"Yama Alou", Nawal Al Zoghbi

ياما قالوا
ما يقولوا
حبينا كده و هوينا كده
و ملينا الدنيا غرام في غرام
هيعيدوا و يزيدوا ده اللي أنا حاساه
واللي أنا عايشاه
في الحب يا ناس و لا في الأحلام

قرب من قلبي اللي على شاناك
ياما غني و غني
و بيحلم بلقاك يا حبيبي
و لسه بيتمنى

روحي أنا
عمري أنا
أنا ذايبة في حبك و هواك
ده إنت أنا
آه يا أنا
و أنا منك
و هوايا هواك

على ناري
يا حبيبي
بستنى كده و في قلبي كده
أشواق تملى الدنيا بحالها
و تجيني
تلاقيني
الشوق ذوب فيا و عذب
و الحيرة بتفضل على حالها

Avvicinati al mio cuore che per te
continua a cantare
e sogna di incontrarti, amore mio
e non finisce di desiderarti.

La neige

Today I joined my friend N for a daytrip to Faraya-Mzaar-Kfardebian, on the slopes of Sannine mountain range. Some of his friends were very late: a sure sign that they are no serious skiers. I had the time to indulge in a delicious mana'ish spread with za'atar and cheese and to enjoy the political billboards that blossomed on both sides on the northbound highway as I was driving through the reckless traffic. The original ad campaign based on the slogan J'aime la vie ("I love life") was supported by the March 14 majority coalition (although my friend F, who works for the ad campaign, vehemently denies that) and it was indirectly suggesting that the Hezbollah-led opposition had a cult of death while the "normal people" of Lebanon wanted to live in peace. The opposition bounced back with a series of ads where the original logo is slightly edited and a series of handwritten comments are added as footnotes. The campaign says J'aime la vie - en multicolore ("I love life - in colors"), or "I love life - in dignity" or "I love life - without debts", indirectly suggesting that the current cabinet has no national dignity and that it is ruining the country's economy.

Parliamentary majority and opposition side by side.

I guess you're always drawn into politics in this country. When we finally arrived in Faraya, the woman at the ski rental shop asked me if it mattered to me to wear orange ski pants, since the orange color is associated with Michel Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement, while the area of Faraya is mostly standing with the rival Christian formation of Samir Ja'ja's Lebanese Forces and the Kata'ib. I showed my Red Army fur hat with sickle and hammer well on view. I guess this will leave the poor lady speechless for the whole weekend. By the way, the whole daily rental package (skis, sticks, boots, gloves and pants) came at a very affordable price of 15,000 LL (10 US$, € 8).

I bought a half-day pass for the whole Jonction skiing area for 30,000 LL (20 US$, € 15) and enjoyed more than three hours of skiing.

Il y a six mois

This morning I went back to Club 43, which was established in the 1960s as a not-for-profit secular association, for the so-called Résto Social. A free Friday lunch is served to dozens of elderly and disadvantaged people from different backgrounds who seem to have gone through a good lot of troubled times in their lives. Volunteers such as Madame Wafa (a lady remarkably looking like a less young version of Emmanuelle Béart) prepare and serve a decent meal and, above all, make these people feel that someone is taking care of them, even if only for a couple of hours per week. These elderly men and women were ready to fight among them to have an additional serving of kibbeh or to bring "home" an additional loaf of bread. Something somehow sometime has to be fixed in a society where people aged seventy brawl to get basic food.

According to guidelines that I've been adopting for a long time, I did not take pictures of these people. This is Jean, Bettina, Rana, Pamela, Madame Wafa and Imad having lunch after the guests had left.


I couldn't help observing how most of the volunteering ladies (not portrayed in this picture) were wearing a Pierre Gemayel memorial pin on their outfits. This matches with a huge display of memorial banners all around Gemmayzeh and might mean a surge of popularity for the Kata'ib party.
After an afternoon at the university and a good dinner at the Hamra branch of Kabab-Ji, I went to a dance-till-dawn upscale student party at the Royal Plaza Hotel.


I had been in the same place six months earlier, watching the explosions around the airport at the beginning of the July war. It was one the first times in my life that I felt really happy to listen ordinary club music among packs of pretentious silver spoon students. Life is back and war is over... for now.

Visages de Beyrouth

I am being honest here: reading political essays from the 1940s can be quite boring at times. Today, I decided to reward myself with a generous serving of earthy mouloukhiyeh at The Blue Note.


Moulokhiyeh is a sort of stew of rather slimy leaves similar to spinach with chunks of chicken and beef meat, served with rice and a sweet-and-sour dressing made with raw onions and vinegar. Rashid Da'if, a Lebanese writer, mentions the Blue Note and this dish in Testofil Meryl Streep!, one of his sharpest novels ever. So I thought it would be nice to remind the maître d' that this café and its signature dish have their own place in contemporary Arabic literature. Well. Not only was the maître not aware of the story, he didn't even know who Rashid Da'if is. I decided to quit my literary pretensions and to return to Michel Chiha's Visage et présence du Liban, a collection of articles and essays on Lebanese and Mediterranean identity that was published in 1964.
I then drove to Gemmayzeh for the vernissage of Wissam Beydoun's Mouvements and Amjad Faur's An Extraordinary Violence at Espace SD, next to Charles Helou Road.



The place is extremely interesting and the bookstore a threat to my budget restraints. I couldn't resist buying Zaven Kouyoumdjian's Shot Twice. The author collected some dozen pictures of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war and then went back to the same places, taking pictures of the same people fifteen years later. This photographic book is a punch in the stomach and definitely a must-see. My friend F joined me at Espace SD and then we had some pub crawl (with a few margaritas) in Gemmayzeh.
At 9 pm, I went to Club 43 to watch Fatih Akin's movie Gegen die Wand, also known in English as Head-On.I ended my day at Basement, where resident dj Jade was performing minimal electro.


As the name properly suggests, the place is a concrete-clad basement with some decadent baroque decor à la B018. In a certain sense, it looks a lesser version of B018 with much younger crowds.