Busy

So many religions in a country has one great advantage; holidays. Friday was Good Friday for the Orthodox Christians, so no work. I went to the Beqaa Valley, because the newspaper wanted to know whether the Syrians have really gone. Well, they have, it seems. Read all about it at http://www.trouw.com/nieuwsenachtergronden/artikelen/1115011607770.html.

Saturday we celebrated Queens day in Beirut. There were some fun and games organized for the kids.

Sunday I went with Cecile and Yasmine to a place after Bois de Boulogne, which is a Christian summer resort above Beirut, somewhere in the mountains near Khenshara, if anyone knows where that is. I don’t. Anyway, we picnicked in a field where there were cisterns hewn out in sold rock. We found five altogether. There was also some sort of basin built which collected water. Yasmine is an archeologist, and she figured this must have been from the Byzantine period, which would be Pre-Crusader. It is very interesting to go on trips like this with an archeologists; you get inside information.

We used to have a geologist friend, Jim, and going on trips like this taught me all about the geology of Lebanon. I know now where all the faults lie, geological time periods, how fish fossil beds are formed, how you get small and big pebbles in a rock (composite rock, if I remember well), and how the Crusader castles were built with all kinds of different materials. Well, he left, is living in Saudi Arabia now. But Yasmine is also an interesting source of information. Now we need someone who can tell us about the fauna and flora.

Wildlife would be nice too, but I doubt there’s any wildlife left. Lebanon is a station for many birds on their way from Europe to Africa, and early spring you can see them going in the thousands and thousands. Storks are very impressive. In Holland one stork will make it into the newspaper. Here you see them in massive groups, very high. Sometimes they just circle around and around on a turbulence.

The kids (Adrian, Hana, Obi, Sarah-Lynne and Joseph) were all very excited about these cisterns, because they were full of tadpoles, and goat skulls. It seems this is an area where goatherds pass by frequently (and die), because we find up to 6 goat skulls, and 7 horns of rams.
Monday I went to the beach, didn’t do anything, and today, Tuesday, I am home, waiting for the gardener to empty my planter. It seems that the water tank up on the roof gets filled with well water in summer, which.. . .
Well, let me explain this first. In Beirut the government does not deliver water to your door as they do in Holland. The water runs like once or twice a week. In winter it is more often, in summer you can end up getting it one once a week. The janitors of the buildings here fill then all the water tanks on the roof, and we hope that the tanks do not empty before new water is delivered.

I remember in my old apartment in Eat-Beirut, I had to climb onto the roof myself and fill it with a hose. That tanks was all green and filled with algae. You shower with that, but you drink it as well. Well, some people do. Anyway, when the tank empties before new water comes, you either have to buy it from water sellers, who pass by with tanks (this was a very frequent sight during the war when the government wouldn’t provide water for months and months), or, if you are lucky, your building has a well. We are somewhat lucky; the building has a well, and somewhat unlucky; the well is brackish, as we are very close to the sea, and due to Beirut’s consumption, the water level is dropping and dropping.

Anyway, brackish water is what you end up with in summer, which eats right through all your appliances such as laundry machines and dishwashers. But it also kills all your plants. So a couple of summers ago it was very dry, government didn’t provide any water, and I watered my plants with basically salty water. The soil needs to be replaced now, and they come to do that today. 2.5 cubic meters of it.

These days it isn’t as easy as it used to be to get day workers, since all the Syrians have gone. Or most of them. They are worried about getting lynched. I haven’t seen anything of the sort, but I have read incidents where Syrians would get lynched by a crowd, specially in the Southern suburbs. Funny though, because that’s Shiite territory, and they tend to support the Syrians. Or at least Hezbollah does. Syrian newspapers say more than 35 have been lunched since February 14, when Hariri got blown up (by the Syrians, I might add). Pretty sick. Walid thinks it is an excellent thing that all the Syrians should leave, but he ignores the fact that his staff both at the gas station as well as the beach are mainly Syrian. Oh well.