A Message from the Organizers of the Baalbeck International Festival

Dear Internationally Renowned Artist who will be performing at the Baalbeck International Festival: Thank you for accepting the invitation to play at our festival in the historic site of Baalbeck. Now that the date of your performance is coming closer, we would like to inform you of the following:

- Lebanese people are always late, so your performance may start at 7.30 (as scheduled), or at 7.45, or at 8, or at 8.15pm. In any case, we cannot start until all the VIPs have arrived, so please be flexible when waiting in the dressing room to go on stage.

- Once you start, don’t be surprised if your soft rendition of Schubert disappears by the sound of the nearby mosque’s call for prayer. See, we cannot possibly know what time those pesky things start singing and schedule your concert around it, so you’ll just have to live with that.

- The local population will be very happy to receive you, and will demonstrate this intermittently with fireworks and gunshots around the venue throughout the entire duration of your (acoustic) concert. Don’t worry about it, it’s tradition.

- Similarly, a welcome-party will be held across the street, and cars will drive by honking loudly. Don’t worry about that either, we will send the police to ask them to turn down the volume of the music, and they will do so with blasting sirens so you are sure they are doing their job.

- Some of the audience will be there to listen to you play the piano. Most of them are not. They’re the ones with the expensive tickets sitting in the front row, and they will come and go as they please. Don’t think that they are rude for getting up in the middle of the concert – they’re just trying to get their money’s worth in terms of showing off. Similarly, we’ve made the floor-boards of the venue extra squeaky, to assure the full attention of the whole audience when the above-mentioned guests get up and walk out of the temple during your concert to answer their phones.

- If all the noise and disturbances make you feel unappreciated, know that we can’t help it, this is how people are here. The client is the king, so we can’t possibly ask our security people to tell paying guests to turn off their cell phones, or return on time after the break is over. That would just be impolite.

So, we hope you will have a great concert here at the International Festival of Baalbeck, and remember: it’s not about you – it’s about them!

Looking forward to seeing you here,

(signed) The Organizers of the Baalbeck International Festival

Can you tell we had a great night at David Fray’s acoustic piano-recital yesterday, in the Temple of Bacchus at the Baalbeck International Festival?

Simpelweg hilarisch

Ik heb al eens eerder geschreven over de lolligheid van een multiculturele relatie: humor laat zich maar lastig vertalen. Ik herinner me een Iraanse collega in Amsterdam die elke ochtend bulderend van het lachen de nieuwste Iraanse cartoon zat te lezen – cartoons die zelfs met de beste uitleg niet meer dan een glimlach op het gezicht van de rest van het team veroorzaakten. Hier is weer zo iets. Onderstaande video is een clip van een slapstick-achtige TV-show genaamd S.L.Chi (‘meest irritante ding’) die eind jaren ’90 hier in Libanon op de buis was. De meeste van mijn vrienden vinden dit geweldig, en kunnen niet stoppen met lachen als ze dit eenmaal na beginnen te doen. Ik doe heus mijn best in het integratie-proces, maar dit? Ik snap niet wat hier zo grappig aan is... (vertaling onder de video):

- Meneer, meneer! - Ja? - Uw deur staat open! - Wat? - De deur! De deur staat open! - Deur? - Deur! - Mijn deur? - Uw deur staat open! - Oh! (zegt iets tegen zijn mede-passagier/chauffeur) Dankuwel meneer!

Lachen gieren brullen, nietwaar... Wat denk jij?

Lost and found: does anyone know this little guy?

I found him on the street here in Hamra a little while ago. Someone must have loved him dearly – he’s missing a leg and two arms, and possibly his ears as well. If you know the kid who lost this little guy, please direct him or her to me; this little one is waiting to be picked up…

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What goes up...

Sietske has a post up about the way things are celebrated in Lebanon: with fireworks. Beautiful fireworks, and dangerous gunfire: emptying one’s Kalashnikov (or recently: RPG) straight up into the air to celebrate (re-)election of one’s favorite politician is considered quite acceptable behavior by many. It’s one of those habits that’s amusing as long as you don’t think about the consequences, because as Sietske says: what goes up, must come down, and a bullet coming at you vertically is no less lethal than a bullet flying horizontally.

Walid tells me the story of the first time Nabih Berri was elected Speaker of Parliament, in the early years after the civil war. Celebratory gunfire erupted in the neighborhood of his school. They were playing in the recreational area during the break when suddenly a boy fell to the floor, blood all over the place. He was rushed to the hospital and the bully of the class was punished because ‘he must have hit him with something sharp’. As it turned out later, a bullet coming down had entered the boy’s body close to his neck and had ended up close to his heart.

A friend of mine told me a similar story. When the civil war was over, she and her sister went out to celebrate. So did many people – with their weapons. The sister was hit by a ‘celebratory bullet’ in her lower back and brought to the hospital; she’s still in a wheelchair.

The most famous of these tragic stories is from a wedding in the Beqaa: when the newly married couple drove off in a convertible, their friends and family were shooting in the air to celebrate. One of the bullets came down and hit the bride; she died on the spot.

I heard this last story so many times I don’t know if it’s true; but it shocks me that these incidents are not more widely reported. If there is fighting, every killed and wounded is counted; but when it’s to celebrate, we hardly ever hear of all those things that go wrong. We may pretend it’s a fun game to guess the difference between the sound of firecrackers and Kalashnikov, but maybe Maya Zankoul’s rage is more appropriate. Not sure about her solution, though…

A whole other electricity problem

One of the most complicated things in Lebanese daily life is paying the electricity bill. That is, if you want to do everything like a good citizen is supposed to do. First, you have to convince Electricité du Liban of giving you electricity. This can be quite costly if, like in our house, the previous tenant of the apartment has not paid their bills for over a year and has left the country with an outstanding debt of about $300 with EDL. You will be given three options: either you pay her outstanding debt in full and they will resume delivering electricity to your place, or you pay a fixed sum which happens to be around $250 dollars with the same result, or you buy a new energy meter for about $250 which you install in the meter box of your building and leave the debt for the tenant after you.

Once this inevitable payment is made, you go to another counter to tell them how many Amperes you want (5, 10, 20, 50, 100 – they can tell you exactly how much you need if you tell them how many appliances you have. The friendly employee smiled broadly when he announced we could even run ‘another A/C!’ on what we chose). You make the rounds past various other counters and offices, get some stamps, signatures and more stamps, pay some more, and then just like that – you have electricity in your house.

And that’s where the real fun starts. Because then, every month, a guy will come by to pick up your payment. He will come during the day, so usually there won’t be anybody home but the cats, so he leaves a little green note with the fact that he was there, found no one, when he will come again, and how much you owe him. (For us, this is usually around $15, or $25 in really hot and really cold months). There used to be an indecipherable name and number scribbled in the corner of the note, but now he has upgraded to a stamp so that you can actually read it and call him.

Which you will do, because the proposed date to pass by falls in the same category as the first one: a working day between 9 and 6 when no one is home. He then says he will pass by at a time you agree on, but you both forget that that’s when the regular powercut is scheduled, so rather than walking all the stairs to the 8th floor where you are waiting, he decides to skip your house and wait for you to call again.

You call him again to ask why he didn’t show up as promised, and hear that he will pass by in a few hours when the electricity comes back. He will ask you to leave the money (exact change, please) with the janitor of the building. This means you have to be on friendly terms with the janitor, which can be assured by monthly payments equal to your entire electricity bill (you should also do this if you decide not to pay your electricity bill at all, because the janitor is the one with the key to the meter box of the building, and the one to turn your electricity back on after the electricity guy has turned it off due to default. But that's only for those of us who do not aspire to 'perfect citizen' status.).

If you are not on friendly terms with the janitor, there is nothing you can do other than to carry with you the amount due, including the little green note he left a few days before, and walk around in the neighborhood until you see the electricity guy passing by. If that happens (hopefully without a lot of phonecalls as to his exact whereabouts), you hand him the money through his car-window, he gives you back a little white slip of paper, and you will have paid your electricity bill for the month.

Congratulations.