Duty free in Beirut

Back from a long weekend in Beirut. As I am just off one crushing work deadline and leapfrogging right into the fire of the next, it was a welcome relief from work.

I traveled again with a colleague, but this time we had no real plan except eat. Lebanese food is garlicky good, and that’s pretty much all that I ate, save a Dunkin’ Donut on which I splurged. That was quite a find.

Our first find of the trip, though, was in the gate area. Traveling Colleague and I met up in the gate area. She arrived earlier than I did, and when I joined her, the flight just before ours had just shut its doors. There was only one other person in the gate area, and as I walked up, I noticed a bag sitting across from TC.

 

As I sat down, I commented that she’d taken a seat next to a suspicious package, and apparently it hadn’t occurred to her that it could have been something other than trash. She took a look, and it turned out to be a bottle of rum and a bottle of Bailey’s, purchased from the duty-free store.

We figured what the heck and took it, as the owner’s flight had by that time pulled away from the gate. It’s not possible to return the stuff, and what else was going to happen? We were traveling light, so why not?

I don’t drink, but I think TC was happy to have a wind-down drink after all the walking we did. In the end, we gave the booze to the hotel clerk, who, when I told her what was in the bag, happily said, “Oooh! I like Bailey’s.” So we found the stuff a good home.

Beirut was a good choice, I think. And I set a trend. I’d bought my flight a couple months ago and since then I found out at least three others decided to do, plus TC jumped on with me.

We didn’t do anything special – beyond the eating – and walked a ton. We arrived on Friday – a holiday in Istanbul – and wound up walking something like 6k that day. The parts we explored were divided into three sections – east, middle and west – and boy, we hit them all hard.

The civil war ended in 1991, I think it was, and Beirut’s done a phenomenal job of rebuilding, and fast. In some ways, it was a quite a metropolitan city, but in others, you could definitely tell it had a rough past. There were barricades, razor wide and armed guards, but, across the street, there were Tiffany, Ferrari and H&M stores.

I’d read about “the souk” area and figured it would be a bunch of stalls with people hawking their handicrafts, but it was a blocks-long, outdoor high-end mall. The kind with escalators and fountains. It was absolutely beautiful, as was the view from the corniche. Of course, water and boats are always gorgeous.

We tried to find handicrafts, though, and did not really succeed. It wasn’t a colossal failure, but I never figured out what, other than cedar magnets, Lebanon did. I found some rugs, but nothing that I fell in love with, which was good because they were pricey. (Well, that and I’m running out of floor space.)

I came home with a cedar magnet, a couple of rocks, a birthday card for a friend, a little surprise for Riley that was hard to come up with, and – of all things – onion powder. I ran out and I haven’t found any here yet.

Considering I left the book I brought in the room, I think I left with less than I brought.

Oh, I forgot about the bandages. I bought 10, but only came home with two. My Chacos, and I do love them, hurt me so badly the first time I wear them each season. My feet were so bad after the first day. I bought the little bandages, and wore them the next day but it rained.

 

Here’s a lesson: I am stuck on Band-aid brand ‘cause Band-aid’s stuck on me.

Yeah, I know that’s not a lesson but a jingle, but that was going through my head all Saturday because I did NOT buy Band-aid brand. I didn’t think I needed 20 bandages, so I got 10, and the one with 10 was  some cheap Lebanese brand, I guess. In the rain, they didn’t do any good. They were NOT Band-aid brand, and they were definitely, absolutely not stuck on me.

It was a pretty rough. My feel right now look like they have some kind of horrible pox because, two days later, it’s still clear that I have open wounds all over them. They’re pretty symmetrical, though. Little toe, big toe side, big toe front, heel back.

The little piggies that went wee-wee-wee all the way home had it worse. The right one got strangled, as it tends to do – I need to figure out how to adjust the Chacos – but the left one just went numb and bled and bled. Every time I looked down, I had blood streaming. Since it was numb, it didn’t really occur to me that anything was happening, but I’d glance down and horrify myself, especially in a light rain.

Before we went into the rug store, I had to triage myself a bit, not wanting some kind of “you bled on it, you bought it” rule to come into effect. And when we got back to the hotel room on Saturday night – after 19.7k of walking, I stripped off the sandals and went into the bathroom to hose down. It looked like an industrial accident because the sandal straps had soaked with blood.

Sunday, I went with shoes instead. We went for a long, long walk – 6k this time – to the national museum, which was small but nice to see. The best item they had was a sarcophagus called “Drunken cupids.” It was exactly what you’d think – a bunch of cupids drunk, including one holding another’s head as he puked.

Red and blue make cookies

We had a fund raiser this week for the local staff emergency fund, so I made some cookies. There were some random prizes, including one for the “purpleist” entry. I had my eye on that and decided to make sugar cookies and dye them purple.

They're both purple

Well, I didn’t win, but I learned a lot. First is to not give away your game plan. I lost to a friend who did the same thing I did, only with macrons. She dyed them purple and gave them purple Bailey’s frosting. They were good and looked good. Mine were just good.

And it took two tries to place second! This was a busy week and work, and I had to work late every day, which meant I skipped the gym. On Tuesday, I got home maybe half an hour before I would have finished my gym routine and decided I’d take that opportunity to make a batch.

As I have no purple food coloring, I planned on mixing red – of which I have a huge thing – and blue. And here’s what I learned this week: when you want to dye cookies, you shouldn’t do it after you add in the dry ingredients. It was so ugly. The red and blue didn’t mix together at all, and each color didn’t really dissolve, or whatever it is that food coloring does. I mean, it DID color the food, which, technically, is what it’s supposed to do, but it didn’t blend, either the red and blue or the coloring with the dough.

Better looking with icing

As a result, I got a mix that looked a lot like Jimmy Dean sausage before you cook it, which, although fine for JD, is not a good look if you’re going for a cookie that you want to win a beauty contest. I rolled them into balls anyway, foolishly thinking that maybe when the cookies cooked, the colors would blend better. They didn’t, of course. I have no idea what I was thinking on that one. There was no way I was going to take them to work and enter them into a contest.

At that point in the evening, it was getting late and I thought I’d just make the next batch in the morning – I’ve gotten up and made cookies earlier in the week – but realized I still had to ice them, so I decided to give it another shot that same evening. Starting around 9, I started another batch, but this time I put in the food coloring before adding all the dry stuff. And that was success, to a degree.

Only I’m no artist and I figured out that I didn’t know the proportions to make purple. I dumped in some blue and then added red, but once I mixed everything up, it looked kind of like a gray tinted with purple. Telling myself it was lavender, I went with it and made the cookies. When they were finished, they looked even more gray, which is not a good look for a cookie. The line that kept running through my head was from “Steel Magnolias,” where they talk about the groomscake: “It has gray icing. I don’t even wanna know how to make gray icing,” or something like that. Well, I discovered how to make gray cookies: aim for purple.

Ugly but gluten free

During the week, Laurie had been sending me some photos of her latest cake creations, so I took a picture of the lot of cookies and sent her. She is definitely the baking talent in the family. Mine are good, but hers are good and look good. There’s a difference.

The next morning, I made icing – the idea was for two layers of purple – and I swear it looked brown at first, but in the end, it really was purple. I iced both sets and they both looked a lot better. I told Laurie that everything looks better in the morning and with icing on top!

The baking evening hadn’t even been my only treat that week. My boss’ birthday was on Tuesday, and I dispatched the guy who did the commissary run to buy a gluten-free baked good mix, whatever they had. They had Pilsbury Funfetti, which is a white cake with those little edible confetti-looking things. He got two and I made two 13x9 cake pans, thinking I’d ice make a two-layer cake.

The cake part turned out fine, though my 13x9 pans are somehow different sizes. The problem I had was the icing – I did NOT have an entire box of powdered sugar like I thought I had, and I started the cake after my gym routine that night, meaning I’d showered and was wearing PJs. I weighed the options of changing clothes and going to the store that night and decided it wasn’t worth it and would make due.

Well, boy, it was ugly. First, I’d put a thin layer of icing – which I dyed green, because dying batter is fun! – on the bottom layer and then plopped the top layer on it. Well, that’s the point I realized there is more than one size 13x9, although I am not sure how. I wound up hacking a bunch off the bottom layer. It was tasty but I was kicking myself because I’d iced the bottom layer and by this point it was clear I’d be scrimping for the top. I started trying to sponge the trimmed cake section’s icing on the sides of the cake. On top of that (no pun intended), I did not think to shave off the poofy middle part of the cake and therefore had some gaps between layers on some ends.

I coped the best I could with what I had, using butter-flavored Crisco to make the powdered sugar go a little further. Still, it was pretty thin, like some guy doing a comb-over. I decided to distract from the baldness by using red sugar sprinkles all over the thing. Good thing I have lots of red food coloring.

The end result was by no means Laurie’s Ghostbusters cake, but it served its purpose well, as my boss, while not completely surprised to have a birthday cake, was totally stunned that it was gluten-free.

I keep forgetting

It’s been awhile. At one point, I was a prompt, post-every-Saturday person, but that kind of went as by the wayside as my Peace Corps English teaching. You plan and plan, but on the way, something pops up that changes everything.

I’m as swamped as I can be at work. During the summer, we are transitioning to three new computer applications and guess who gets to be point person? And of course there’s the Fourth party, for which I am co-coordinator. It’s being done totally differently this year.

My mantra is to make it to July 15. By then, several obstacles will be history and I should know where I’m going next. Plus, at that point, I’ll have been here over a year, whereas now I’m just under a year. I just need to get to that point and mentally I feel like I’ll  be like in a better mental place.

Right now, I’m just stressed. All these computer applications we’re moving to are not working right and they’re slow. It’s incredibly frustrating.

Last week, I went to a class for one of the replacement applications and hoo boy, it’s not ready for the real world just yet, but it’s coming anyway. But not soon enough. I asked for the training because we were told we had to use it as of March 31, in time to send our Fourth invites and felt lucky to have gotten it. No sooner had I bought the flight ticket than my office decided to stick with the old application through those invites. Which would have been good for me, except I don’t know that one, either.

My last two weeks has been this: fumble around with the old application in order to get my department’s invites ready, then take three days to exclusively study the new, then come back and fumble with the old again. Hopefully, when it comes time to use the new, I won’t have forgotten how to use it.

One thing I keep forgetting is that I have a car now. I bought someone’s 20-year-old Volvo. It’s so weird to think about it that I still refer to it as Jeff’s car. I got it on the threat of being told I couldn’t walk to work anymore; it was pretty cheap. It took awhile for it to clear inspections and really it’s only been in my parking spot for 3-4 weeks.

Two weeks in, I finally decided to take it to work. Honestly, I prefer to walk, so if I can, I’ll do that. But it’s nice to switch up the routine here and there, especially when I have stuff to lug in or back. I drove it last Monday, or maybe it was the Monday before. I think it might have been the Monday before, because I intended to bring it back the following Friday but couldn’t get it out of the work driveway because there was work being done. Anyway, today, a holiday, I finally decided to make a round trip with it and took it to the gas station. I was running on fumes. It cost about $75 to fill the thing up. I’m definitely not going to drive it all around!

Been running around again, though. I did another 10k yesterday, and oh man, I thought they’d get easier, not harder. It was sunny and hot – I felt awful. The upside, though, beside finishing, was that I was allowed to participate in the first place. We’re still on movement restrictions and the path was alone the riverfront and through the old town. But I asked permission and got the OK, so that was cool. And I did finish, no matter how hard it was. And man, my hips hurt so bad at the end.

The next one I have planned is in August, but I’ve been strong-armed into signing up for a 14k this fall. I already bought the plane ticket and I’m already regretting it. I am NOT ready for it. I’m only doing 7-10k a day these days and I don’t intend on adding more. I have no idea how I am going to do 14k. A lot of walking, I would guess. I don’t know my time but I think it was around 1:10, the same as the second one I did. (I’d done three before but didn’t pick up the little toe tag for No. 3.)

This weekend was a long weekend and I did a day trip to Iznik with a little van full of colleagues. Iznik’s a tile city about three hours away and there were some cool ruins. I’m not a big tile person but it’s nice to look.

Guangzhou wasn’t exactly a place where you wanted to buy a bunch of cool stuff, but Turkey is totally different. Leather, lamps, tiles, towels and rugs are just a few of the awesome stuff you can find here. It’s an utterly fantastic tourist place, and it’s hard to lay off when you find something new.

Rugs really are a weak spot for me, and not just Turkish. I’ve picked up three here already, though, and have my eye on a fourth. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I’ve taken two trips so far and picked up rugs on those, too. One was the Pakistani rug that I got in Sarajevo and last weekend I found a little runner – maybe six feet long – from Belgrade.

I really need to stop. Either that or start looking at 2000-square-foot houses with hardwood or tile floors.