Weekends, Here and There

Some of you have heard me explain that Mapquest is irrelevant in Beirut, Amman, and Cairo. Further proof. When I was in Beirut I once asked for directions to a church I had heard about. “Oh,” he said, “just tell the taxi drier “al balad” and he will take you there. It’s a white church with a steeple.” He seemed generally unconcerned with these directions, so I figured that the church would be obvious upon my arrival at al balad.

Well. Al Balad means, sort of, “Downtown.” The driver dropped me off downtown. Downtown is huge. I must have looked confused, or lost, because the driver reassured me that this was, in fact, al balad, and this was, in fact, where I had said I wanted to go. So I got out. I never found the white church (and when I did find a church to go to, which happened to be white, it was nowhere near al balad.) Downtown Beirut on Sunday morning is, um, quiet, and the few people I asked had no idea of any church, anywhere, so I ended up following a French woman to her church, a very nice, if somewhat bewildering for an American Protestant, French Catholic service.
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There’s this club downtown called the 9:30 club and Martin and I went there last Friday (because the Washington Post recommended it.) Despite its name, the concerts do not start at 9:30, or even around 9:30, but the doors are open by then, at least. It was well on its way to being 11 and I had finished my Dos Equis by the time Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra sauntered onto the stage. And what an orchestra they were: we left at 2:30 after two long, practically uninterrupted sets of, well, Afrobeat. The standing-room-only crowd seemed only slightly enthused by the vehement political statements intermittently made by the long-legged trumpet player: they were there for the rhythm, disco ball, black walls, beer, and opportunity to dance however you want. At Meg’s high recommendation, I plan to return for Aqualung on May 9.

In other, more cultured, news, I saw original Toulouse-Lautrecs! At the National Gallery! I am a huge fan. One of my disappointments (albeit minor) in Paris was the small number of original Lautrecs in the Musee D’Orsay. But now I have seen them, and they are wonderful and huge and colorful and I wanted to look at them all day. It might go back: it’s free, after all.