After the ruins, we ate some lunch and walked around town. I'm finally starting to understand small towns in Arabia. They're little cities that grew organically with no preset design. They never had a master plan; new roads just snaked out from the city center wherever they were needed, and new buildings popped up alongside. The roads don't form neat grids. They ramble and twist and turn back on themselves, creating a maze where side streets and alleys became major routes through town. But the chaos gives the city vitality. The maze of streets and tangle of shops in an Arab town make every turn a discovery, every walk a tour. There's a unique energy in the way people move through the streets. It's like watching blood cells flow through arteries and capillaries and veins. The city is an organism, and the streets are alive.
I don't think there's any such thing as a quiet little Arab town. Arab towns are either noisy and chaotic or silent and asleep. From the first pre-dawn call to prayer to the end of the 'isha prayer at night, it's a buzzing hive. Veiled women shop for fruits and bread and cuts of meat. Men with trays of tea walk from shop to shop and come back with empty cups. Taxi drivers lean against beat-up Mercedes in the town center. Old men smoke sheesha and play backgammon. Young men cluster on street corners and look at girls. The air smells like burning wood and propane, and cigarettes and garlic, and roast lamb and incence and perfume. Two cars pass each other on a one lane road while a mother herds her children across the street. Her toddler stops in the middle of the road to get a lick from his ice cream cone. She grabs him by the wrist and pulls him to the curb, and he drops his cone and starts to cry. After they're gone, a skinny stray cat runs out and laps up the melted dessert.
The city buzzes all day long. It never slows down. Then, sometime after 'isha, it just stops. The streets empty. The whole town goes silent. You rarely notice people drifting home. You just look up from a magazine, or you walk out of a restaurant, and everybody's gone. You can get so caught up in the energy that you never see it go. It's as if someone threw a switch and turned off the whole town.
In Baalbeck, someone really had thrown a switch-the electricity is turned off at midnight. Everyone is home before the town goes dark. I was curled up in bed with a copy of The Prophet when the overhead light went off and the fan by the bed shut down. I pulled out a flashlight and kept reading until two. I never thought to switch off the lights. When the electricity came back on at six in the morning, I was rudely awoken by a light in my face and a blast of cold air from the fan.
Our host brought us breakfast and called a cab driver he knew. The driver told us he could take us to Bcharre for 50 dollars. We laughed and tried to talk him down to 20. He wouldn't go below 40, so we told him we would just take a service taxi instead.
We walked to the town square and talked to the people running the service taxis, but none of them went to Bcharre. One who spoke a little English told us that service taxis never went there, and the only to get there from Baalbeck was by a private car. So we had to go back to the hotel owner and ask him to call his friend again. We tried to get him to agree to the 40 dollar price he offered earlier, but he knew we were in a bind and insisted on collecting 50 dollars. We grudgingly agreed and made our way to Bcharre.
Hi, Mike. I came across your blog while researching travel in the Mid East, particularly Lebanon. Can you tell me anything about safety, etc. for Americans? It seems like you made it around pretty well and that people were really helpful and welcoming. Was that the case?
Posted by: Scott Trauner | October 16, 2005 at 03:48 PM