Have a Great Summer!

Greetings from 33°53’39 N & 35°28’28 E (courtesy of Google Earth), the heart (or actually 'head', if you want to go for exact translation) of Beirut.

The bug exterminator - a guy with a little truck that expells gigantic clouds of foul smoke all over the neighborhood - woke us up at 6:00 AM this morning! It promises to be a long, hot and humid summer over here. No rest for the wicked.

The three of us will therefore be heading for the Motherland in a while, so hubby can enjoy a long vacation from us, yep yep, while we will spend some time at 52°05’10 N & 5°11’47 E, then descend to 44°24’52 N & 1°12’31 W, and after that I do not know where the wind will take us this summer. I might blog, sporadically so. I am taking a 1993 laptop with me, which doesn't have wifi, hifi and mabaarifshoe, all that stuff. Still has a floppy drive. Anyone wishing to reach me/us, call my parents.
Adios and have a great summer!

Soccer

Eddie, very disappointedly, quietly removed his Brazilian flag from the balcony last night. So who do we cheer for now?

One Lebanese blogger wrote; "Brazil lost? hahaha. So who is 98.76% of the Middle East going to support now?" I think I’ll be in France around the time of the finals, so let’s vote for France. That will be some Quatorze Juillet if they win.

When Holland was still in the World Cup, I watched the soccer matches at the Riviera beach. Not that soccer interests me very much, not at all as a matter of fact, but to watch it with a group of Dutch is a load of fun. So I watched more for the group spirit than for the game. Then we got kicked out by those weasely Portuguese, which was the end of the soccer watching for me.
But you do not really need to actually watch the game in Beirut; you’ll find out the score without ever watching a single game. The streets will tell you. You just wait till the honking cars with flags circle around.
Yesterday I had a party in the mountains, and the male participants were pretty devastated when they figured out the host had cable television, but not the right one; they couldn’t watch the soccer game. Oh boy, now they actually had to converse with the other people. Still no worries, we were way high up, and at the end of the match we could see the fireworks erupt absolutely all over Beirut! I don’t think you see this kind of fireworks at New Years Eve.

Last night, I happened to be at home for a change, and decided to actually watch the game Brazil – France on TV. Took me quite some time to locate the right channel (of the 764 something channels. Who needs that many channels?), but we finally got it.
It’s hot in Beirut right now, and everyone was watching with their windows open. Next door is the Canadian beach, so called because it’s a building with a lot of Canadian’s living there, who use the roof as beach. Yesterday was Canada Day, so they had a big BBQ + the usual fireworks, and the atmosphere was heating up. Anyway, we did hear other households in the neighborhood cheering, but since they cheered at moments when our soccer game was not going anywhere, we assumed they were watching another game. How odd, I was wondering.

Until cheering went up all over the friggin’ neighborhood. And what do you know? 3 seconds later, France scored a goal on my screen. It seems my cable has a 3 second delay. So now I really don’t have to watch the games anymore, because I know in advance whether the ball will go in or not. I guess I’ll give up.

Anti-Semitism Part II

The ‘natour’ (janitor) of the building has very generously contributed to my difficult story on anti-Semitism in Lebanon. Yesterday he had commented that now that Holland was out of the World Cup, I really should remove that Dutch flag. He wanted to eliminate all the flags as the World Cup progressed, so that in the end we’d have only one country left on the building. “Germany, in shallah”, he said. I did not comment on that. I thought it rather amusing that a grown man would have such childlike pleasure in organizing this flag war on our building, but hey, what the hell, so yesterday I removed the Dutch flag.

When I got out of the door this morning, he said: “Now that Holland is out, you should be with Germany.” Was he hinting at me installing a German flag on my balcony? Over my dead body! Germany, of all places! The Dutch have a rather checkered past with the Germans, much like the Lebanese have with the Syrians. It is not quite comparable, but there are some similarities. We only had to deal with the Germans for 5 years, so we shouldn’t complain (as much as we do). But cheer for the German team?
“No,” I smiled politely. “I will not cheer for the Germans. The Germans are like the ….” I didn’t want to say ‘Like the Syrians’, because I did not want to insult him. Maybe he is pro-Syrian, I don’t know. Maybe someone in his family is from Syria, who knows? Who cares, but whatever the case, I don’t want to insult him, so I was trying to be careful with my words.
He looked at my face, which must have had a rather painful grin. “Aaaah,” he said, suddenly nodding understandingly, “they are like the Jews!”
Right. It is a perfect lead for my story.