After lunch at Tawlet, we explored the neighborhood of Mar Mikhael. It was hot in Beirut that weekend, so by late afternoon, we were toast and retired to the relative coolness of our hotel room for a nap before happy hour cocktails at Dragonfly, then dinner at Liza.
The next morning, after a delicious breakfast at our hotel, we wandered around the neighborhood on our way to the Sursock Museum.
One of my favorite moments of the trip was our slow walk through a quiet neighborhood in Achrafieh. It was Friday and the streets were full of children on their way to or from school. In Jesuits Garden park, stray cats intertwined through the brush as elderly men and women did laps with their walkers. A jacaranda tree dropped violet petals on an antique Mercedes. It was a moment of being transported in the truest sense to another time and place as though inhabiting the body of another Hanna from decades before.
The wealthy Beirut aristocrat Nicolas Ibrahim Sursock built the private villa that now houses the museum in 1912. When he died in 1952, he bequeathed the villa to the city of Beirut, and it is now home to a contemporary art museum.
After the museum, we grabbed a late lunch of falafel tacos at Taco de Madre on Pharoun Street where we also visited the very cute shop Pink Henna.
We again retreated from the heat to our hotel room. Around dusk, we decided to take a cab to the other side of town to grab some coffee and take in the Raouche Rocks.
Our only miss of the whole trip was dinner that night. I had previously had good luck with Tripadvisor recommendations, but this time the website let me down. After grabbing drinks at a bar in Mar Mikhael where we were surrounded by the occasionally disorienting melange of trilingual Beirutis. Many Lebanese are trilingial, speaking Arabic, French, and English with equal passion and fluent proficiency. Elise and I found ourselves mesmerized by the hybrid language created when the three were combined; just when you found yourself following the thread of someone speaking next to you, they would switch languages in mid-sentence and your metal train would go careening off the rails.
Anyway, back to dinner. Knowing we were in the "Paris of the Middle East", I thought it only appropriate to take in some quality French fare, so I consulted Tripadvisor who suggested the Couqley French Bistro in Gemmayze. Fortunately, neither Elise and I were that hungry following our late lunch and decided to split a burger. Now, don't get me wrong it was a very, very good burger, but the ambiance left a little to be desired and kind of reminded me of the French version of a Howard Johnsons.
Our time in Beirut was running short, and we were scheduled to head back to the kids on a 1:00 p.m. flight which meant we had to be at the airport by 11:00. We got an early start the next day, however, because we really wanted to take in the farmer's market downtown which I think took Elise's breath away based solely on the number of photographs she took there.
The parting shot from a local jewelry store.
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