Category Archives: Life

Wedding Madness

I am not a person who likes weddings. They’re usually crowded, involve lots of social etiquette (which is not something I’m usually good at) and, now that I’m over 20, they serve the double purpose of entertaining some invitees and letting them bombard you with the “good luck” wishes of you tying the knot soon, to which you always smile and say: “thank you”, knowing deep down that it will be a while before I do so.

And fittingly, I have a summer of weddings coming up, the most important of which is that of my aunt, taking place in June. Call it the calm before the storm, but these might be the last couple of weeks of “calmness” I will get. Come end of May, my family members will start trickling from different parts of the globe, some of whom I haven’t seen in over seventeen years.

Add to that the fact that my aunt is turning quite OCD about all the preparations, and you’re in for some “fun” times. Let me put it this way: her theme is that of gemstones and sweets. She asked me to come up with sentences that encompass that theme for the forty tables at her reception and trust me, it gets quite hard including the words “love” and “sweet” with a gemstone such as idocrase (I don’t know what that is as well, if it’s any consolation).

However, I am actually excited about all of this. It’ll be the first time ever that my whole family is brought together. The part I’m the most excited about? the family portrait my grandparents will take with all their children on my aunt’s wedding day.

I’m also preparing something for my aunt as my way of a gift. After all, I don’t work (and it will be some time before I do that) and I know my presence is the best gift (humble, I know) but I think something tangible would be nice as well. So I’m thinking of doing a heartfelt slideshow for the wedding involving this song:

I’m thinking of having pictures of my aunt with my grandparents at different stages of her growing up play with the first verse and the same concept for her fiance during the chorus. Then for the second verse, I would include pictures of the both of them on their wedding day. Any suggestions?

And a couple of weeks after my aunt’s wedding is my best friend’s wedding. However, unlike Julia Roberts, I don’t want to ruin it for her. She was just telling me about the massive preparations she’s going through and it’s mentally draining. I guess being a guy, this is all too much for me to comprehend. The idea of a wedding to me is: you and her, get together with parents and people you want to be there, go to church and say “I do”. My best friend then cuts my monologue saying: “but I’m a girl… I love this. My day should be the best day there is”

And I think that’s why weddings become a jumble of madness. Because those getting married (especially the women) want to make it the best wedding there is that they simply forget about the most essential thing: to have a good time on the wedding day and hope for a long and healthy marriage – not just one day where you impress those you invite, most of which will find ways to criticize, regardless of how spectacular your wedding is.

I think I will in my aunt and best friend’s wedding.

Crepaway Taking Steps Backwards

I was overly happy when the Batroun branch of Crepaway made a separate non-smoking area for those of us who don’t like to inhale with their burgers.
However, as I visited the place with friends, I found the area filled with people who were smoking. I asked about it and was told that they had removed the non-smoking area for the day. The explanation? they didn’t want the smokers to be placed on a waiting list for the smoking areas.

Excuse me Crepaway if I wanted to dine without the smell of cigarettes and without that awful stench getting stuck on my clothes and lungs. I mean, the emphysema I am most certainly going to acquire in this country cannot really be compared to the ten minutes of wait that a smoker has to endure, right?

In Lebanon, non smokers are figuratively run over by their overly dominant opposites in society. After all, clean air is something you’re not entitled to in a country where finding hookahs in American style diners is very common and even normal and where non-smokers have become a distant minority, squashed in almost rodent-like manner.

And let’s talk about the pricing! Back in December, the natural counterpart for Crepaway in Lebanon, Roadster diner, boosted its prices by a considerable amount, causing my friends and I to lessen our visits to a place that was eating away more and more an already tight budget. In the meantime, Crepaway boosted its prices in a lighter manner and they remained quite acceptable for what was offered.

However, I was surprised during my visit to Crepaway that they had increased their prices yet again. The famous Spielmozzarella is now priced at about 17,000LBP, about $11.33 and a Chicken Escalope platter is almost 20,000LBP (about $13.33), with smaller portions of French fries and coleslaw.

I understand fuel prices are on the rise in the country but I am positive chicken is not getting more expensive and nor is meat and, well, I am not going to a restaurant to dine on 95 Octane fuel while sniffing on the “exquisite” scent of a Marlboro.

AUB Purposefully Losing Its Identity

Whenever you recite the following Bible verse: “that they may have life and have it abundantly” in Lebanon, the first thing that comes to a person’s mind is the country’s most prestigious educational facility: the American University Of Beirut.

The moment you walk into AUB’s campus, you are striken by how different it is from the city in which it is found. It’s a piece of land inside Beirut where buildings are, unlike their Beiruti counterparts, being preserved, where trees grow freely (and where cats roam without being disturbed). College Hall, the building that first welcomes you when you enter through AUB’s Main Gate was totally destroyed in a bombing that targeted it in the 1990s. However, the university rebuilt it exactly as it was. AUB was an example of cherishing legacy in a country that is running away from its past as fast as it could do so.

Next to College Hall is a building that looks like a chapel. It has the Protestant architecture of a chapel. It even has an Organ inside. And to make its original purpose even less inconspicuous, it has a Cross on its roof. However, what used to be a church was transformed into what is today AUB’s Assembly Hall – a place where students gather for commencement, concerts, etc…

The change that “Assembly Hall” faced was considered as the ultimate change in the face of AUB, previously known as the Syrian Protestant College, which was founded in 1866 by American missionaries Daniel Bliss and Henry Jesup.

AUB today is a secular campus in a country that is striving to attain a secular situation. It is a place where people from all sects and religions can attend and expect to obtain the best level of education that Lebanon has to offer – and that is a great amount. However, no one expected the decision taken by the AUB administration to change the university’s most famous slogan into one that does not have any religious affiliation.

Yes, the verse “that they may have life and have it more abundantly” will apparently be changed into some other phrase, as part of the university’s new marketing campaign – to “better the university image”.

The questions beg themselves. Does the AUB administration think the current reputation AUB has cannot withstand the fact that its founders chose a very poignant Bible verse to anoint the university with? Do they really think AUB benefits from anything that takes away of its 150 years of history, let alone a meaningless campaign to attract more students, one that will be forgotten in a few months? And do they really think that the current AUB image is improved by changing the verse that is written on its Main Gate as a way to tell all the ultimate purpose of attending the university?

AUB is slowly eating away at what makes it a special beacon in Lebanon and the Middle East. AUB used to be a revolutionary facility where scholastic evolution merged with a sense of historical belonging. It looks like the strings of this sense of belonging are being slowly chipped away by the lure of more dollars flowing in to an already overflown treasury.

You’d think what has already taken place at AUB regarding the separation of religion from the university is enough. The steps taking place today can be described as a form of administrative theophobia.

The improvement of AUB’s image does not start by removing the phrase that would make any AUB student proud to hear. It starts by improving the university programs to a point where they can compete better with universities abroad. It starts with giving us better labs, where we can stretch our wings a little outside the tiny boxes in which we are bound by professors whose knowledge in their courses has been hampered by their sense of megalomania and it starts by getting down from the high-horse this administration has fabricated around itself and realizing that, if AUB continues on the path it’s on, the only way to go is down.

Royal Wedding Becomes 6th Biggest Event in Internet History

It looks like a record number of people have watched the live broadcast of the Royal Wedding online. Akami, the distributor of this service, has said that more than 1.6 million people tuned in to live stream the event – that’s a little more than last year’s World Cup, which peaked at 1.6 million hits also, albeit a little less than the Royal Wedding.

Global internet traffic for news regarding the event peaked at about 5.3 million pages per minute.

Things related to the event have been trending on twitter all day (even the phrase THEY KISSED is trending) – as has “William & Kate” for the past week and Facebook home feeds were inundated with statuses and comments about the event.

All of this merged together make for the 6th biggest event in internet history.

And if the sheer magnitude of this wasn’t overwhelming to comprehend (I mean, people seem to have too much free time, no?) the biggest event in internet history is nothing other than a World Cup Football game that took place in June 2010 simultaneously with the longest match in Wimbledon history, which peaked at more than 10 million pages per minute.

And yes, I have not watched a single thing related to this! Either way, let’s wish the newlyweds a life full of love and other necessary good wishes and let’s just move on.