That one time I went to the Hezbollah Museum

One of the places I most desperately wanted to go to when I arrived in Lebanon was the Museum of the Resistance in Mleeta in the South. The museum was created in 2010 by Hezbollah to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the retreat of Israel from South Lebanon. A museum on a given political organization created and maintained by said organization is the kind of surrealist self-serving enterprise I just had to see for myself. In mid-January, one of my classes got to visit the museum, an occasion that was exciting for the reasons mentioned above, and also because I thought class trips were only for middle-schoolers.

The museum is situated on top of a hill which used to be the location of a Hezbollah encampment during the fighting against the Israeli Occupation Forces. At approximately 1.5 km in altitude, my attitude of denial when it comes to wearing proper winter clothing proved particularly painful on this January morning. The hill was covered in thick fog that we were told used to be prime weather to attack Israelis without being spotted.

View from Mleeta

Are you sure you're French?

I have seen many people over the years try (and fail) to pinpoint where I come from. I find this extremely amusing, seeing how I am a pretty generic white person and don't see what could mark me as being from one specific place over another. The crazy guesses I have heard are even funnier knowing that I have the blandest genealogical make-up ever. My parents are both from the same village in Normandy, and the only possibility of exoticism in my genes is my great-grandfather's unknown father, who, let's face it, was most probably from somewhere super foreign like a neighboring village. Or perhaps Brittany.

Among the most memorable guesses as to my origins, I have been told that I look/sound like someone from Detroit, North Carolina, Italy and even Greece. I was also told over Christmas break by someone I had just met that I sound foreign when I speak French, which was rather upsetting, although probably true. But for some odd reason, no guess keeps coming back quite as often as Eastern Europe.

Surviving the Service: the first of what will undoubtedly become a series

The concept of a "service"

Beirut, for its apparent lack of public transportation, has a very practical means of moving about called the service—pronounced the French way, aka "serveece."

Basically, a service is just like a regular taxi, except it picks up and drops off multiple people along the way. Think bus, if a bus didn't have a predetermined route, and if by "bus" you meant a car built sometime back when the Soviet Union was still a thing and seat belts were an optional feature.