Free Avoiding Prison & Other Noble Vacation Goals by Wendy Dale Page B

headliners such as Alexander the Great and King Nebuchadnezzar. Just feet away from the blue waters of the Mediterranean, Peter and I strolled between the colonnades that had once formed part of an impressive city.
    But this was just foreplay. The real deal was another two hours away, the ancient Roman city of Baalbeck. So far I’d been having a good time, but when you got right down to it, ruins were just one rundown building after another. Not Baalbeck. As Peter and I got out of the car, I could see the tremendous structures in the distance, the largest Roman temples ever constructed.
    The temple of Jupiter was the most gigantic of all. I got vertigo looking up at its seventy-foot-high columns, imagining what this city must have been like in its day. All around us was what I decided to call “temple dandruff,” huge chunks of rubble that had broken off and fallen to the ground. These colossal blocks of beautifully carved stone contained the ornate moldings of leaves and lion heads. Peter and I couldn’t resist climbing over them in spite of their size. Like energetic preschoolers, we pulled ourselves up using both hands and ascended the slanted rock hunched over so that we could quickly grab hold of the stone in the event of losing our balance.
    There were three other structures to see so we headed over to the temple of Bacchus, which was the most impressive, simply because it had been so well preserved. It was like pictures I had seen of the Parthenon—a rectangular structure surrounded by columns—and its size was staggering.
    â€œThree hundred years they spent building this place,” Peter informed me, walking up the temple steps. “And they never finished.”
    â€œTalk about a bad case of procrastination.”
    â€œTell me about it. You know, there are ruins in Beirut too.”
    â€œI know. Hadi and I go to cafés in them.”
    â€œNot the ruins of the war. Ancient ruins.”
    â€œOh.”
    â€œThey’ve been trying to rebuild downtown Beirut, but half the time, when they begin excavating, they unearth another set of Roman ruins. For them, it’s a real pain. They give the archeologists a couple of months to scavenge what they can and then they bulldoze it all.”
    â€œDamn Roman ruins. What an inconvenience.”
    Late that afternoon, both of us famished from a long day of walking, we stopped at a restaurant along the highway for
mezze,
which could be roughly translated as “lunch, a whole lot of it.” It always began with a series of appetizers (hummus, tabbouleh, baba ghanoush, plain yogurt, and flat Arabic bread), moved onto main dishes (lamb, chicken, or beef), and ended with fruit and sweets. Food was fun enough, but my favorite part of the meal was the traditional drink
arrack,
a licorice-flavored liquor that turned milky white when served over ice cubes and mixed with chilled water.
    Sitting in the outdoor patio of the restaurant watching the other patrons, I couldn’t help but think how calm they all seemed. They were, after all, Lebanese. They woke up in a war-torn country, ate lunch surrounded by strife and civil unrest, and lived with the threat of bombs all day. Yet here they were laughing over glasses of
arrack,
asking their family members to kindly pass the flatbread.
    These were the moments I had not counted on in Beirut. I had been prepared for guns and bombs and destruction. But this was also a place where people got on with their lives. They got up in the morning, read the paper, headed to work, and returned to have dinner with their families.
    After an emotional good-bye, I boarded a flight leaving Lebanon the next day. It was a short journey to Cyprus, then another flight to London, and finally onto Washington, D.C., where I arrived exhausted and jet lagged. From there, I took what Southwest Airlines would refer to as a direct flight to Los Angeles (meaning two obligatory stops at Nashville and Phoenix).
    It was during a