Tripoli
Trip Start
Oct 20, 2008
1
34
93
Trip End
Jan 31, 2009
Tripoli,
Lebanon
Monday, November 24, 2008
The lady at Jet told me that the Lebanese officials wouldn't let me leave if I did not have a return flight, because I was traveling on a tourist visa. I told her that I was flying to Tokyo from there and that I was planning to buy that ticket in Moscow. She said that that would not suffice. I believed her. To my relief, there was somehow no difference between the prices of the one-way ticket and the roundtrip. $445. They didn't accept credit card or traveler's checks. My cash reserves are being depleted fast.
Went to the helpful tourist office on the eastern boarder of Hamra and got my directions to Tripoli. Got on a Connex bus for 4,000 pounds. Was in Tripoli in 1.5 hours.
The bus took the main highway that went North, right beside the Mediterranean. There were numerous multinational fastfood chains on both sides of the road. In addition, the building that I could see from the bus were almost as impressive as the ones in Beirut.
There was a casino on the way. Hizbollah must be hating this.
Greater Beirut is very different from all the other Middle Eastern cities that I have visited.
Soaps of Tripoli
Desert has been replaced by a a lot of green; there are very few ladies with headscarves, and men no longer wear the traditional Arab dress.The moment I set foot on Tripoli, I noticed the stark contrast to Beirut. The chador and the traditional men's wear reappeared. The mosques outnumbered the churches by far. With its dirty streets and run-down buildings, this could easily be a suburb of Damascus.
Has shish taouk at al-Dar. Nothing special. The weird thing was that there was nobody eating there at 1pm and the glass coolers looked as if the restaurant had gone bankrupt. The reason why I stayed was because of the owner, Daniel. 5,000 pounds.
Daniel: 50, half Armenian, half Greek; his family came here from Ottoman Anatolia; when I told him that I was Turkish, he told me that he was Turkish too; he graduated from Boston University; then, worked for Procter and Gamble and some other multinationals all around the world; finally, came back to Lebanon to renovate the Ottoman building that he inherited from his grandfather; that building became al-Dar; he has married 7 times; we started tailing about Lebanese politics; his forecast was that the US was going to attack Iran; the Hizbollah will attack Israel; Israel will invade the Souther half of Lebanon, while Syria will invade the rest; both civil and international warfare will begin simultaneously; hence, Lebanon will be no more; the Lebanese are supposed to be optimistic, but this is as gloomy as it gets; Daniel will flee to Europe as the war approaches; he was a bit crazy; however, there may be more than a grain of truth in what he has said.
The cab driver that took me to the bus station used to be a sales manager for Coke of Saudi Arabia.
The Soapmaker
After he saved up, he returned to Lebanon to get married. At home, civil war was awaiting him. He didn't have time to convert his Lebanese pounds into dollars. As a result, decades' savings evaporated in a few days.Most of the buildings in Tripoli are from the Mamluk era. I walked through the numerous souqs and finally arrived at the Citadel that had first been built by the Crusaders. Although it was in great shape, no Crusaders' castle can impress me after Crac des Chevaliers near Homs.
The main higlight of Tripoli was the 6-generation-old soap workshop. The Sharkass family has immigrated from Russian in 1803. They are Circassian. Today, the father, Mahmoud, his wife and daughters work side by side. As I read from some of the letters that had been sent to him from some of his loyal customers, they make some of the finest soap on the planet. Moreover, they have an online ordering system (sharkass.com) through which they take mass orders from California and Australia. Their rectangular soaps, which are made with the cold processing system, are good for the hair. The spherical ones that are made with the warm processing system have fragrances and are good for the skin. The ladies of the family are so proud of their father's achievement that they showed me international magazine articles about him for minutes and minutes.
Couldn't leave Tripoli without trying its legendary sweets. Had a mixed sweets platter and tea at Hallab and Sons. Compared to the Turks, Arabs make their deserts with much less syrup.
Tripoli
The syrup is also brought to the table, so that the customer can decide the rights amount.The number of soldiers patrolling Tripoli is only a fraction of that in Beirut.
Lebanon is unable to supply the demand for electricity. Every day, at changing hours, there is a scheduled outage that lasts 3 hours. Being surrounded by unfriendly neighbors such as Syria and Israel makes it almost impossible for them to import electricity.
Tripoli is the second largest city, yet its population is only a fifth of Beirut's.
I love how the elderly in Hamra use Starbucks as a traditional coffee house. They sit down with their beads in one hand and chat the hours away. Wish I could photograph this, but it's tough. They get interrupted when they see the camera. In addition, some get pissed even if you ask them if you can photograph them.
I feel that a second civil war is coming. The main evidence for this statement is the Hizbollah invasion of West Beirut that took place this past May. They showed the government what they were capable of doing and implied that the government should stop trying to manipulate them, especially with regards to their policy against Israel. Only a few months ago, Hizbollah militants bombed buses carrying soldiers, in order to reiterate their message. If the central government shows a tiny bit of teeth, there can be nothing but civil war. This forecast makes me utterly sad, because it points at the destruction of beautiful Beirut.
I promised myself that I would not get demoralized if I were turned back from the Russian boarder. Many unfortunate events will take place during this journey and I should be able to digest them.
