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Published: April 6th 2009
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On Sunday, we woke up early and putzed around for a while at Starbucks (I know... but it's open early!), which turned out to be a fountain of useful information. First, we learned that today was daylight savings here. Then, I finally asked someone about the taxi situation because I am oh so tired of paying so much for cabs and Ryan isn't big on waiting around for buses. It turns out you just have to ask the cab, "servees?" which roughly translates as, "are you a service cab and not someone who is going to charge me a private cab rate and then still try to pick up other passengers?" And then when he says yes, you hop in and pay a fraction of what we've been forking over to cab drivers. Thank you starbucks! So we grabbed a service cab and headed down to the central transport hub to go to Baalbek, leaving the final score as beirut cabbies:10, tourists 1. 😊
Then we found a minibus to go to Baalbek and took a great ride through the Lebanon mountains, full of snow and really beautiful scenery, and through a bunch of little towns in the Bekaa Valley,
which is flanked on the other side by the Antilebanon Mountains. We learned later that this was one of the earliest inhabited areas of the fertile crescent, because growing conditions are very good and there were two huge springs for water. It took about 2 hours to get to Baalbek, where our arrival was signaled by an incredible view of roman columns.
The main site here is the roman ruins, which includes the largest roman temple built in the world. The complex had several buildings, including the main temple of Jupiter, a smaller temple of Baccus, and then finally a third temple, which isn't open to the public, of Venus. The site was amazingly accessible, and you could freely climb all through the ruins of the different temples. Aside from a school group there for about an hour, there were very few other tourists around -- maybe five other couples and one family -- so we could wander around this huge amazing structure almost to ourselves. Like most sites, this was later inhabited by Christians, who built a church inside the temple of jupiter, and Arabs, who fortified the structure to use as a citael (qalaa) and added a
mosque, though neither of these really survived.
Baalbek is the first place that has had the kind of tourist vendors who chase after you and try to sell things. The most bizzaro thing is that many are selling Hezzbolah t-shirts, which just seemed flabbergasting, though I guess some people consider it an interesting souvenier of the Bekaa Valley, where the group got its start.
After the site, we headed into a cafe and had a cup of tea to warm up (it is pretty cold here in the mountains) and practiced our very limited arabic with the owner, a young guy who speaks english really well. Then we had more mezze for dinner, which are constantly delicions, but, like tapas in spain, are starting to lose some of its appeal after a few days in a row. It was very good though, and we had...
Tabouleh: always good, full of super-fresh parsley, and very little bulgar
Fatoush: spinach salad with olives, tomatoes and a declicious lemon dressing with fried pita chips on top (I may never enjoy salad again without fried pita chips on top)
Mutabal: babaganoush, which is always good
Stuffed Grape Leaves, with less rice
inside than typically found in the states
Hummus, which actually has too much tahini here for me but Ryan likes it
"Cream chesse wontons" - really yummy sheeps cheese in dough
Chateau Ksara wine, which is a lot like the Cab blends we've been tasting back home
and watched the sunset over the ruins from the huge windows of the restaurant.
There's not much to do here at night, so we're just hanging out in our hotel, which is decent enough but doesn't have heat, so we got out our little sleeping bags to keep warm. For tomorrow, we're still debating whether we should head to Syria through the Damascus border, stopping at a couple of sites along the way, or just head north up toward Homs on our way to Alleppo, which was our original plan. Either way, we have to get our visa at the border and it is supposed to take a while. We've already spent more time in Lebanon than we had planned, but neither of us is really ready to leave.
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