Mexican Food in Lebanon

My last destination in Lebanon was the ancient city of Byblos. This city is said to be the oldest port in the world. I heard people claiming it was around 5000 years old! I don't know the historical validity of that (you know how people tend to exaggerate about their hometown...), but whatever the age of the city it was a beautiful place and probably my favorite of the cities I visited in Lebanon. The picture above shows the a view down into the harbor from the ruins of a Crusader Castle.


There are lots of reasons why I liked this city so much, but a lot of it had to do with the fact that no matter where I was in the city I had a spectacular view of the sea. As I was first coming into the city, walking down this seemingly innocuous street, all of a sudden the sea appeared out of no where and blew me away.


I eventually made my way to the harbor and talked to some of the locals. The Lebanese dialect was a little different than the Arabic I'm accustomed to, but I managed well enough. The locals were more than pleased to tell me about their city while I sat amongst the boats on the edge of the sea.

Before I left for Byblos I had heard from a few people that there was a really good Mexican food restaurant somewhere near the harbor. I was craving Mexican food something fierce; in fact I still am, it's one of the few things I miss from home. Anyway, I made sure I found the restaurant and ordered steak enchiladas. They were wonderful.


And the view from the restaurant was just as impressive as everywhere else. The above picture is what I saw out of the window from my table at the restaurant. Mexican food and that view was pretty perfect.


I continued to wander the city and found a Crusader built church. Named after John the Baptist, it was built in 1150 but damaged by the continued fighting of the Crusades. It was incredible.


Inside the church they were preparing for a wedding that was soon to commence, but I managed to sneak a few pictures before they got mad at me.


The outer courtyard of the church was a nice place to sit and relax. The weather was absolutely perfect the day I was in Byblos, and I probably would've sat there for quite a while had that wedding not been going on.


As I said earlier, there was a Crusader fort built and partly destroyed here during the Crusades. The neat thing is that it was built amongst and around other ruins from times past. This part of the world is so full of ancient history that they practically built their ancient sites on top of each other. Above you can see the remains of some Greek ruins with the later built Crusader fort in the background.


This is a small-ish amphitheater overlooking the sea. Though it isn't big I can imagine seeing anything performed against such a backdrop would be mighty impressive.


Before I left the city I had to go back and sit along the coast. I knew this would be my last opportunity to really enjoy the Mediterranean before I left so I made sure to take my time. You can see the outer edge of the city framing the sea.

I really enjoyed my time in Lebanon. It is a beautiful country, the people are nice, and the food was great. If you're ever in the neighborhood of the Middle East, I would definitely recommend Lebanon as a place to visit.

Gingerbread Disaster

I took a short break from posting due to the holidays. Christmas here was very different than back home. It still provided many opportunities to get together with other people and share in good food with good friends. I am blessed in many ways and this Christmas really helped me to see that. The people I am surrounded by are amazing; life here would not be the same without them. And Christmas wouldn't have been Christmas without them.

In my city there were even Christmas trees, decorations, and lights to be seen in a few sporadic places. The places where I felt most at home were those houses of other Americans. Americans know how Christmas is supposed to be, and it was nice to be in that kind of atmosphere.

I spent Christmas day mostly eating, but there was one thing that stands out as making this Christmas great. We made a gingerbread house. Now, I'm not one to get excited about buildings made out of food, and admittedly I was a bit wary of doing such a thing, but when it was all said and done with, it totally was the best part of Christmas day. After an amazing meal at a friends house, we got set up to make the house.

I don't think any of us had ever truly made a gingerbread house before, and it was just as well since we couldn't find the proper ingredients to do so anyway. (Sidenote: I spent the previous day looking for graham crackers to use in the gingerbread house. There was much hilarity that arose from me going around asking people if they sold graham crackers or even KNEW what a graham cracker was.) We all brought anything we could find that we thought might be useful in constructing the "gingerbread" house.

This was the base layer. We ended up using wafers with chocolate in between for the main part of the wall. Like I said, no gingerbread or graham crackers were available.


After the ground had been laid, we then put on the main wall which was made out of Butter Crackers. We used generous amounts of frosting as mortar to hold the whole thing together. The frosting worked surprisingly well...


We put on a second layer of wafers and then set about deciding how we were gonna make a roof. This took quite some time. Also, notice the doorway in the front. Pretty clever huh? We didn't want the gingerbread people to not be able to get in or out of their house!


This picture shows the decorations starting to appear. Somehow we came up with a plan for the roof that eventually worked. Also, candy snakes started crawling through the windows.

The whole group working together to get it right.


This shows the first layer of the roof completed. Also, if you look inside, you can see a bed made out of wafers with a gumdrop man laying on it (left of the green snake).


This is the completed house. The roof was a scramble, but I think it turned out nicely. On the top left you can see a field of red, green, and purple flowers (made out of jelly beans); beneath that at mid left there is a pool/pond with a green frog in the middle (jelly beans); below left shows the garden; and mid right shows a goat pen with goat inside (wafers and jelly bean). Use your imagination.


Close up of the jelly bean frog in the water.


Then it slowly started to buckle under its own weight.


Then it just completely gave way. We think it fell on this side because of the window we put in caused it to be less structurally sound. We should've gotten better engineers to look over our design first...


This is the final shot of the whole thing. I thought it looked kinda like a house after a tornado or hurricane rips through. Buried somewhere beneath the wafers and crackers is the poor gumdrop man who died peacefully in his sleep on his wafer bed.

Maybe next Christmas we'll be able to make a better house since we have prior experience now. Either way, it was great fun. A good Christmas day for sure.

My Arab Diet

The food options here are such that if I never wanted to touch Arab food, I wouldn't have to. What I mean is that between the American franchised restaurants (like KFC), the western style grocery stores (such as Safeway), and the knock off restaurants that serve American"ish" food (anyone up for some Burjer Kinj or Chix Filet?), I could go with just eating stuff I'm used to if that's what I wanted.

But that's NOT what I want. My goal from day one has been to blend in with and embrace the culture around me. That's not to say that I don't enjoy food that reminds me of home (we fixed mexican food today and it was great), but I mostly want to eat the food that the locals eat.

Falafel Sandwiches

So, I thought today I might share about some of the foods that I eat regularly here. One of my favorite foods has been falafel sandwiches. You can find little stands and shops selling these throughout the city. And they are quite good. Each place makes them slightly differently, but the gist is the following:

Take a piece of bread (typically arabic flat bread)
Insert freshly made falafels
Smear in some hummus
Smush up the falafels
Spoon in some sauce made with chunks of tomatos
Add any desired extras (I like peppery hot sauce and french fries thrown in)
Close up and enjoy

Falafel sandwiches are cheap and delicious. I can buy 3 for about $1. And there's a stand that's only about a five minutes walk from my house; I can essentially get them whenever I want. Superb.

Falafel sandwiches are delicious.

Also, instead of going to the huge grocery store on the other side of town I usually just walk to a local store that's about 10-15 minutes away. The selection isn't as large, but I find it's just fine.

On the way I pass several fruit and vegetable stands. At this point I've learned which are the good ones and which are not so good. I have my favorite one that I walk to probably twice a week to buy dates, bananas, and pomegranates. The pomegranates here are superb! Oh my gosh. They are so sweet, and extremely red in color. I usually peel an entire pomegranate and put the seeds in a bowl, and then add plain yogurt. Fresh pomegranate and yogurt is hard to beat.

Doesn't that look amazing?

Also, I buy hummus and pistachios from various other stands and vendors. The hummus here is different than anything I had in the US, but it's very good. The food has been very kind to my stomach, and it hasn't made me sick once. I really was fearing having to be super careful with my food, but so far nothing has bothered me at all. I just hope it stays that way.

By the way, if you've never had a pomegranate, I REALLY recommend that you go out to a store and find one. Surely some organic grocery store has some you can try that would be like the ones I get here. They are so good. And as far as how to eat them, you just cut it open and pull out the little red pulpy seeds and eat them whole. Don't eat the white membranous skin separating the seeds as it is horribly bitter. I promise, pomegranates are extremely good.

A Large Amount of Nuts

This past Friday, I attended a Christmas party with a bunch of other Americans. The locals here, "celebrate" Christmas in some degree. The embracing of Western culture has given rise to seeing Christmas trees (fake) and holiday decorations in many of the bigger stores and malls. With that said, it was nice to be with other Americans who truly appreciate Christmas in the same way that I do; a way that has nothing to do with Santa Claus or presents.

Our party consisted of dinner, a reading of the Christmas story (Not the one that starts "Twas the night before Christmas"), singing of carols, and a white elephant gift exchange. The food was great; I knew I would miss Mexican food, but I guess I didn't realize how much I missed it until a plate of 7 layer dip was set before me. And in the white elephant exchange, I actually made out quite good: I walked away with a kilo of pistachios. Pretty good huh?

Switching gears - Within the past month or so the temperature has slowly become colder. It's still nothing to complain about in any sense; in fact, as I'm writing this it is 59° F and sunny outside. So, quite nice. But once the sun drops beyond the horizon, the temperature quickly follows suit. The thing is, here the sun has been setting about 4:15 or so and then it's nearly black outside by 4:45. It wasn't this way when I got here in October. Then, the daytime temperature was warm/hot and the nighttime was comfortably warm.

Look how happy I was in the warm weather just a few months ago.

I find myself thinking about the bounteous heat that will be afforded to my comfort this summer, knowing that at some point it will get unpleasantly hot. With that in mind, I thought it would be good to anticipate my future loathsomeness of said heat by reminding myself how much I miss it. All joking aside, the weather here has been quite moderate and pleasant; I know there are many other people around the world dealing with temperatures much more extreme and hostile than I face.

And even moreso, last winter it snowed here; A LOT. I can't complain. I'd prefer it not snow this year, though if it does, you can bet I will have a blog full of snowy white pictures.

Chess & Kentucky

A few weeks back during one of my language sessions I learned the word for chess; it's "shutarunj" by the way. I do like to play chess, though admittedly, I'm not the best chess player. I asked Muhammad, my language helper, if he liked to play chess. He said yes and we talked about going out at some point to play chess together.

He told me that many people play chess at the local coffee joints. When I say local, I mean not Starbucks or anything of the western sort. I mean hole in the wall, gotta know where you're going to get there, smoke filled from hookah, nothing but men sitting around and chatting playing various games (I'm pretty sure I saw a game of Texas Hold 'Em going on), kinda place. This is where Muhammad took me a few days ago.

I was very glad to be frequenting a place that probably only sees a few non-locals a year. I really enjoy seeing the more traditional places and experiencing things like the locals do. The culture is more interesting (to me at least) when I don't see things that I recognize as western.

We walk in and find a place to sit down. A waiter comes and we ask him for a chess set. He scuttles off to find us one. I noticed the place was quite filled with hookah smoke. They call it "Argiileh" here, and nearly everybody smokes it. I'm not the biggest fan, but I deal with it. When he returns he has a chess set in hand. This is no luxurious set, but it gets the job done.

We also ordered some drinks. I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but they serve a drink here in the Middle East that I'm quite fond of. It's nothing shockingly absurd, in fact I'm surprised this hasn't caught on in America; it's simply lemonade with mint in it - they call it lemon with mint - outrageous huh? They make it with either whole, crushed, or blended mint in lemon juice.

Delicious lemon with mint drink.

The chess game was fun. It wasn't too serious despite the look on Muhammad's face in the picture. It was just nice to get out and hang out with him. Funny little story, he offered to take me to dinner, though I told him I wanted to pay for us - he wouldn't allow it. He asked me if I wanted to go to "Kentucky." Not knowing what it was, I just said sure. Ten minutes later we're standing in line at "KFC" in a highly trafficked shopping area (I hesitate to call it a mall). That's right folks, they love Kentucky Fried Chicken here; and they call it Kentucky haha.

He's a grandmaster.

Taxis and Food

So I've been taking the taxi by myself for a few days now. This city is quite big, but I've managed to get around alright. I know specific landmarks and place names to say so I can usually get myself within short walking distance of the places I need to go. I'm slowly grasping the layout of the city and am now recognizing things as we pass by them. What I'm saying is, my mental map is coming along well, and this makes the city less intimidating.

Tonight on the way home I got in a cab that didn't have a meter (or at least it was cleverly hidden). I knew right off the bat this was trouble, but I was too tired to care. So I make conversation as much as I can without actually knowing any substantive Arabic, and the driver knowing little English. We get to my neighborhood and I have him pull over about a block from my house. I know that where I came from to my house usually runs about 2.5 dinars, so I figure I'll be nice and just give him 3 and not ask for change. I hand him three and he looks at me and demands more.

I say, "Three is good!"

He points to the clock and says "Late."

I'm thinking to myself, "Is he really trying to tell me that there's some late night taxi tax??" (By the way, it was only like 9 PM; not late at all.)

I laugh and say, "Okay. Two good?" and go to reach for one of the dinars back.

At this point he decides that three is indeed good, and says "Salaamu" meaning "peace" and he was out of there.

I just want it to be clear that most taxi drivers that I've dealt with are very nice and honest people. I almost gave one guy a 10 dinar note instead of a 1 and he gave it back and informed me of my error. Tonight was the first instance of someone trying to take advantage of me.

I got to eat my first authentic sit down Arabic meal the other night. It was wonderful. I especially enjoyed the hummus which was topped with meat and pine nuts; as well as the chicken (picture of the whole meal above). Afterward, we had some tea; it too was great (See below picture). The food so far has been superb. We've had the chance to get little things from street side restaurant shops as well. Today we had a falafel sandwich; SO good! It's mushed up falafels inside some of the Arabic flat bread, which is chewy and delicious, as well as hummus all rolled up with some other sauce sprinkled on top. Another of my favorites has been Shawarma. Wikipedia probably does a better job of explaining this that I would do, so you can look it up if you like. My stomach has been strong and I've not had a single instance of it having to "adjust" to the new food so far. Admittedly, the food here isn't really all that different than home, but I still thought I'd have to go through an adjustment period.

These first few days have gone really great. I've no reason to believe it won't continue in the same fashion. I'm probably gonna be heading out and doing some more exploring tomorrow in a new part of town. This is so great, I still can't believe I'm really here.