It's Beirut, yay Krispy Kreme

Friday, going to Beirut
So, we get up bright and early and get ready. We are a little apprehensive because we have to enter Lebanon, and unlike our land crossing from Jordan to Syria, we don’t have our visa for Lebanon. Unlike Syria, it’s supposed to be easily available from the border (Syria’s is not, therefore we applied back in May through their embassy in Washington DC). And since we’ll be on a bus with the locals, we don’t want to tick them off by forcing the whole bus to wait through our ordeal. We grab our packs and walk to the main road and try to hail a cab, but there’s not a lot of traffic and it seems that the cabs all already have passengers. Eventually we get one and we are on our way. When we pull into the parking lot of the bus/service taxi station, literally 10 guys run up to the doors and we are surprised. We get out and they want to know where we are going, we say, “Beirut” and they all say that they’ll take us. They are service taxi drivers or the people who hustle for them. We say that we want to take a bus, they lie and say, “all of the busses have left”, but we can see a handful of busses behind them. Then one honest guy says, “the busses are over there, just go find one.” SO we walk over and a nicer young guy asks where we are going, and points to the first bus in line, and says 10 o’clock. That’s perfect, 20 minutes away, we ask where to get tickets and he walks us up to the window and talks to the guy. It’s really cheap, just S400 each, so we paid for 2 on a bus the same amount as we’d pay for one in a service taxi. We drop off the packs and go to load on the bus, it’s almost the same as the others that we have been on, but at least not at this moment, there is no air conditioning, we hope that when they get rolling is when they’ll turn it on. We watch a little kid lick his way across a plastic sign, gross. Then we load up and hmmm, no air conditioning. Darn it!! It’s not so bad once the bus is moving, they leave the front door wide open while driving and there’s a vent in the middle of the bus roof, just above us and it’s pleasant as long as everyone keeps their curtains closed. The family with the little boy who was licking the billboard is sitting in front of us. I feel sorry for the mom, there are 3 little boys under 4, and the toddler isn’t 2 yet. She has a slightly older boy, 6/7 that seems self sufficient and then a much older boy (17?), not sure how he is related, but she won’t speak to any man, so the older boy does all of her bidding and communicating. She’s in full burka, even the veil thing that ties around your head and covers the eye opening, and black gloves. She focuses her attention on the toddler and the older boy sorta monitors the other three that are shoved into the 2 seats across the aisle, but they are kinda on their own. And OMG, these boys are filthy!! Dirty faces, black, grimy hands, it makes me cringe as a mom. And I’ll cut them some slack. With 4 boys under 8 years old, it must be murder to keep them clean, but at no time during the trip did anyone make any attempt to wash faces or pull out a Kleenex and do the spit thing. And the toddler was obviously the favorite and his face was disgusting. The youngest of the group of 3 on the other side of the aisle has a huge personality, but after spending a day observing, it seems like he’s also the one that takes the most abuse, so maybe his personality is directly reflected by being a little neglected? I’ll call him Badger since I have a lot to say and it makes more sense with a name. The boy slightly older than Badger sits and bites him for a good 10 minutes, up the arms and on the neck, and Badger is being tough and just laughing for most of it until it hurts and he squawks. The oldest boy and mom don’t give a darn. Then the 3rd boy on that side of the aisle, not really involved in the wrestling, gets comfortable against the window and falls asleep, and the biting boy wants to get comfortable so he shoves badger onto the floor between seats, and then the oldest boy (with mom) grabs Badger up off of the floor and shoves him into the seat behind his brothers, which wouldn’t normally be a problem, but there’s someone sitting there. It’s a nice looking 20-ish man, but it’s not fair for him to have to now babysit someone else’s child. Luckily Badger is tired too and curls up awkwardly on the seat and falls asleep. His upper leg kept slipping off of his lower leg and his head was at a strange angle with no real support, so the nice gentleman eventually straightens him out and rest his little head against the stranger’s side. What a nice man, I think that I’ll take him home. I smile to show him that I noticed his generosity.
There’s another westerner on the bus, which is a relief, cuz we have one more person to be hissed at if our visas take forever at the border. He’s tall and attractive and has a yellow shirt. He’s sitting 3 rows in front of us and reading a Lonely Planet Syria/Lebanon books, that’s encouraging.
We are at the Syrian border in a heartbeat, even though the bus is really bad about pulling up the hills and mountains, slow as molasses. The first stop is to pay our exit tax SYP500 apiece, fill out the paper, then pull forward and disembark again to stand in lines. Holy cow these people are horrible at lines. There’s even fixed posts in the ground and they are right up against our backs, with their hands coming up over our shoulders, trying to muscle their way before us or at least hand their passports and paperwork before we get to. Lexie complains that the little woman behind her was so close that they were spooning. We have the extraordinary bus attendant with the puppy eyes taking care of us, he shoves UK boy- I’m really sorry that I wasn’t listening when I asked his name- into one line and then me and Lexie into the next one, so we are encompassing both of the foreigner-only lines. UK-boy knows to push forward, and he’s tall enough to fend off the crush behind him. And I’m trying to be a fullback in my line with Lexie, I’m tall enough that they aren’t getting anything over my shoulder or head, but Lexie is more susceptible to the pushing. The two women in front of us take decades to process, they each have a handful of papers with children’s photos stapled to them, so I guess that they are processing multiple kiddos. The bus attendant appears again and hands our passports to UK-boy, cuz it looks like he may get to the head of the line faster because he doesn’t have the slow women in front of him, he’s trying, but his window isn’t grabbing new passports at all. Then finally our line clears, 4 sets of hands shoot forward between me and Lexie and over our shoulders, I nudge them aside and tell UK-boy, “over here!!” and he hands back the set of 3 passports and we get them in the window before anyone else. YAY for teamwork!!!!! They process fairly fast, due to the crazy currency exchange, we have to pay LB25,000 to enter Lebanon, US$1=LB1500. It’s done, we get our passports stamped and it didn’t take too long. Our bus attendant, he is so sweet, is there to escort us back to the bus. All of the locals processed faster, wouldn’t you know it, but they aren’t angry. All in all, it took about 20 minutes to get it done. And we are off.
Oh, back to Badger stories. So, little guys have to wake up when we exit Syria and they have a passenger change, the dad was waiting at the border and the oldest boy disappears. The parents buy snacks and sodas for the kids and they enjoy them, but the wrestling and smacking starts again and the parents ignore it. At one point the next oldest boy tries to tear off Badgers ear and he cries silently for 10 minutes and then falls asleep again.
Again, this part of Syria/Lebanon is really mountainous. They have ski resorts and are known for their beauty. So we climb mountains, go through some towns and then clear the last mountains and see the Mediterranean Sea. Cool! It’s like coming back into Denver from the mountains and coming down Genessee, only it’s not a freeway, it’s a 2 lane road, and there are homes and businesses on either side of it and we zigzag all of the way down.

We are in Beirut. It’s really hot and incredibly humid, but beautiful and it’s great to be back in a “westernized” city. We see women dressed in dresses and shorts and tanktops, hollah. Our hotel is near the water, right across from this beautiful college campus, the American University of Beirut, created by missionaries in 1867 (?) to train Doctors for the hospital. Lebanon used to be part of Syria and they both used to be French colonies, so Arabic is the first language, most people speak French and then most people also speak at least some English. It’s very cosmopolitan.