution from Sunnis or any other powerful religious group, 2.) Lebanese, against all outside invasions (the 2006 war still hangs heavy in everyone’s mind–I hear it mentioned at least once a week, just in the normal course of conversation,) or 3.) Arabs, against invasions from even further outside.  That last may just be me, as an American, reading a little too much into things–but her comments definitely shed some light on, for example, the reaction to the American invasion in Iraq.  (I always thought that we seemed to expect a repeat of Germany’s capitulation in WWII, and this is just one more little illustration of how–and maybe why–you can’t expect an Arab country to act like a European country, duh.)

Okay, so there’s Part I–next up, Christmas and New Year’s.  And then some reflections on my experiences in the classroom and on the street…

On the 1st day of Christmas, “habib(t)i” gave to me…a latte at Costa Coffee.

…2 missed calls and

…3 croissants

…4 electricity cuts

…5 calls to prayer

…6 cheese manooshees

…7 army checkpoints

…8 sheikhs a-preaching

…9 beggars begging

…10 expectations

…11 taxis beeping

…12 U.N. convoys

A few notes for comprehension: “habibi” (or “habibti” in the feminine) technically means “my love” in Arabic.  However, I should add that in Lebanon it’s used almost as ubiquitously as “dude!”  Costa Coffee is sort of the British equivalent of Starbucks, and is pretty much the only place to get a latte here.  Starbucks itself hasn’t made it to Tyre yet.  (If you can believe that there’s anywhere left on this planet where that can actually be true!!!)  A manooshee is sort of the local equivalent of pizza (but don’t think that it’s anything like pizza!)  The rest should be a bit more self-explanatory; you can gather for yourself the popularity of croissants and other types of French pastries, the irreliability of the power supply and cell phone reception…the Lebanese army maintains regular checkpoints on all the highways in an attempt to instill some law and order in the region (do some background reading and you’ll understand,) a sheikh is an Islamic scholar, poverty levels are high, and a really large percentage of of jobs comes from the presence of UNIFIL, the U.N.’s peacekeeping force, installed here to bring an end to the war in 2006.  “Expectations” refers to the culture’s rather stringent (by Western standards) set of social rules.  And taxis honk at you while you’re walking by the street to find out if you want a ride.  If you do want a ride, this is rather nice.  If you just want to go for a walk, however, it does quite a bit to undermine the normally relaxing nature of the exercise.  Lebanon doesn’t appear to be much of a “walking” society.

So the week before last was actually the Eid al-Adha, a major, three-day-long Islamic holiday, when Muslims celebrate the demonstration of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael on God’s orders.  (And no, that’s not a typo—Islamic tradition holds that Ishmael, not Isaac, was the subject that particular episode.  Otherwise, it appears to be basically the same story that we have in Genesis.)  It vies with Ramadan as the biggest holiday of the Islamic year, particularly as this is also the time of the Hajj, the mandatory pilgrimage to Mecca that every capable Muslim is required to perform at least once in their lifetime.  In some countries, apparently, everyone who can possibly afford it buys a sheep to sacrifice on this holiday, in memory of the sheep that God provided to take Ishmael’s place (the extra meat is given to the poor,) but that doesn’t seem to be really the thing here; I’m told the only families that usually do it are those who are celebrating someone coming back from the Hajj.  (You know which families those are because they also decorate their houses with party streamers.)  Maybe sheep are extra-expensive in Lebanon.  Most of the subsistence industry seems to involve agriculture, not shepherding.

Exactly when the holiday started was a little hazy.  The Islamic calendar is lunar and technically everyone uses the same one, but Sunnis calculate all dates well ahead of time, using a lot of math, whereas Shiites will wait until they actually see the right phase of the moon, and for whatever reason sometimes the Shiite leaders don’t observe the moon to be at a certain phase on the exact date that Sunni calculations say it ought to be, sooo…well the upshot was that the Sunni holiday started on Sunday (the seventh) but the Shiite holiday didn’t start until the eighth.  It’s hard to keep kids from celebrating a holiday as early as possible, however, so whatever the official position, the mostly-Shiite city erupted with fireworks Saturday at sundown (Islamic dates switch over at sundown, not midnight,) and it was on Sunday that we went over to see friends of the Moores for the holiday dinner.

It was quite a spread, basically a Thanksgiving-type occasion, except with some really exotic dishes; there were stuffed grape leaves and a couple other examples of what we tend to think of as Lebanese fare, but also, for instance, a kind of raw meat-paste called “ki’bi,” which was supposed to be a kind of dip for the bread.  (It was the only dish I didn’t try.  No matter how often they reassured me it was safe, I just couldn’t quite get myself to put raw meat in my mouth.)  And by the way, may I say that pita bread in Lebanon isn’t much like pita bread in the States, either.

It was a little difficult, a bit isolating, trying to socialize without being able to speak Arabic.  After the meal various friends and neighbors and relatives stopped by (and we went up and visited a couple other houses as well,) and I met a couple people who spoke English and did some translating, but I have to confess I spent a lot of time sitting in some corner chair, smiling vacuously at everyone and working on my cross-stitch.  Fortunately, the weather was gorgeous, so I also wandered outside a bit.  We were up in the hills, a country house on a banana plantation south of the town, and there was a gorgeous sweeping view from the back yard down over the valley to the sea.  Of course I only had my phone camera, so the picture doesn’t remotely do it justice, but:

A view of the valley leading down to the sea, from the hills south of Tyre.

After that the holiday ended up seeming a bit anticlimactic, however.  There were extra-long prayers broadcast from the mosques the next morning (after the Shiite holiday officially started) and most of the stores were closed for the next three days, during which time we heard a firework go off somewhere in the neighborhood on an average of once every fifteen minutes.  All day.  Every day.  Yes, that many.  Any jumpiness at the sound of loud noises I may have exhibited when I first came here was long gone by the end of the week!  We even set off a few fireworks ourselves, from the balcony, which made the pyro in me very happy.  Oh, and those “gunshots” I described in an earlier post?  All but certain now that they were just some really big fireworks, because I heard quite a few more like them.

I am, incidentally, feeling much better today.

In preparing to come, everything I read on avoiding food poisoning basically said, don’t use the water, don’t eat fruit you don’t peel yourself, etc. etc.–the usual.  All of which becomes rapidly impractical if you’re going to be spending a long time in the country.  So instead I’ve been taking acidophilus supplements and hoping for the best.  I figure after a while I’ll build up an immunity like everyone else…I just hope it happens sooner rather than later…

Seriously, though, one of the more unexpected bits of culture shock has been learning to deal with Lebanon’s perpetual energy shortage.  Government-run electricity goes off without warning several times a day, at which point most buildings have a generator which kicks in.  The generators, however, are insanely expensive–meaning, about $200/month for just five amps–and so running a household during these times takes a fair amount of juggling.  (Actually, even the government electricity doesn’t provide for the kind of reckless energy usage to which we’re accustomed back in the States, but the limitations are far less noticeable.)

The biggest energy drains are the hot water heaters–there are about five small ones, scattered throughout the condo–followed by the major appliances: microwave, dishwasher, clothes washer and dryer.  The generator only allows for about one hot water heater to be on; with government, you can do up to four at a time, but only if you’re not running anything else.  Therefore, before you pop something in the microwave or run the dishwasher, you have to remember to step over and check the power breaker and maybe switch off a couple of water heaters first (but not the one that goes to the dishwasher or clothes washer, if that’s what you’re going to run.)  If you forget to do this (which so far is often, in my case,) you’ll hear a loud clicking noise in warning and then you have maybe five seconds, if you’re lucky, in which to race across the house and turn off something before the circuits blow and the electricity for the entire condo goes off (or sometimes, God forbid, the entire building, if the switch for the condo fails.)

All of this, as I said, leads to some fairly impressive juggling, especially with five people in the house who are all going to need hot water at least once a day.  For instance, I shower at night so that there’s plenty of time to recharge the hot water in that bathroom for Isaiah the next morning.  Once he’s done, which is usually fairly early, that water heater goes off and a different one goes on for those who get up later in the morning.  I generally wash my clothes in cold water, and the dishwasher just has to wait to run until the government electricity comes on, whenever that might be.  When we need warm water for cooking or to fill a hot water bottle, we usually either nuke it or heat it in a kettle on the stove.  (The stove is, thankfully, gas-powered.)  Since there’s no central heating (I’m guessing gas isn’t that plentiful, either,) hot water bottles are a great way to stay warm, and I spend a lot of my spare time in bed under the comforter, or wearing a fleece jacket I got at Summit Hut in a burst of my mother’s inspiration shortly before I left.  Burning a candle or two also does an impressive amount to heat a room, if you keep the door closed.

Of course it’s usually warmer outside than inside–buildings are built primarily of cinder blocks here, so there’s not much in the way of insulation, but they do have a way of radiating cold long after the sun comes up and warms the air outside.  This means that during the day, most of the doors out to the balconies are left open (the ones with the screen doors on them, that is–Tyre has a fair number of mosquitos even in winter) to provide a little warmth that way.  And it also makes hanging your washing out on the line to dry a fairly pleasant experience–especially since that balcony overlooks the sea, which is usually a magnificent turquoise blue color.  (When it’s cloudy it turns a silvery blue, which is just another kind of beauty.)  Air drying is, of course, the way to go whenever possible; there’s an electric dryer, but you can’t run it unless you’re on government power, and even then we normally just toss the already-mostly-dried clothes in for about five minutes to get rid of the stiffness and puff up the towels.  And I was reflecting today on the curious fact that, in a society where it’s terribly improper to go out in a shirt that doesn’t at least have long sleeves and cover your butt, practicality still requires the public airing of the family undergarments on a regular basis.

Of course there’s one important upside to all of this, which is that it’s finally forcing me into some habits I’ve been meaning to make for a while, but never quite gotten to.  Like hanging out the laundry instead of using the dryer, for instance.  Considering that, for much of the year in Arizona, it takes about ten minutes of outside exposure to dry a damp piece of clothing, there’s really not much excuse for an electric dryer except laziness, to which I freely confess my guilt.  (Well, that and disorganization–I often found myself running back inside to throw my clothes in the dryer before racing off five minutes late to something important or other.  But you can’t afford to be that disorganized here, so maybe this will cure me of that, too.)  And who knows?  Maybe I won’t even be so eager to crank up the thermostat in the winter anymore.  Although I kind of doubt this.  I’m still a wimp when it comes to cold, and any blood-thickening I benefit from while I’m here is going to disappear pretty fast after a couple months of Tucson summer.

Still, the point is, I grudgingly have to admit that, at least in this case, suffering really does build character, and I think more of us in the West could stand to spend a few months in a third-world country.  I was reading recently an op-ed in the New York Times on “greening” projects in Phoenix, pointing out that so far in the U.S., living a more eco-friendly life has thus far been more of a trendy luxury reserved for the wealthy (who can afford to install solar panels and shell out the extra $$ for organic produce at Safeway) than a true society-wide shift in focus and habits.  I’m all for clean energy, but until we can all make that switch, maybe we should be focusing more on simply turning off our hot-water heaters when they’re not needed and buying only local, in-season produce instead of whatever imported, hothouse organics happen to strike our fancy. I think our biggest problem is that we’re so used to having it all; we want to be eco-friendly, but only in a way that won’t actually require any hardships on our part. But whatever happened to the famous all-American, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-tough-it-out, rugged-frontier-simplicity work-and-lifestyle-ethic?

***

Today was cold and clammy with intermittent thunderstorms rolling in off the Mediterranean, but we’d planned to go see the local Roman ruins this morning and so we all bundled up and hoped for the best.  As luck would have it, most of our time there fell between showers, so we only got a little wet towards the end.

A glimpse of the extensive Roman and Byzantine ruins uncovered in the middle of Tyre.

I often have a hard time grasping the sense of timelessness some people seem to feel naturally in any ancient place.  Tyre to me is too alive–a city of high-rise apartment blocks and bad traffic, the trash of a plastic civilization lining the gutters and trodden underfoot by thousands of warm bodies every day.  There is little here to indicate that this was once the pride of the Mediterranean, the seat of a sailing empire, or that Jesus himself grew up only fifty miles from here, and worked his first miracle in a village not far away.  Perhaps it’s because the daily life that so overwhelms it has always done so; day after day, year after year, the traffic is heavy and the streets are dirty and the city is crowded and full of noise, and only the trappings change, so gradually that no one notices, until one day you wake up and discover that a thousand years have passed and the place is hardly recognizable.  There is no sudden break in the timeline here; despite the many successive civilizations that have ruled–Ottomans before the French, Crusaders before Ottomans, Arabs before Crusaders, Byzantines before Arabs, and on back and back, Romans and Greeks and Phoenicians and Egyptians and Canaanites and who knows how many before them; even Neanderthals and modern humans once lived side-by-side in this region–despite all of that, there was never really a time when life here came to an abrupt end.  You can sense the passing of the ages visiting, say, the ruins of an ancient pueblo in the American Southwest, because you know that no matter how far back you follow your own history, it will never arrive at that place.  The history of Wupatki came to an abrupt end in the late Middle Ages, and there is nothing to shield the modern visitor from a full-on confrontation with the past, nearly as it stood, on the day it was abandoned.  Not so here, on the edge of the Mediterranean–the “sea in the middle of the world,” as the name means.  Civilization itself began in this region, and has continued thus ever since.  It may well end here, too.

So despite the fact that for the past two months I’ve been thrilling at the prospect of coming to this land of living, breathing history, I haven’t felt it much since I arrived.  But on my trip to some local ruins today, I caught a glimpse of some of it.  Just a glimpse, but a very clear one.

The problem with so many ruins in the West is how far removed they are from their natural place–even when they haven’t moved at all.  Too often they’re so cleaned up, rebuilt, restored, catwalked- and plexiglassed-in and labeled and plaqued and not to mention visited, that at some point they cease being ruins and become nothing more than some mildly interesting rocks.  It is necessary–I fully understand–for their preservation and our education, but sometimes after visiting such a place, I wonder if I wouldn’t have experienced it the better had I stayed home and read a book about it.  After all, even at their best, the most a ruin can offer you is ghosts; a well-written novel will truly bring it back to life.  But I digress.  My original point is, much as I know there are some terrible downsides to having ancient ruins completely open for the public to touch and clamber over and, yes, even scribble their names on and maybe cart off pieces as souvenirs, there are advantages, too, and the quality of the experience is chief among them.

A piece of the French railroad which once ran all the way from Alexandria to Istanbul.

The park has two layers, a Byzantine and a Roman.  Through the middle runs the remains of a railroad, laid by the French, which once ran all the way from Alexandria to Istanbul.  In fact, it may have been the railroad which led to the ruins’ discovery.  David was a bit fuzzy on the details, but the jist of  the story is that a piece of the Byzantine road was uncovered during some sort of construction project, and the archaeologists, excavating bit by bit, discovered the gates of the ancient city with hundreds of mausoleums lining the road outside, the remains of an aqueduct, and a hippodrome.

Standing at the head of the excavated road (the Byzantine portion,) facing the city gates.

A portion of the Greek inscription on a sarcophagus.

Today you can walk down the road yourself and read the Greek inscriptions on the sarcophagi.  It was forbidden to bury people inside the city itself, so the area just outside the gates quickly grew up into a regular cemetery–except that, unlike our cemeteries where people are actually buried in the ground, this one was almost entirely above-ground.  Tomb after tomb was built and filled, one on top of another, tucked

A tiny piece of the extensive cemetery outside the gates of ancient Tyre.

into every nook and cranny between the giant square pillars that supported the city aqueduct, (and which are all that remain of those waterworks now.)  We clambered around on countless crumbling walls and sunken rooms, empty alcoves that once held shrines to the saintly dead, climbed above them on the stone staircases that once were used to maintain the aqueduct and now lead up to–nothing–peered inside stone coffins broken open by later thieves hoping for golden grave goods, and crunched under our feet the little white snails that now constitute the majority of the cemetery’s inhabitants.  We saw little of the dead themselves,

An old aqueduct-maintenance staircase.

though in one opened tomb we did find quite a pile of broken bones, (from which I fled immediately and so can describe in no further detail, except to say that I saw no skulls, thank God.)  For the most part, the graves have all been emptied long ago–by whom or to what end I can only guess.

A shot of the archway with some of the many flowering shrubs that grow among the ruins.

The archway that marked the outer boundary of the ancient city.

Halfway down the road, you find yourself standing under a great arch.  The artistically criss-crossed patchwork of smaller paving stones laid by the Byzantines ends rather suddenly, the road drops off a couple of feet, and now you find yourself standing on the great square flagstones, impregnably practical, that mark the Roman layer.  It seems the Byzantines built their road directly above the Roman one, without even bothering to remove the older stones of the road before them.  Beyond the arch the cemetery ends–does that mean the arch marks the gateway to the ancient city itself?

Columns lining the Roman road.

It wasn’t clear–and the road is lined instead by countless marble and stone columns, half of them now lying on their sides.  Here is also where a side-road branches off.  The archaeologists, while following the main road and discovering all that lay around it, had known from textual evidence that there had been a hippodrome in the area, but they found no indication of it until they reached this arch, discovered the side-road, and decided to follow it.  And that was how they found the hippodrome, practically a stone’s throw away.

Looking down the length of the racetrack.

The stone bleachers of the hippodrome.

We climbed around in the stands and wondered what the little alcoves beneath the stone bleachers were for.  The Romano-Byzantine equivalent of the hotdog stands?  Or maybe the parking garage, where the richer patrons of the races left their horses?  And how is it that the design of stadiums has changed so little in the past two millenia?  Is it so universal that everyone arrives at it independently?  Or is the Greco-Roman world so imprinted on our cultural memory that we unknowingly reproduce it down to this very day, even in something so un-classical as a football stadium?

A view from the stands, looking over the free-standing archways that follow the hippodrome's length.

I sat awhile in the stands and wandered across the racetrack as raindrops started to fall again, thinking how once this place had held all the noise and action of a football game at any modern university, and wondering what process could cause such a center of life to come to ruin.  Was it the Arab conquest, perhaps?  Or did it fall into disuse even before that, during the final days of the Roman Empire, or the long, slow decline that marked nearly the whole of Byzantium’s existence?  As the legions marched away to their interminable wars with Persia and the wealth was drained from the province and civic life declined?  In one way or another, a year would have arrived when there were no more races, and then the sand, blown in from the shore, would have begun to pile up, no servants to clear it, no feet to disturb its lay.  A few years more, maybe even decades, but inevitably nonetheless, and some farmer, passing by with his cart, would have appropriated a few of the stones to shore up a sagging foundation, or mark the corners of a new field.  Then his neighbor would have done the same.  Perhaps some of the blocks would have found their way to the building site of a new mosque, or down to the harbor to support the frames of new-built ships.  Bit by bit, whatever was left above the sand would have been eaten away, until any signs of its location were erased and finally even the secret of its existence was consigned to ancient texts in a language the people had long since forgotten to speak to their children.

A hibiscus flower on the racetrack median.

After the hippodrome, there’s not a lot left to see.  A few hibiscus shrubs bloom on the median, blossoms of sweet-scented fire bright against a landscape now gray with clouds, and a few mosaics line the path to the exit–though mostly simple geometric designs; nothing spectacular.  But the place stays with you.  Today its stones are once again exposed to the rain.  Lovers tease each other in its hidden corners and children climb the restored bleachers and set off gyrocopters from the tops of the hippodrome walls.  A few times a year, after dark, road and racecourse are lit by electric lights and people gather in the stands again to enjoy public concerts and poetry recitals.  In between such times, the place is silent but for the distant

One of the mosaics that line the path to the exit.

sounds of the city, which seem disproportionately faint here, as if they have to travel through time as well as space–all but the haunting wails of the call to prayer, which echo off the stones and remind them that they are not the only remaining monuments to an older civilization in Tyre.  You get the feeling the stones are waiting for something.  Perhaps they are waiting for a day when there will be no more bombs, no planes overhead, no foreign rulers, the omnipresent shadow of war will finally melt away and the wealth will return to clear the trash of a plastic civilization from the city’s streets, and Tyre will take up once again her place as the crown of the Mediterranean.  They have been waiting fifteen centuries or more.  They can afford to wait a little longer.

A stela inscribed in Latin, which despite four years of Latin classes in college I was unable to decipher.

I arrived at the house in Tyre in the wee hours of the morning last Friday, but I was so jazzed up I couldn’t go to sleep right away (despite two long and exhausting days previously with only three hours’ or so of fitful sleep in between,) so I started unpacking and only collapsed into bed as the first call to prayer was going out, presumably the one that comes a bit before dawn.  I awoke some time later to a pink sky and another call to prayer, and glanced at my iPod.  Only six o’clock.  I sort of groaned inwardly–I mean, seriously, I couldn’t sleep any longer than that?!?!–but supposed it was probably for the best, as it meant I’d adjust to the new time zone more quickly.  In fact, I felt surprisingly rested for only a couple hours’ sleep.  I made my way downstairs and found the rest of the family up already.  No doubt still suffering from jet lag too, I supposed.  (They’d only gotten back from the States a few days before I’d arrived.)

Tommy, the eight-year-old and only kid in the family remaining at home, came bouncing up to me and asked if I wanted breakfast.  I’m not usually hungry when I first wake up in the mornings, but that day I was ravenous.  As he was showing me the cereal cabinet, his mom, Barbara, commented that there was going to be dinner later, too.  What an odd thing to say, I remember thinking.  She went on to ask if I’d be hungry enough to want both breakfast and dinner.  “Well I should certainly hope that by this evening I’ll be hungry again,” I chortled.

“It is this evening,” she replied.

I froze, suddenly very confused, and looked outside again at the sunrise.  “But–it’s–six a.m.!” I protested.

“No.  It’s six p.m.”

Everyone was grinning at me by now, but I still didn’t get it.  “But–”

“You slept all day,” Barbara clarified.

“But–”  The meaning of her words was finally sinking in, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe them yet.  “I just woke up…it’s sunrise…”  (Or was it?  Oddly enough, the sky seemed to be getting darker.  But how could it possibly be evening when it felt just like morning?)  Finally David pulled out a watch with an am/pm light on the dial.  Six p.m. it was.

After that they kept trying to pull the wool over me every time I woke up for the next few days, trying to convince me I’d gotten my a.m. and p.m. switched again, but fortunately that first day was the height of my confusion.  Of course, I had a horrible time getting to sleep the next night and stayed up until the wee hours again, and then I’d actually wake up at a regular time and fall asleep by the afternoon, try as I might to avoid a nap, and…well, for the next few days, let’s just say that when I was awake and when I was asleep had little, if any, relation to the clock (not even an inverse one.)  It was just kind of a neurochemical free-for-all.  But it wasn’t until I started falling asleep in the early evening and waking up at midnight bright-eyed and bushy-tailed that I finally put my foot down.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, so two nights ago I finally caved and took a sleep aide.  (Remeron, in case you’re curious.  I used to take it as an appetite stimulant, and I still have a little left.)

The first try I used too heavy a dose and not only slept right through the night after another early bedtime, but well into the morning, and felt groggy half the day after that.  But last night I took a half-dose about ten o’clock, and it worked like a charm.  I slept, as I said above, eleven to seven; eight hours, and I haven’t even thought of a nap all day.  And, well, that, let me tell you, is the last time I bother trying to adjust time zones the old-fashioned way.  I don’t care if it’s “unnatural.”  Traveling fast enough to notice time-zone changes is unnatural.  Bring on the chemicals!!!