Sledding

The time of the wooden sleds – my time – has definitely passed. We’ve even passed the plastic imitations of the wooden sleds.
This is the age of the bodyboards! They’re light and faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaast. They’re high-tech sleds! And we tried them out on Sunday. We had to abandon the first place we went sledding, because we were a danger to just about anyone else on the slope. After Eddie knocked the fifth woman off her socks (you cannot really steer these things, and you hit them right about knee height, so they go down real hard), people started to stare really hard at us. They didn’t like the dog either, (and he hadn’t even pissed on anyone’s sled yet!) so we decided we needed an empty slope, all to ourselves, with pristine snow. Well, we found one (and I won’t tell you where so that next weekend we still have that slope to ourselves). It wasn’t really a slope that we had to ourselves; we had to whole dang mountain! First few runs were done carefully, but once the kids got the hang of it, they went right in between the rocks, as if on a roller coaster ride. I had to pick them up 2 kilometers down the road! The kids sled for four hours non-stop. Everything was soaking wet and they fell asleep in the car back to Beirut. I am definitely going to do that again!

On another note: never seen so much military presence in town as today. Policemen, soldiers and Darakeh (Internal Security guys, the Mobiele Eenheid in Dutch) on just about every street corner. It caused horrendous traffic jams. I wanted to go to Virgin to buy a 1GB memory stick for my new camera (got the superflat Sony, am very happy with it), but could hardly get there, and once I did get there, all parking lots were blocked of. This is all for tomorrow’s big demonstration. Tomorrow it’s exactly one year that Hariri got blown up, and there’s this huge demonstration planned in an attempt to sort of revive the Cedar Revolution feeling. Let’s see if it works.
It's my third Sony, and as Sony goes, it means I need to buy a third set of memory sticks. These guys make sure nothing can be interchanged. Stupid Japanese.