trips

trip 1: saida castle + funny fair
fridays are scheduled to be trip days this summer at beit atfal sammoud (house of the children of the resistance). that's our school. today was the first- we had no idea what to expect, with morning & afternoon classes converging for one big trip. 102 children and a handful of confused teacher volunteers shepherding them through the day. somehow, it wasn't as bad as we'd feared. we herded our rowdy packs of kids out of the camp, the kids shouting, running ahead, running home (?!), running back, weaving in and out of traffic on the way to the buses. just like brooklyn :) once on the bus, my kids took a seat and got a standing lecture from one of the lebanese assistants from the school. turns out she was saying, "come on everybody! get up and dance!" the bus took off, the driver blasted the arab pop, and the kids had a nice hour long dance party, clapping and wiggling in the aisles all the way to saida. the driver made sure to keep me entertained by grabbing my hand on the highway and shouting "yella! yella!" saida castle is an ancient roman ruin, seaside. teacher salma's student lost a shoe by kicking it into the sea. rania (queen of the teenagers) improvised a nice tour for me, ending at the lebanese flag on top. one of our kids grabbed the flag, wrenched it out of its stand, waved it around, and then got a lecture from some iranian tourists... who wanted to borrow it for their own photo shoot.

next stop: funny fair [sorry-- that's funny WORLD]. "fun fair" is actually a vocab word in UN english classes, it seems. the real deal was called "funny fair" and was just down the road from saida castle. an eclectic collection of ancient carnival rides staffed by 5 guys running from ride to ride, depending on popularity and mood. best ride: the ferris wheel, just for the amazing breezes & views of saida's banana farms & mosque-spotted mediterranean coastline. worst: the roller coaster, a rusty tin can for one that accelerated at every sharp and treacherous corner. the ride attendants sat and smoked and let the rides run until they remembered what they were doing (4 times around the roller coaster?). poor amira was the only casualty, getting knocked unconscious on her first spin around the spinny ride. (she danced the whole way back)

trip 2: 4 hours of laundry upstairs
gabriela (quintalingual- wait no, she corrected me-- it's PENTAlingual- junior at columbia), alyssa (ed coordinator extraordinaire) and i trooped to the top of our apartment building to test out our laundry system. we'd been told that our landlord would let us use his laundry machine. not only did ahmad's family invite us in and immediately encourage us to separate our whites and darks on the kitchen floor, but they sat us down in their living room and entertained us for the full 2 cycles of laundry and then some. we met ahmad's 3 brothers, their 2 children, 1 wife, and parents. we shared coffee, nargila, arabic and english vocabulary words, nationalities, and finally the most beautiful meal. watermelon, haloumi, yogurt, olives, bread. gorgeous naughty 2 year old lana demonstrated proper nargila technique while ahmad and his brothers shared an intense political re-enactment film. dear gabriela filled everyone in the room in on what everyone else was saying. we closed the night with dates for a wedding, the river, and 3 kisses on everyone's cheeks.

photos: my boys on their way from shatila to sabra to saida; beit atfal rolls up to funny world