Two Legs In Lebanon

I have been to Lebanon twice now, and the experiences were as different as if they’d been two distinct countries. The first trip, backpacking alone, was consumed with the history of a country through which so many ancient and modern armies had tread, built and destroyed. The second trip, to a wedding in the mountains, and surrounded at all times by a group of people, was locked invariably in the life of Lebanon as it is now, detached entirely from the past. This seems common of any place though, history does its best haunting in solitude and silence.

A week ago I landed in Beirut with the bride and groom, an American guy and his Lebanese betrothed. We met the best man in the airport and piled into a tiny rental car, our bags between and on top of us as the bride-to-be pumped the manual transmission in high heels through Beirut and up the slick and narrow mountain roads to her village, Kfardebien (and that’s precisely how it’s spelled). The mountain roads around Lebanon seem to defy physics, climbing straight up at insidious angles which may or may not flatten out briefly for a hairpin turn before continuing the next ascent. Our driver, speeding up those slopes, passing trucks around the corners and doing it all in heels was my first indication that the mountain people should probably not be fucked with under any circumstances.

After 40 minutes the car shed the best man and I at a hostel before continuing on to the bride’s house. We were left in the company of some other wedding guests who had arrived before us, in a place that was about 25 degrees colder than I had expected. The weather reports on Beirut, a few thousand feet down, said it woul stay at about 75 degrees for the duration of the trip, and I had packed accordingly. Our bedroom may have actually, impossibly, been even colder than the air outside. So there wasn’t much left to do but sit on the terrace and crack into the bottle of Jack I bought at the airport.

I slept in every stitch of clothing I brought with me, and woke up sometime in the late morning. I wandered about half a mile down the street and found a friendly, portly fellow named Pierre cooking little Lebanese breakfast foods in a restaurant. Pierre’s place and the Shisha (hookah) bar a block up the mountain from the hostel would mark the extent that I would travel for the next two days. The groom was busy driving around the country procuring blood tests and paperwork of some kind so that the mountain priests would relinquish one of their daughters into the custody of an American (who was Christian, just not particularly the right kind). We would see him for stretches of about 15 minutes at a time which consisted mostly of grunts and audible sighs before he got a phone call and left to go somewhere else.

In the meantime the best man, a wizened Canadian wedding guest, and I drank Almaza, the wonderfully refreshing national beer of Lebanon. We drank on the balcony of the hostel when we woke up, and then moved to the Shisha bar and drank more, and then moved back to the hostel to finish off the nights with a few swigs of Jack before crashing again. Then, there was gambling.

We had each brought a black suit and black tie (excluding the Canadian, sporting a white linen suit) which was supposed to be complimented with huge black sunglasses and a black fedora so that we could roll into the Casino du Liban in the style of the groom’s favorite movie protagonists, The Blues Brothers. Apparently the Fedoras were harder to come by than expected so we just ended up looking like the mentally handicapped bodyguards of an eccentric drug dealer.

In our mind’s eye the Casino du Liban had that fatalistic Mediterranean charm of an old James Bond set, full of mystery and intrigue. There would be models in evening gowns blowing on the dice of the princes of Gulf Kingdoms and Montecarlo playboys looking to go native in Arab lands. The first indication that we were horribly wrong was that our tiny rental didn’t look remotely out of place in the parking lot, next to so many old, beat up jalopies. The dress code had considerably slackened since the casino’s hay day and the flock of gamblers lined up at its tables had all the charm of a sleazy Atlantic City casino…on a Wednesday. The casino’s few female inhabitants were dressed in sweaters, and many a Lebanese grandmother sat with cigarette dangling from her mouth, pumping coins into the slot machines. As the best man remarked, “I think we crashed this party about 40 years too late.”

But we made the best of it. This was the bachelor party after all. We wandered around the tables for a bit and since between the four of us we had two former addicts, the alcoholic drank water while playing blackjack and the gambling addict sat at the bar drinking whiskey while watching the poker games. After a few hours I was down, the groom was up, and the bride whisked in and led us back to the mountains.

The next night we were treated to a pre-wedding reception of some kind at the bride’s house. All the westerners attended as did the extended mountain family of the bride. We were swarmed with all kinds of food, Lebanese moonshine (called Arak) from the bride’s father’s basement still, and a barrage of Lebanese music. It was an incredibly fun party which ended promptly at midnight, and the only fault I can find with it is that there is a Lebanese tradition of stealing something from the bride’s house the night before the wedding…which nobody told me about until the next day, because there was an unguarded bike upstairs and I could have hauled off an ungodly amount of booty.

The next day we went further up the mountain to take some pictures while we were all dolled up. The bride was in a gigantic, hooped white dress and we were in our Blues Brothers suits. We posed together in various spots on a beautiful apple orchard dotted with Roman ruins in the distance that belonged to a family relation whose name nobody can remember because he looked so much like George Bush, which is exactly what we called him. Then the three of us in black went down to the church and shivered in front of it for an hour waiting for the bride. We did get to ring the big bells though.

Then began one of the most bizarre wedding tableaus I’d ever seen (not that I’ve been to that many) because the wedding and the

procession, from beginning to end was controlled entirely by the photographers. The bride arrived in her rented beamer and sat in the car for a few minutes while the video crew arranged us in the phalanx he thought best along a red carpet rolled down the stairs of the church. We waited for a while as the guys with video cameras got into place and the photographer was where he wanted to be and then went from the cold outside of the church to the cold inside of the church. My first surprise was seeing that the photographers had erected lighting right up against the altar, and they spent the entire service wandering around the altar taking pictures, even at one point tapping the priests on the shoulders to get them out of the way for better views.

As I am always terribly uncomfortable in churches the ceremony was thankfully short, and I escaped without blasphemy for a day. At one point the groom reached over to give something to the best man. What I thought was the ring turned out to be the key to the rental car, as they would be going to the reception in the fancy beamer.

The reception was somewhere between very cold and really cold slightly downhill from the church, I don’t know what the exact elevation was. The best man and I sat at a table with all the other foreigners, a couple of Canadians, a Swede, a Brit and his Thai wife, and two Scots. This group was mainly made up of Hash runners from Jeddah, and the Scots actually flew in just for the night of the wedding and flew out again. A bottle of mountain moonshine and a bottle of whiskey sat on every table, but the best man and I were not feeling so hot to start the liquor going. Some Lebanese mezze (little plates of food much like Spanish tapas) started going around the tables but the bride and groom where nowhere to be seen. They sat in the beamer in the parking lot for about an hour and none of us had any idea why.

Then pretty much without warning somebody appeared with little red hats (I still think they’re called a Fez) and all the foreign men were ushered out of the restaurant and asked to put them on and wait. The bride and groom came to join us, along with a cadre of Lebanese dancers, dressed in some kind of ritualistic uniforms, bearing drums and spears, in that order. The bride may have had some inkling of what was going on, but I think she was too cold to think about it. The leader of the white silk brigade simply said, “follow me,” and it was on. They pranced up the stairs and we followed behind them, and then there was overload.

The eight of us were gathered into a circle holding hands and badly dancing the dubke (a traditional Lebanese circular celebration dance…thing) the lights were coming from all angles, the music was roaring out of speakers three feet above our heads, and around our circle the white silken gentlemen were also dancing around and banging drums. Fountains of sparkling fireworks also sprang from the ground all around us making the room outside the circle invisible. None of us had any idea how it had happened or how long it would last. It was like the lost book of revelations written by Richard Simmons was coming to life all around us.

But after a few confusing minutes we were allowed to escape the circle and the dancers put on a fairly acrobatic show and were joined by some white silken lady dancers. It was a much more impressive spectacle from the outside looking in.

Then the Lebanese wedding guests sprang to the speakers like glamorous party moths to a strobe light. Before too long everybody stopped to eat, and we expats quickly fled back to the relative safety of our white people table. The spear and drum dancers cantered back off to their secret mountain lair and the dust settled over the restaurant. The bride and groom sat at their own table with about 40 pounds of food spread before them and we foreigners returned to our natural element, awkward small talk.

The bride’s brother started the festivities back up by singing a few Lebanese songs, and to his credit the guy had a great set of pipes, and after that the Lebanese broke free. Beirut is known as one of, if not THE party capital of the Middle East, and apparently their weddings aren’t much different from their clubs. I’ve always had a certain dread of weddings, the cheesiness, the awkwardness, and it seems like a place where there’s a very fine line between being a little tipsy and embarrassingly drunk in front of everyone you know. This wedding though was by far the most fun and exciting wedding I’ve ever been a part of.

The cousins and sisters and brothers were all out there shaking it, and then the aunts and uncles were all out there. It should be no surprise that I was the worst dancer among them, but they could all actually dance. This frenzy of dancing in which the middle age folk were keeping up, even surpassing the twenty-somethings lasted for a couple of hours I think. At one point there were people being lifted onto shoulders, including me for a bit, and then, like all parts of this story so far, something expected came out of nowhere, a fucking sword.

It was sitting in front of the cake when we walked in and then all of a sudden the groom had unsheathed it as he was draped in some kind of brown robe and the bride held the sheath. He was laughing and posing with it for a little while before the bride’s father grabbed the sheath and showing a degree of athleticism a 70 year old man shouldn’t even be capable of had a dancing sword fight with the groom, whose face quickly went from happy-go-lucky to “this shit just got real.”

Then there was some more frenzied dancing, followed by the “first dance” of the bride and groom, first surrounded by more fireworks, and then by a dry-ice machine that quickly turned the marble floor into a death trap. The groom then cut the cake, with what else but a sword, and then the obligatory tossing of the bouquet/garter followed that. Then there was some more dancing. The last surprise and maybe the biggest was how quickly the reception ended. I thought by the way the night had progressed that it would probably just continue going into the wee hours of the morning until people were collapsing and passing out all over the restaurant, but as furious as the party was, after the bride and groom left it simply stopped like someone had unplugged it, and everyone went home at an entirely reasonable hour.

The departure of the bride and groom would mark the last time I would see them until I got back to Saudi Arabia, they were whisked away the next day to Italy for their honeymoon. Though this raucous and entertaining Lebanese wedding was the first I’d been invited to, it wasn’t the first one I’d seen. That happened the year before sometime in September, on an entirely different mountain.