Our Sunday was full of adventure. The bus left at 8 in the morning so that we could drive through the Lebanon Mountains to Baalbek, precariously close to the Syrian border. Making our way up the mountains, we passed by Khalil Gibran’s home/museum. For those of you who are not familiar with the great Lebanese writer/artist, might I suggest that you introduce yourself to him through his quick and easy read, The Prophet? The National Council required that we read a few articles and at least one book related to Lebanon. Honestly, I only read The Prophet because it was the only book that I could get from the library, but it turned out to be a suitable choice for me; written in 1923, this philosophical-style book seemed to parallel another intellectual book that I very much enjoy reading—the Tao te Ching of the ancient Chinese religion Taoism. If you have a summer afternoon free, I highly suggest you sit back and soak up the ideas from Khalil Gibran’s most famous book.
After an hour in the museum, we continued through the mountains until reaching the park which held quite a few of Lebanon’s landmark cedar trees. Everyone bought a few souvenirs from the stalls right outside the park but in order to make it to lunch on time, it wasn’t long before we entered the park itself and trekked our way up and down the paths that were lined by some of the biggest and most beautiful trees I have ever seen.
We hiked up to a pretty sweet restaurant (reminded me of a Buschenschank from when I lived in Austria, except at this restaurant they actually serve hot food! :-D) and our tour guide Melkar ordered us all the standard sandwich with meat and fries…as in the fries are stuffed in the tortilla wrap…when I get back to the U.S. I’m going to be that person who dumps a bunch of fries on her burger and eats it that way—truly I will miss these sandwiches, just as I miss my beloved Moroccan tea. 
We ate lunch in the bus, but pretty soon we drove past the ski schools (yes, ski schools!) and we got to the top of the Lebanon Mountains, when I begged Josh, the Deputy Escort (and Grand Valley alumnus ;-) Go Lakers!) to let us out for a quick snowball fight. Claiming I was going to be the trouble-maker in the group (ha, hardly), he reluctantly obliged but he didn’t have to tell me twice! It was fun playing in the snow in June and, I wasn’t going to go there, but because Hampton did, I had to get the boy back by proceeding to drop snow down his shirt, which ended up better than I planned because it ended up going down his pants as well.
It took another hour or two until we got to Baalbek, where the famous Baalbek ruins are located. We stopped at a small tourist shop first, where the owner put a turban on my head and I learned that it is different than how I learned to tie a turban in Morocco. They actually use scarves in the shape of a triangle here in the Mediterranean, not long rectangular ones like the Berbers of Morocco use. Everyone was kind of surprised to find that the store also sold Hezbollah t-shirts and coffee mugs, but if you think about it, we were sort of in Hezbollah territory…
The really sweet thing about the Baalbek ruins, besides the fact that there is still so much of the ancient city of Heliopolis left, is that there were at least four civilizations built on top one of another here at this sight. It started as the Phoenician city Baalbek (“Lord (Baal) of the Beqaa Valley”) way back 9,000 years ago. Then Alexander the Great came along and conquered the place in 334 BC, had the place renamed Helipolis, and had the place expanded to the enormous cultural sight that it is today.
The symmetric, intricate, and elaborate construction done by the Romans to please their gods is mind-blowing, as is the fact that there is still so much of it preserved today. I thought the remains of Volibilius in Morocco was impressive, and what’s left of Italy’s Pompeii. But that was before coming here. After the Muslim army conquered Baalbek in 637 CE, the city switched hands quite a few times, but it was constantly altered by the different civilizations—a roof was added to the center temple, as were windows to make up for the lost lighting; a mosque was fit in between two other temples—and eventually it passed into the hands of the Ottoman empire in the early 1500s.
On the way back through the Lebanon Mountains, we stopped at Zahle, the largest Maronite Christian community in the east part of the country. The town was absolutely adorable and I wish we could have spent an hour or two there but we only stopped to grab some of Zahle’s famous ice cream (I got cherry vanilla, with chocolate of course). It was delicious, and in a funny squish-shaped cone even, but it didn’t beat the bittersweet dark chocolate scoop I had on my birthday after the concert…still, I’m up for spending the rest of my days here to see if any ice cream will top that first one ;-)
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