In this country... we're not allowed to make plans

So yesterday afternoon May and I jumped in the car and headed north to Jbail, or - as it's traditionally known - Byblos.

Byblos is the supposed source of our word 'bible'. It's also one of oldest inhabited settlements in the world, having a continuous and well-documented history going back over 7000 years. The Arab name, Jbail, is apparently a variation on an original Canaanite name for the settlement. Like other places in Lebanon (Baalbeck being the most well-known) there are also placenames referring back to the worship of Ba'al, along with layers of ruins from neolithic times through to the Romans and beyond.

Our interest was more mudane than archeology. We wanted to get out of Beirut, forget about car bombs and US strikes on Syria for a few hours, and relax in a pleasant environment.

And pleasant Byblos/Jbail certainly is. The entire port area and old souk have been largely rebuilt and/or very tastefully recreated. The town is so
liberally strewn with the ruins of vanished civilizations that it's easy to forget, within a couple thousand years, what era you're in. I took lots of photos, which I'll add to this post to give a feel.

The only criticism one might make would be the sense of unreality that surrounds the place. As one would say in French, ça cloche un peu. The artificiality doesn't come from a flaw in the renovation of Byblos itself. It's more in the discontinuity between it and everything around it. The drive up from Beirut was astonishing. The last time I made this drive it was largely rural. One left Beirut's northern suburbs and drove through a largely undeveloped coastal plain until one reached Jounieh, a small town on the water with red tile roofs. From Jounieh, the drive reverted quickly to agriculture, beaches and small villages until one got to Jbail, which was then an even smaller town than Jounieh.

Today, all that has changed. The entire drive is urban. It's a kind of 'miracle mile' gone wild. The hills, which drop quite precipitously to the water along most of the drive, are covered helter-skelter with thousands upon thousands of appartment blocks, seemingly thrown up in minutes with no regard for nature nor any attempt to create something that might resemble a neighborhood. It's very impressive in its own way, yet the whole drive up I couldn't stop thinking of....cancer.

Anyone who's been to Costa del Sol or the southern areas of Athens has seen similar things. And it goes without saying that the US, despite some improvement in the last few decades, is still full of horrific examples. I'm thinking of large areas of Orange County south of LA and the Northeast coast between New York and Boston, for example.

What was so striking in this case was the complete disparity between my memories and the new reality. And the feeling that it's all happening so fast that by the time we drove home in the evening things would have gotten visibly worse.

So, the drive up, along with the surreal atmosphere in Beirut itself, combined to make Jbail seem rather otherworldly. Still, we had a wonderful afternoon wandering about, meeting and chatting with people as only May can do, and ended up at Pepe's (yes, Pepe's) overlooking the harbor, where we took in the sunset over a cold beer.

By late evening - 10 PM or so - as we were making our way up to the car, the place was packed to the rafters. The many outside restaurants were absolutely full and music was blaring on every side. Here again, there was a feeling of surreality - a minor clash of civilizations was going on. I noticed as we were making the long walk up from the harbor that all the music - from the teenagers sitting in groups among the ruins with guitars to the cranked-up night club PA systems - was western. Folk, rock and hip-hop were the order of the day. Of course, Byblos is deep in the Christian heartland of Lebanon, so a western orientation is omnipresent. Last night, however, there was a bit of an edge lent by the presence of many quite conservative Muslim visitors presumably from places like Tripoli. At one point we passed an open-air restaurant whose blaring sound system had some horrific - yet, I'm sure, highly popular - American rap singer growling something like, 'come on bitch, get the fuck over here when I tell you, I'm ready to make it!'. I've toned it down, since my kids might read this post. ;-> All to an audience largely made up of women in hijab and even in niqab (which covers the entire face except for the eyes). Nobody except me seemed particularly put out by the lyrics, so perhaps the clash of civilizations was primarily going on in my own mind, but it certainly felt pretty weird.

On the way home, as we approached Beirut our conversation inevitably returned to real life in the big city and the worries and stresses that go with it. In this case, car bombs, civil conflict next door, sectarian violence, social discord and all the rest. At one point May made the comment that I used as a title to this post, and which I found really striking. In fact, the whole of what she said was even more striking...and sobering. She was talking about life in Lebanon and the unrelenting struggle to create something lasting in the face of constant crises and endless disasters, large and small. And this is what she said: 'In this country we are not allowed to make plans. I can't make plans. Muhammad and I couldn't make plans. My father couldn't make plans. My grandfather couldn't make plans. None of us can make plans."

That comment  is still echoing in my head today.