Seafood, cemetary and citadel

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I am blogging. I have the will to do nothing else today. Getting here was tremendous effort. The sun, the juice stands, the women in tight jeans and the all-eyes men. The sunglasses stalls and the derelict buildings. This is Tripoli and we have been here two days. Yesterday we ate a lot, including a three course meal in beach front fish restaurant called Silver Shore. We ordered mezze to start: grainy hummus, fatouch, olives and bread and chose our fish fresh from the fridge in the kitchen - after minutes of misunderstanding the menu , the waiter thought it best that we just pointed to the beast we wanted and I managed to say 'grilled' in french. We were the only diners. Having read in the guidebook that the resaurant closed in the early evening, we headed to the El Mina area around five - a time at which no Middle Eastern person eats anything, let alone dinner. We ordered diet fizzy drinks - there is a good selection of these in this part of the world!- and when the mezze arrived, the waiter graciously served us each a heap of salad onto our plates using both a spoon and fork simulataneously to create a kind of salad shifting platter. I was impressed. The service in the Middle East is exemplary - no armpits in the face whilst leaning over you to pick up a plate on the other side of the table. All waiters have the beady eye for an empty glass, or an ashtry used for tea bag disposal.

I should mention the part where I upturned my sprite in the untouched hummus. The table was a crowded mezze of dishes and bottles just waiting for an undiscaplined elbow... The corriander decoration span in a whirlpool of liquid tahini fizz for only a second before the bowl was whipped away with a rue smile and replaced moments later. I apologised a few too many times and was known by the waiters in the kitchen as The Clumsy One for the remainder of the evening, I am sure of it. When I had finished the salad on my plate I reached for the bowl of fattouch and began to dig around for a good bit. Rolling his eyes from an adjacent table - where all the kitchen staff sat and smoked professionally for the evening - our trusty waiter, exasperated by my clumsy attempt to mimic the fork and spoon technique, leapt up, siezed the salad bowl from me and gracefully served out my seconds. The fish arrived. He lingered at the table after setting the grand platter down, waiting for our knifes to hover uncertainly above the creature, before diving back in to do the honours himself. Deboned, deskinned and served out, the fish was perfect, and came with a speciality sauce containing crunchy pine nuts which was delectable. The fruit platter was faultless, too: cherries, plums, apricots and water melon; all perfectly ripe. We pushed our stomachs to their limits of fullness and counted our pips. I am supposed to marry a lawyer tomorrow - no, today - and Lizzie a doctor or a cowboy - I can't really remember. I was more full than I was after our all-you-can-eat buffet in the Movenpick dead sea resort, so we walked the three kilometres home exeedingly slowly and stopped for tea in Le Palais, where the waiters must think the English do nothing but drink tea on holiday and I can't believe how long thier shifts are.

The man using the computer next to me just took a rest from online gaming to ask me: "Are you Russian or is your father Lebanese?" I asked him do I look Lebanese? (With a smile, of course, not in a mean sarcastic way - that would be uneccesary at this stage) and he told me, no, I look Russian. "And you are beautiful" Ah, yes. I am now typing fervrently and he has gone back to World of Warcraft.

Lizzie and I spent the day apart yesterday. When I say 'the day', what I mean is a couple of hours in the middle of it. During this time I had a very long shower and washed my hair in reliably hot water, which was a treat. I lay on my bed for sometime, enjoying the air conditioning and writing bits and bobs on postcards. It was midday when I finally left the hotel so I slunk out unseen by anyone who might disapprove of my tardiness and walked out into the bright central square of old city Tripoli. I wanted to wander, not to head anywhere in particular and only to look at the map every so often to make sure I wasn't anywhere horrible. I have no holiday discapline when it comes to sights. There are only so many ancient mosques that one wishes to see in any two month period and that number is not above five in my case. So I walked past the city's ancient religious sites and found myself instead in an Islamic graveyard. I weaved among the tombs to find a shady spot, where I could hear the trickling of a near-by water feature and watch two stray dogs chasing thier tails a stones' throw away. The cemetary was marble white and leafy, and on the edge of it the high rises loomed still in the distance. I watched a man in a vest smoke a ciggarette unknowingly on his balcony. I ran my sticky hands under a tap jutting out of a tomb and splashed water onto my face. It was cool and quiet. So humid that it was only really comfortable to stay still. After some time I took up my pen and wrote letters - you may recieve one - and hummed the soundtrack to Evita to the dogs.

An hour later I stalled, unable to write anymore, as the call to preyer started in a near-by mosque. The loud, deep trumpetting that I am by now used to, but has never quite made it into background noise. Sometimes I find myself singing the almost-tune under my breath, hearing the elephant yawing in my mind when I sleep. Mayble I will miss it when I get home. In this case, it was deafening. Really exeedingly loud. The mosque must be very close with quite the sound system, I thought to myself, as the rumbling echoed off the tombstones and swept around me like sound-wind. Then another one started. A competing mosque, also near-by, blasting out the call to preyer for anyone who didn't like the first mosque's facilities. The combined cacophony was overwhelming. Quite the Islamic experience, I thought suduedly, as yet another mosque announced it's one'o'clock preyers to the world - or anyone who was not did not already consider themselves spoiled for choice by their first two options. I was caught in the crossfire of three competeing mosques, the call to preyer of each exaggerated by the other; out of time and deafeningly historic. I felt I was induced to preyer by sheer force of sound as I sat and listened to the calling, alone in a graveyard of the Islamic dead with a pen in my hand.

I left quite soon after, least of all because I needed a Sprite Light to revive me, and I decided to make my way up to the famous citadel which overlooks the city. I climbed the hill slowly enough, up and up the yellow cobbled steps... Past a refuse fire which smelled stongly of plastic and made my eyes water. Three young men stood watching me as I emerged tearily from the smoke at the top of the hill. They stared a little and laughed at my back as I walked away; I glared accusingly over my shoulder - What was the joke? - and walked in the wrong direction to the citadel, only to double back and go through the stare/glare moves once again feeling slightly embarrassed. One of them pointed to a crowd of five soldiers sitting in the sun by a green port-a-loo. That direction. I followed his lead. Approaching them I found myself feeling very alone for the first time since arriving. The stares are usually divided cleanly between Lizzie and I, and when there are two of you it's much less intense. All the slodiers stood up as I arrived. "The citadel?" one of them asked. No, I'm here for you, I wanted to say but didn;t because it is never wise to make jokes with officials. He gestured round the corner to an unpromising car park and I realised that I was, in fact, standing next to a tall stone wall that was likely to be the wall of a citadel-like building. I felt I had arrived and skipped off enthusiastically in the direction of what I could now see was a stone arch entrance to a building that was certainly a citadel.

I could hear from inside the sounds of yet another group of men loafing around in the way they do in this area of the world and decided I'd have to enter confindently. This plan backfired unpleasantly as I leaped keely through the archway onto the uneven ground, twisted my ankle and fell, delivering myself at the feet of six surprised gentlemen and letting out a shocking yelp. They were all very old, I could see as I blinked back tears, but two of them heaved themselves out of their deck chairs and helped me up from the cold stone floor and sat me down on a ledge between two more. Another man, slightly younger perhaps, disappeared through a door to the right and returned with an icy cold bottle of water for me to press against my foot. None of them spoke any English, so I sat and listened to them discuss with gusto the obvious danger of the cracked pavement, in arabic, and sigh over what should be done about it. They all felt very sorry for me, which was nice, especially since my ankle recovered almost immediately and is now feeling fine.

The only draw back of this heart warming situation was that, like with the sprite-in-hummus scene, I was now seen as an unstable calamity waiting to happen and was followed at a distance around the citadel by a man who would wave his arms urgently whenever I looked over an edge or lost my balance on a small stone. He would shout "danger! danger!" and gesticulate what I assume was an impersination of me falling down a filght of ancient steps and dying. The citadel was pretty good. Like a massive castle looking over the town. And I do like big castle. My first instict is always to go upwards, like a goat, so I made my way up to the top floor or the tallest tower and then climbed on top the wall and sat at the highest point in the wind and the sun and felt monumental for the second time that day. Unitil Mr health-and-safety started making strangled noises from ten metres below me. I ignored him untill he found his way closer, then allowed him to assist me down, to his exaggerated releif. On the way out I asked about the toilets. Le box verde, the man told me. A port-a-loo. No way! I looked crestfallen and he showed me to a rather nice bathroom behind the ticket booth. I like it when this happens.

Right, now it is one minute past seven in the evening and I am feeling the stirring of a hommos and bread craving. Or some kind of sweet treat. Tripoli is famous for it's sweets and it's sea food and we have sampled both pleantifully. On this I will leave you - if you've even got this far! - and vow to blog more often in the coming weeks...

Lots of love to you all. Mary xxxx

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