This lovely mountain resort town is perched above the eastern end of
the beautiful Kadisha Gorge and at the foothills of the Cedars of Lebanon.
It is the brith place of Lebanon's most famous author
Khalil Gibran. It has a small museum which pays tribute to him.
Beiteddine palace was built over a period of thirty years by Emir Bechir Chehab II.
It's architecture reflects the typical oriental architecture of the 19th century Ottoman Era.
It is remarkable for its glamorous
arcades, multicolored mosaic floors, reception rooms, harems, hammams
and even by its guest house "Diyafa" where passing guests were lodged
(French poet Lamartine stayed once there).
Detail of the Sarcophagus of Ahiram, king of Byblos, seated
on a cherub throne, before an offering table, 13th century B.C (National Museum of Beirut).
Around 1200 B.C. the scribes of Byblos developed an alphabetic phonetic script, the precursor of our modern
alphabet. By 800 B.C., it had traveled to Greece, changing forever the way man communicated.
Located in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon, Baalbek is an ancient city
that has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Originally
Canaanite (3rd century BC), the Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines,
and Arabs successively occupied Ba'albek and left their imprints on the
place, often modifying what existed previously.
www.kaftoun.com
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Beautiful Dad
Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 1:53pm
I I want to talk about my dad. It is hard for me to talk about him to
"real" people; I hate to feel weak and emotional - it tarnishes my
public image of the strong stoic Randa! So I will talk about him to
y'all as long as it stays in cyberspace!
I have been thinking - probably obsessing - about my dad. Want to look
at his pix everyday; see his face in almost everything.
I go and read and re-read his diaries on Kaftoun.com.
My brother Jihad and I saved ALL his letters - they are actually more of diaries.
He would write everyday then mail to us what he wrote on a regular
basis. So we knew everything to know about Kaftoun and the family - the
weather, what's growing, who is sick, who is visiting, who was born,
who died, everything....
Few months before his death... in his usual chair at the kitchen table.
When it became very hard for him to write, he started being ashamed of
his hand-writing (swear was still better than mine!) but if you know my
dad, you would know that he was a perfectionist...
So, he stopped sending us letters and started writing in his "blue" agenda. Jihad is scanning all and uploading on Kaftoun.com. I still have to upload Dad's letters to me and I - Daddy's little girl - have A LOT.
April 17, 2009
Yesterday, after I wrote the note above, I went to work. I sat beside a guy who did not look quite right and people were staring, and so I thought GREAT a drunk so early in the morning. Then I noticed that he is fidgeting a lot and so I thought he may start getting ugly. Then I noticed that he is twitching - he was on my right side and I tried to read my book and just forget about him. I couldn't; I kept sneaking looks at him from behind my dark shades. I noticed the involuntary movements of his face; his legs were twitching and he would move them a lot; his hands were kind of shaking but more of twitching and he would put them under his knees, hold them together, under his cheek and lean on one side as if trying to sleep..... and it was then that I started to cry.This guy was probably 60 years old, dressed in work clothes with his cute lunch bag and was going to work while suffering from Parkinson's ( okay, granted I am not a physician and I don't have results of his medical tests or anything, but I knew it - he had Parkinson's.)
I wanted to hold his hands like I used to do with Dad until his hands would stop shaking. Of course, I could not presume to do that with this stranger on a bus in a strange city! But I could not stop - kept sneaking looks at him until he left the bus about 30 minutes later and I kept crying until I got to work.