In Progress

Last year in April I blogged about a mosque going up near Cola, a major intersection in Beirut. It's still a work in progress, but most of the exterior work appears to be complete, and there's far less green gauze hung all around.

We were in the car, and as we passed I took another picture. I love the geometry of these patterns.

It's nice to get a full wall of the angles and repetitions of the interlacing lines.

Every week at the farmer's market you'll see this pair of ladies making sandwiches. The one in the foreground kneads the bread, flattening it into a thin disk. Under her left arm you can see a large round pillow, or maybe I should call it a bean bag because it had some weight to it.  The flattened dough goes onto this substantial pillow and she flips it over onto the baking surface in the foreground. It isn't like flipping a pancake--the pillow sort of squashes the dough onto the iron.

The bread is finished baking in only a minute or two and then it's ready for fillings--olives, goat cheese, thyme, tomato, olive oil, etc. It's yummy. You can see bags of spice in the background on the right.

In the background on the left are a few other merchants eying me and my camera. I wonder what they thought of me, and what they thought I thought of them.

One Such Raft

You can tell the beach is nearby. Little shops that otherwise would stock little more than drinks and chips miraculously spill forth beach accessories, mostly the kind that are bright and inflatable. A day at the beach isn't the same without a boat and we could not resist.

The boat more or less secured the happiness of a half dozen children for at least as many hours.

It seems we've purchased one such raft each year for about the past five years. It's become part of how we do summer around here.

Start Seeing

The world is a big, complicated, chaotic place where a million things happen, change, or simply exist all at once. You can't possibly notice everything, all the details. That's why sometimes it feels like things that have been there all along begin to exist when you first think to notice them.

That's what has happened for me as I've gone around looking for tiled buildings in Beirut.

Looking for them, as a process, has pulled them from the negative space of my life.  They jump out at me now and demand my consideration, my acknowledgment of them as a genre in the context of all that is Beirut.

It's Not What You Think

Like most buildings that fascinate me, I can only guess at the history of this building.

And chances are, it isn't what I think.

Once Swanky

I must have passed this building a dozen or more times before I really looked at it today.  I feel like I saw it for the first time.  For the first time I noticed that black and white tile and the angle of the decadent entryway.  This is a place with a sense of itself.  You can tell when you look at it, you just simply know that once long ago it was swanky.

It's abandoned now, lonely too maybe. 

New Road

In Beirut the weather is clear, bright, and sunny. There's likely to be little variation on that for the next five months.

I was out in that weather around mid-day, and happened upon this road resurfacing project.

How they ever moved all the rundown, inoperable cars from the road I'll never know.

Got Satellite

They don't have glass in the windows . . . but they do have a satellite dish.

Hmmm. That's an interesting trade-off.

All Along

On the left is a "before" shot taken a few months back. That's what I was used to seeing. But then it changed one day and you can see how it looks now in the photo on the right. I wish I'd taken both from the same angle, but alas. . . .

The sign was gone, and in its place, windows--awesome old shuttered windows. My gut reaction was, "Oh, how cool. They've installed a decorative upper floor in the traditional style and harmonized it with the pervading style of the neighborhood." I was thinking about how great their work was, and how well they had matched the stucco and that the distressed paint looked really accurate.

Yeah. Then I realized that nothing had been installed. Nothing. They'd just taken the sign down. You can see the scaffolding is still in place in the after shot. These aren't restoration windows. They've always been there, and it's funny to think that they were there all along staring blindly at the back of the sign until just the other day.

Grit, Grime

I'm still thinking about tiles--not the classical, traditional, artisanal tiles. No. I'm thinking about these tiles, ornamenting the exteriors of buildings of a certain age around town. Beirut would be a different city without them.

I like the simplicity of this design. Think of how different these tiles would look if they were clean, immaculate. Sometimes, it's hard to imagine something without the ever present layer of grit and grime, but I think it's a useful exercise. In my imagination, I can see the perfectly cleaned up, dust free tiles, and I think they look amazing.