By Matt on October 29th, 2011 Hey guys:
So, I’ve never been to Israel. I mean, I *want* to–and have no doubt that I will someday soon–but I just haven’t made it yet. Seriously. Not a once.
Then again, you don’t have to take my word for it: you’ve already carefully examined every page of my passport for any indications of a visit to Israel–or an itinerary which might suggest the possibility that I at some point passed through Israel without obtaining a stamp, or the vestiges of a security sticker from an Israeli airport which I might have tried to remove from the back cover. Two different officers did this before admitting me for entry to Lebanon, and three more before I could leave the country. (My favorite were the two final checks, which were no more than one hundred fifty yards and 30 minutes apart. Did you really think that I beamed over to Bethlehem for coffee and latkes with Uncle Shlomo while I was waiting to board?) There was no other possible purpose to these methodical page-by-page reviews of my recent travel history–you simply wanted to be sure that I had not visited Israel. And, yet again, I had not.
And what if I had? Would a few days of strolling around Jerusalem, munching on the world’s best falafel (sorry!), and bobbing in the Dead Sea actually render me an enemy of the Lebanese state? Is it so wrong that those of us who will go to great effort to see places like Byblos and Baalbek would also enjoy taking in Israel’s vast cultural, historical, and religious heritage simply for its own sake?
Oh, wait–maybe I should explain this word I keep using. “Israel” is a small strip of the Middle East located directly below your southern border. It is a country, which exists. It’s full of Jews. You are welcome to visit anytime you like.
I know you’re in kind of a weird position right now, in that you simultaneously don’t recognize your neighbor to the south (“Belgium? Fiji? Cameroon? I know we’ve met *somewhere*…”) and you have been in a state of war with it since 1973. Maybe you should pick one of these two things?
Anyway, this thing with the passports… I don’t know. You want to exclude all Israeli passport holders? Sure, you’re a sovereign nation. Whatever. But why go out of your way to punish citizens of the rest of the world who are willing to stay politely neutral on the subject, at least to your faces, simply to have the opportunity to see (and, not incidentally, spend money in) your country? You’re acting like idiot children, and I would laugh at you if I didn’t think it would earn me a night or two in a holding cell.
Salaam,
Matt
cc: Syrian Passport Control
Iranian Passport Control
By Matt on October 25th, 2011 Ask five different Lebanese about your travel plans to Baalbek and you’ll get five different opinions.
1) Older Christian cabbie in Beirut: “Don’t go. If you go, get a driver.”
2) Young tracksuited Sunni bartender in Byblos: “It’s nothing. It’s safe. The only danger is from the drug cartels. Hezbollah is *really* bad in the south. Don’t go south.”
3) Visiting Mexican-Lebanese Arabic student hanging out in the state tourism office in Byblos. “Va a Baalbek. Vale la pena. [Go to Baalbek. It's worth the trouble.]” (The Spanish-speaking Lebanese tourism official sitting across the desk from her in the same office nodded in tacit agreement before repeating “You should go.”)
4) Our new Christian Lebanese friend Peter in Batroun after a whiskey double and two hours of conversation: “The Christians will tell you that the Muslim areas are dangerous, and the Muslims will tell you the same about the Christians. Baalbek is fine. If there were even a one percent chance that you would be harmed, I would tell you to stay away. Go to Baalbek, my friends.” (He then gave us both of his phone numbers and informed us that we could never have problems with anyone as long as we had a friend in Lebanon.)
5) Christian cab driver in Bcharre: “Don’t go.” (He refused to elaborate.)
We went to Baalbek today. We had to.
It was bad enough that recent events have cheated us out of our tour of Syria–the original intent of the trip–but we weren’t about to miss one of the world’s largest and best-preserved set of Roman ruins. The drive from Bcharre required us to traverse a 7,000 foot mountain range, pass four Lebanese army checkpoints, and put ourselves deep into Hezbollah territory. We saw whole towns bedecked in scary Hezbollah flags and plenty of scary banners featuring Hassan Nasrallah doing everything from looking thoughtfully into the distance to wielding a scimitar. Casey wore a passable headscarf, and I was sporting on a five-day beard. The only people to even give us a second look all day were Lebanese soldiers–and we were just as happy that they did.
In our further defense, I will also add that the U.S. State Department’s warning (as well as those issued by France, the UK, and nearly every other country whose citizens routinely visit Lebanon) only specifically mentions an incident earlier this year in which seven Estonian bicyclists were briefly kidnapped while biking up the Bekaa Valley and held, apparently by Hezbollah. The word on the street here is that they were actually kidnapped by Syrian military forces (who weren’t exactly supposed to be in Lebanon), and that there was much more to the story than was reported. There have been no other kidnappings–or known attempted kidnappings–of Western tourists in years.
Anyway–a few minor wrong turns and a couple of hours later than expected–we made it to Baalbek. The site has a long and storied history, starting (perhaps, although it likely goes earlier) with Phoenician human sacrifices to the eponymous wife of their god Baal. (I remembered Baal from several memorable cameos in the Old Testament, but I don’t recall his lady getting a mention.) Once the Romans took over around the time of Christ, they constructed a truly massive statement to their authority in raw stone. Sure, maybe you getting along okay with Baal, it says. But have you heard the good news about Jupiter?
It is, by definition, exceptionally rare for there to be much left among ruins. But Baalbek is intact, and therefore easily imaginable as a living piece of history, in a way that I’ve never experienced.
While the site itself is fairly compact, Baalbek is huge in a way that I’m finding it difficult to convey here. I could tell you that it is home to the world’s largest existing Roman columns, that its foundations are a collection of the world’s largest cut stones (and that no one can work out exactly how they got there), that it took over 100,000 slaves over 10 years to build it, or that the building on the corner of the site referred to as the “Small Temple” is the single most impressive piece of Roman architecture I’ve ever seen, and (as buildings go) a more striking sight in and of itself than the Parthenon. But you’re probably still thinking about the Hezbollah part.
Va a Baalbek. Vale la pena.
By Matt on October 23rd, 2011 Most of Lebanon’s population lives within a short radius of Beirut, and the stretch of highway from Beirut to Byblos is a hideous concrete mess of billboards and high-rises. Byblos (known here as Jbeil) is located at exactly the point where you just can’t take it anymore.
Byblos is an absolute can’t-miss: It is home to one of the country’s most important archeological sites, as well as one of its most charmingly-restored souks.
There is a lot to say about Byblos, but here are some basics:
The city has been in continuous use as an urban center since the Neolithic period, or about 8,000 years, and layers from every culture or civilization to have occupied the area have been found here. The Phoenician alphabet–the earliest precursor to our own–has its roots in Byblos, and the ancient Greeks imported so much papyrus from its port that the prefix “biblio” remains in our language today for all things literary.
The UNESCO-designated archeological site has to be the only place in the world where you can simultaneously see excavations of (among many others) a Neolithic village, a Phoenician temple, a Roman theater, a Mamluk necropolis, massive Persian battlements, and a huge, mostly-intact Crusader fortress. (As a sort of bonus, there is a temple on the site [helpfully labelled "the L-shaped temple"] so completely lost to history that we don’t now know anything about it–including what was worshipped there or who was doing it.)
As if all that weren’t more than enough, Byblos is also located near one of the world’s richest sources of ancient marine fossils. (They are so incredibly old that they have mostly been found at the *top* of a nearby mountain, pushed up from the sea floor after millions of years.) After a fascinating tour of the museum at Memory of Time, I picked up a certified fossil of a fish which has been extinct since well before my species appeared directly from an authentic fossil hunter (who described himself as a “fisherman”) for less than a nice T-shirt.
By Matt on October 20th, 2011 “This is the best city in the Arab world!” our cabbie told us as he executed a maneuver that might have earned him a criminal complaint in Boston. He stabbed an arm vaguely in front of him toward the chaos just past the windshield. “And, you know. It’s not so good.”
We didn’t get his name, but we found our cabbie in front of the National Museum (today’s highlight) for a ride over to the Hamra neighborhood, near the American University of Beirut. He told us about life in Beirut during the war, his sister in New York, the Gulf State millionaires who were driving up real estate prices, his love for American ideals and theories of our success (“it’s because you treat everyone like they are humans!”), provided some travel tips for our journey beyond Beirut (including some veiled safety warnings which we took very seriously), and–alarmingly–complained about the steep prices for basic commodities. “Sugar, fuel,” he said as we passed yet another high-end boutique, a Gucci billboard, and a double-parked Ferrari. “I can hardly afford these things!”
The income disparity here is striking, even through American eyes. The entire “downtown” district (flattened during the war and impressively, if somewhat soullessly, rebuilt) is an outdoor mall of wildly expensive designer stores–not just the usual Fifth Avenue lineup, but dozens I’ve never heard of and could never begin to afford–that would fit perfectly into the massively conspicuous consumption of downtown L.A. The surviving pillars of the world’s first law school (commissioned by Emperor Hadrian in 130 A.D.) are conveniently located in a hole next to a TGIFridays (or TAIThursdays, for the other half of the country), but I wouldn’t have known that if Lonely Planet hadn’t mentioned it.
I am writing a substantial portion of this post from a Dunkin’ Donuts on Martyrs Square. While the coffee is (happily) familiar, my donut is a little stale; the artificial sweeteners are a bit off, and the whole thing is closer to Honeydew’s starchy gutbusters than the product of our beloved Dunkies back in Maverick Square.
Martyr’s Square is pretty bleak, even as these kinds of memorials go. Beirut is the least park-friendly city I’ve ever seen–we haven’t yet seen an open patch of grass–and the square seems to be intended more as an object lesson than a civic center.
What I mean to say is that Martyrs Square is a gravel pit. This is not some sort of snobbish American urban planning euphemism, but only an observation that the top half of the square is nothing more than an open lot full of gravel. The middle section contains a sort of vaguely Leninist statue riddled with bullet holes, and the last bit is a gaping ruin which could be Roman, Byzantine, Mumluk, Hellenestic, Selucid, or merely just a Gap that was in the wrong place in 1984. The square was the heart of the Green Line, the official divider between Christian West Beirut and Muslim East Beirut during the worst of the war years. (Given the profusion of bullet holes and shell damage well on each side around the city, this system seems to have served the Beirutis about as reliably as our own Green Line serves Boston.)
Some leggy Arab girls in short skirts and impossible heels are taking turns snapping each other’s smiling photos in front of the bullet-spalled statue of dying martyrs in the center of the square now. I’m not quite sure that is what it’s there for, but I have to think that a future with more girls in short skirts might help to ensure one with fewer martyrs.
As for our cabbie, he was happy to tell us that Lebanon’s civil strife had ended with the war. “It is all finished,” he said. There was a brief moment of quiet as we passed the blackened remains of a church and a shell-scarred apartment building.
“We hope, anyway.”
By Matt on October 20th, 2011 (Google tells me that I am the first person in human history to make this stupid joke! Your move, Internet…)
Our first taste of Beirut left us breathless. Not first-sight-of-Dubrovnik breathless or ooh-baby popsong breathless or even Godard breathless–but literally gasping, trying to find oxygen somewhere in the diesel fumes.
We flew here directly from a couple of restive days in Antalya, and the contrast will take some getting used to. Going from the sleepy streets of an Ottoman old town to chaos of one of the world’s most energetic cities–not to mention the stress of dodging the coked-up suicidals who seem to make up most of the Beiruti driving population–was a complete system shock.
But, anyway. We’re in Beirut! That’s fun to say.
Lebanon is about the size of Connecticut. It probably has about a million more people than Connecticut, but (and this is true) there has been no census since 1932 because no one wants to know. More to the point, no one wants to know where everyone is worshipping. This would only be an interesting point of trivia but for the fact that Lebanon is the only country in the world to employ a “confessionalist” form of government which is supposed to apportion political power directly to different religious groups based upon their representation within the country. Another census would almost certainly reveal that the Christians are no longer in the majority, thus necessitating a re-balancing of power and potentially digging up the same sentiments which plunged this lovely country into a bloody civil war from 1975-1990. Simultaneously relying upon religious breakdown to structure your political system–all with the threat of political and civic breakdown hanging overhead–seems to have created a sort of political Schrödinger’s cat kind of situation. (I know that this is likely yet another violent abuse of Schrödinger’s cat by a liberal arts major, but you get the idea: the society depends upon a thing for its existence, but would kill that very thing by actually opening the box to check on it and must therefore assume that the thing is simultaneously existing in exactly the state that everyone would like it to be in at the same time. Please direct all complaints to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Schrödinger’s Cat.) In theory it’s kind of elegant: the President is a Maronite Christian, the Prime Minister is a Sunni Muslim, the President of the National Assembly is a Shi’ia, their deputies are Greek Orthodox, and the Chief of the General Staff is Druze. In practice, it may have only emphasized and deepened these divides. (Oh, and this 1943 agreement is also unwritten, just to make things that much easier.)
And yet. We were sitting in a rooftop bar last night with some Coltrane playing and bearded, skinny-jeans-and-ironic-suit-jacket-wearing dudes and American Apparel-and-thick-glasses-clad-girls and I couldn’t help but think that this neighborhood might as well be a flashier, more materialistic, somewhat-more-bombed-out Brooklyn. Unless there’s a kale shortage or a particularly sharp schism over Animal Collective vs. the National, I can’t see Brooklyn descending into civil war anytime soon…
By Matt on October 18th, 2011 I liked Istanbul plenty last year, but I’m also happy to concede that it is more than a little overrated. It’s a big, noisy, sprawling trans-continental (literally!) megacity of interconnected neighborhoods, only one of which (Sultanhamet) is actually seen in any depth by tourists–and, as so often happens, has been turned into a sort of theme park version of itself in the process. We’ve seen it; we skipped it this time.
Antalya is everything that I wanted to like about Istanbul, and nothing I didn’t. The quiet, perfectly-preserved–yet nowhere near theme-parky–winding stone streets of the walled-off Ottoman “old town” slope down to the high stone walls of an ancient Roman harbor. There’s a lovely park with dramatic water views, plenty of reasonably-priced tasty Turkish dining, and an English-only bookshop run by a lovably-crazed giant who must have have learned English through nothing more than repeat intensive viewings of Yogi Bear cartoons. It’s a perfect little Mediterranean seaside holiday town.
And Antalya is Turkish. As everywhere, you can’t avoid the occasional clutches of gawping Westerners, but they are far outnumbered by Turkish families enjoying a holiday in one of their country’s loveliest destinations. Maybe it’s just the off-season, but I always like to see that.
We’re off to Beirut and points beyond tomorrow morning, so more shortly…
By Matt on October 17th, 2011 There’s this story, and I hope it’s true, that the Yucatan Penninsula got its name from the first thing a native said to a Spanish explorer when he stepped off the boat.
“What do you call this place?” the conquistador asked the man in Castillian Spanish, gesturing broadly at the beautiful coastline around them. The man uttered a series of syllables which the listeners carefully took down as “Yucatan.”
Now that we know a little more about the Mayan language, linguists tell us that the phrase which became “Yucatan” to the Spanish conquistadores was actually (quite reasonably) this:
“I don’t understand you.”
We may be many thousands of miles from the I Don’t Understand You Penninsula, but Yucatan moments are an inevitable part of the kind of unguided, barely-planned international travel we love so much. It is deceptively easy to forget that while we may have acquired plenty of information about these places during our travels, but nowhere near enough to begin to build a sense of context.
I’ve been thinking about this during the bus ride from Olympos and Antalya from which I’m now writing. There’s a Turkish comedy on which has a title which I can’t quite remember now, but has recorded itself in my brain as “Recividist 3.” (See? Yucatanning right from the credits. Actually, The Recidivist sounds like a halfway-okay action franchise. Maybe I should draft up a treatment on the next bus ride.)
Anyway, so I’ve got some early 80′s R.E.M. (R.I.P.) on that I haven’t listened to in years and I’m trying to ignore the lingering heartburn from last night’s kofte when this movie comes on. I tried to listen for awhile, but of course I’m never going to understand the dialogue… so here’s my Yucatanned review:
The Recidivist (we’ll just go with that) is an Ignatius J. Reilly sort of fellow who wanders through urban Turkey unintentionally annoying everyone he meets while contracting hilarious maladies. The actor looks like he’s wearing a Turkish Tom Green mask that shouldn’t have made it past QC at the Turkish Tom Green mask factory. His physical comedy greatly resembles that renowned Canadian wit, with evidence of close study of more than a few of Jim Carrey’s least-Oscar-worthy performances. He spends a lot of time rolling around on a couch, possibly suffering either from bad gas or aggravated ennui. He takes a funny potion from a funny potion maker. He gets shot, for some reason, and complains adamantly while bullets are removed from wacky places. He is subjected to, and excessively repulsed by, Rorschach tests. He sort of charms a pretty girl in the way that buffoons in these kinds of comedies always seem to, and she takes him to a university lecture in which it is revealed that the Recidivist can’t count past three, even on his fingers. It’s the kind of comedy which relies upon quick-shot montages, with each new event more delightfully ridiculous than the last.
Needless to say, I didn’t like Recidivist 3 very much–but I also didn’t understand very much about it (starting with the title). For all I know, it’s an absurdist political satire, or an extended critique of the Turkish education system. (It’s far more likely the Turkish Dumb and Dumber, but that’s just what Cortez would say.) For my purposes, however, it is an off-kilter longform R.E.M. video–and, of course, cheap and available blog fodder.
We’re almost to Antalya now, so I’m off to Yucatan it up elsewhere.
By Matt on October 15th, 2011 The rest of our trip as planned will be pretty active, so we decided to frontload the relaxation (and mitigate the jetlag) with a few days back in Olympos before setting off to less familiar points beyond. I’ve already had more than enough to say about how much there is to love about this place–but there’s not much else going on today, so here’s some more love for Bayram’s.
I think the beds are the only reason I wouldn’t actually want to live at Bayram’s. (Maybe they’re this hard on my back for this very reason.) For about 25 bucks per person per day, we have a tidy little bungalow a short walk from the beach with A/C and a full bathroom, two fresh and tasty buffet meals a day, free WiFi (and a free adjoining room full of computers), and a sociable firepit next to a very reasonably-priced bar–all charmingly integrated into a peaceful orange grove. It’s the perfect place to do not much, and within easy walking distance of a complete set of Roman ruins scattered throughout the nearby woods if you change your mind about that.
After a couple of restful days here, we’ll be on to sunny Antalya, and then heading out to Beirut. There likely won’t be much to say before then, so more as it happens…
By Matt on October 14th, 2011 Merhaba! We’re back in Olympos, our favorite part of Turkey, after 24 sustained hours of travel. One quick, if somewhat obvious, observation before I pass out:
Those who didn’t have the good sense to be born into a country which participates in the Visa Waiver Program have to go to the trouble of applying for a tourist visa to visit the U.S. It’s kind of a lot of work, and there’s often an interview and everything.
Also, the form demands answers to questions like this:
Do you seek to enter the United States to engage in export control violations, subversive or terrorist activities, or any other unlawful purpose? Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization as currently designated by the U.S. Secretary of State? Have you ever participated in persecutions directed by the Nazi government of Germany; or have you ever participated in genocide? Have you ever participated in, ordered, or engaged in genocide, torture, or extrajudicial killings?
( ) YES
( ) NO
(Seriously, that’s all one question.) You also have to swear under pains and penalties of perjury that you’re not (and have never been) a prostitute, drug addict, tax dodger, etc. As non-immigrant pleasure visas go, it’s a pretty serious form.
As in many of our favorite countries, Turkish visas are issued upon arrival to anyone who wants one. There is no application, but I helpfully designed one for them while standing in line earlier today. It looks like this:
Do you have twenty dollars?
( ) YES
( ) NO
By Matt on April 27th, 2010  What man is there that knoweth not how that the city of the Ephesians is a worshipper of the great goddess Diana [Artemis]?
—Acts 19:35
I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the Colossus of the Sun, and the huge labor of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, ‘Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand…’
—Antipater of Sidon
The Temple of Artemis was four times the size of the Parthenon, and consistently drew many more visitors and pilgrims each year than the Pyramids in the two centuries that it stood just outside of Ephesus. Although it took 120 years to complete, by the time that the monument was finally dedicated in 550 B.C. it was among the first Greek temples to use the open colonnade design that immediately comes to mind when we hear the phrase “Greek temple” today. Thanks in part to Antipater’s rave review quoted above, the building which the Turks now call the “Artemision” would later come to be immortalized in the Western imagination as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Today, it looks like this:
There is a nearly unbearable poignancy to this site: for all of the many fragments, remnants, ruins, remainders, and reminders of entire civilizations whose names have long ago been lost to history which we have contemplated in the past two weeks, it was this single 60-foot column—now home to a pair of indifferent storks and worshipped by no one—that has most affected me. My sunrise pilgrimage to this erstwhile Wonder still haunts me as I write this.
The ruins of the Artemision are so scant and scattered that it is little wonder that the package tours seem to skip this now-little Wonder; it is, tellingly, one the few major archeological sites in the country for which the Turkish government has not bothered to set even a nominal entry fee. The temple’s demise came on July 20, 356 B.C. (the night that Alexander the Great was born) when it was singlehandedly destroyed by a fame-chasing arsonist determined to have his name remembered throughout the ages. The Greeks declined to honor this wish, and (after taking a few days to slowly torture him to death) set out to do everything within their power to guarantee that his hated name would never be recorded or remembered by anyone. (Thanks to at least one contemporary historical account which escaped the attention of the authorities, however, we now know him as “Herostratus,” and—in a sort of sickly ironic twist which rewarded this common criminal with exactly what he was hoping to achieve—anyone who commits a crime with no higher motive than a desire to be remembered for it [John Hinckley, Jr., Mark David Chapman, etc.] is still said today to be seeking “Herostratic fame.”)
Even knowing that there wouldn’t be much left to see, I reasoned that it’s not every day that you find yourself within a quick stroll of a Wonder. So I got up early this morning and made my own pilgrimage on foot to the outskirts of Selcuk, where a single sign pointed the way. Following a short dirt road, I soon came upon a quiet grove in which elderly geese paddled around an algae-filled pond as the remaining stone and marble chunks of Artemis’s once-venerable home continued their slow sink into the muck.
With my shoes squelching in the same muddy ground which had hosted the innumerable pilgrims who had come to worship here since the Bronze Age, I stared in abject wonder. I lowered myself slowly onto a nearby chunk of stone to find my mind overtaken by visions of future Americans clambering over the twisted remaining rebar from the foundations of a towering copper statue erected by their ancient forebears to the goddess Liberty, alien tourists two millenia hence marveling at the unapologetic scope of the avarice buried within the piled remains of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, and intrepid explorers setting forth into the vine-ensconced rubble of Shanghai, Mumbai, Los Angeles, and all of our other unsustainable megacities. I even had a passing image of some future world government debating what should be done with the derelict sprawl of the 40-square mile Florida city-state which had once been under the benevolent rule of an anthropomorphic American mouse god so revered by his worshippers that they changed the laws as necessary to prevent the creation of any blasphemous graven images of his rodential personage.
Upon a few minutes of sober reflection, I came to something approaching my senses and remembered that these matinal encounters with the ancients will always be fodder for the purplist of travel prose, especially where the author has not been meeting his daily requirements either for sleep or drip coffee. With neither in sight, I stood, stretched, and set my feet back on the dusty path to Ephesus.
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