“I will not be blogged about,” says Oz of the Beirut Hard Rock, as he brings out our super chocolate fudge with the fireworks, and he points his finger at me. We like Oz, because he knows what ‘the usual’ is. Fine Oz, I won’t blog about you.
The Beirut Corniche, 7:00 P.M. on a Wednesday evening. 
When you go out and picnic,
you must build a fire,
so you can see your teenage brother do all kinds of stupid stuff, which is then copied by 3 year-old cousins, who burn themselves, and although we had everything in our picnic basket, including band-aid, we did not have the burn reliever. He survived, and won’t be doing that any time soon again. We call that a hands-on experience. 
As for the teenager; well, what can we say? Beirut is too much of an attraction to drop that (and your friends) and go out in the sticks and have a picnic with your family. We should be thankful for the fact that he wanted to grace our picnic with his presence. That doesn’t happen very often anymore. 
Today was a day off. It’s a rather odd holiday, tagged by my colleagues as ‘consummation day’. It is the day that Maria was told by Gabriel (if I am correct) that she was pregnant. I wasn’t quite sure about the reason why this day is apparently so important that we’ve turned it into a national holiday this year by ministerial decree, until someone told me that the muslims and christians now have equal holidays again. 
But I checked, and the christians are at 8, against the muslims 4, but maybe some of their days are two instead of one. I don’t know. Not that I am against an extra day off, but with a mind-set like that, it is clear that this country is not heading into, into what exactly I don’t know, but whatever it is, we’re not heading there.
The weather was lovely though. And so was the surrounding, somewhere on the banks of the Beirut river, which is just a little stream at that point.
When I got ready to go to work this morning, I saw this fantastic ray of sun light coming through the clouds. Looked like a scene out of one of those old black & white movies from the fifties, when the main character is doing something wicked, and suddenly this beam of light bursts out of the sky with the thundering voice of god; ‘Why haveth thou disobeyed me!” or something else dramatic among those lines. They don’t make movies like that anymore.
And in the afternoon, we experienced “un vrai deluge” as my neighbor described it, just as I had to pick up my daughter from school. Wonderful weather for a Dutchie. Rain and overcast skies. 
P. and H. in action; sharing each others (Lebanese) husbands abilities' to go camping.
From a parking lot in downtown Beirut. They do valet parking, but they're not going to look after the 'stuff' in your car. That's your responsability.
. . I wish I were a baker, because Beirut is at its best at dawn when most people are still sleeping, and there is no traffic on the roads.
We spent the day on the beach; Some Dutch moms and their children. The beach was – as predicted – empty. Summer doesn’t start before June 21. But we, sun-craving Dutchies from the far north, have experience with summers in Holland that are colder that most spring days in Lebanon. Okay, so it was a bit windy. But the sun was out, and so were we. 
The wind had carried massive amounts of driftwood on the beach, and other odds and ends. Perfect building material for children, and so our kids - bare feet - crawled around and over this gigantic heap of bamboo sticks, shoes, plastic containers, lighters, bits and pieces of textile, springs of an old mattress, broken glass, rope and planks of wood with rusty nails 5-inch long sticking out of them, pulling out stuff to build a tent. 
One of us, who does all kinds of fun-activities with her children, and who likes to involve the neighborhood children of mothers who cannot be bothered to get out of bed as well, was told by one of the play-dates of her daughter that ‘she did not really love children.’ Why? Because the house rules apply to everyone, even the guests. We do not feed our children whenever they want, but rather at set times, and if they’re hungry at two, when they refused to eat their lunch at one, well, than it is tough going until six. That is perceived as being unfriendly.
Another view is that we are careless. How can you let your child run around barefoot on a garbage belt with rusty nails sticking out of wood? Granted, that is a bit of a scary thing. But worse-case scenario is that you’ve got to run to the ER for a tetanus shot and stitches. But if you keep running after them and protecting them, they’ll never learn to look out for themselves.
It is not so much an issue within the household, as it is with the extended family and the outside. The cultural differences are not that big, but they do exist.
And so we grappled with this topic for a while, on an empty beach, totally ignoring our kids who had a ball between the rusty nails and the broken class. I hope they will remember this day on the beach, when they built this gigantic tent.
