Lebanon

I'm totally going non-chronological here, so apologies for any and all confusion.  Last week's visit to Beirut was long overdue, and a highlight of my sabbatical to be sure.  Stayed in the same apartment where we lived in 2010-2011, ate at the same amazing man'oushe stand (Snack Faysal) every morning, and best of all caught up with good friends: Karine, Nancy, Rula, Amy, Lina, Lisa, Malakeh, Zane, and Rima.  I have lived in places much longer than the year I spent living in Lebanon and struggled to make close friends in those other places.  Sometimes, a place just becomes a home, one of your homes, and you have to express thankfulness for the blessing of having more than one such place.  Out for lunch with the gang from the English Department at the school I visited during that year, a friend said one of the nicest, most gratifying thing anybody has ever said to me: "you really fit in here."  For a person who has always struggled to do just that, those words meant so much to me.

Walking around the Hamra neighborhood, drinking at the best coffee shop in Beirut, seeing the same faces at the money change stands and on front stoops...man what a warm, exciting city.  I thought we had combed every inch of the small country during that year, but Karine showed us otherwise--Our Lady of Zahle shrine and the Jesuit dairy farm (a lakeside bike ride!) in Tannayel, both in the Bekaa; the monastic cell and adjacent shrine to the Maronite saint Mar Charbel; a seaside restaurant in Byblos for a plate of echnidia fruit.  A perfect long weekend.  It was as hard to leave this time as it was in 2011.