Anatolia and the Levant 2013

As we got closer to our trip, we began to seriously think about where we would travel in addition to Istanbul. I discovered the great airfare website skyscanner.com which let me explore where we could go. After plugging in Istanbul into the search engine, Skyscanner showed me how much it would cost to fly to various countries nearby. Interestingly, the cheapest place to fly to outside of Turkey and Northern Cyprus was Beirut.

Now this immediately perked my interest since I grew up in the 1980s when Beirut seemed to be Hell on Earth. I remember reading about the place in my early teens and thinking how could such devastation and fighting go on in such a little place? And how could people continue to live there? In late November or early December, I began to read up on Lebanon. The mix of cultures (Christian, Sunnis, Shiites, Armenian, etc.), the food (both Becky and I love Middle Eastern food), the recent history of war (a travel agent we met in Beirut latter - coined this as "Dark Tourism"), and the ancient history - Byblos was where the modern alphabet was invented, all made the place fascinating to me. And then of course there was the fact that Beirut had historically been called the "Paris of the Middle East," something I had relentlessly told my wife over the years.

I mentioned to my mother that we were thinking about traveling to Beirut. She was not very happy about this, thinking that Beirut was dangerous to Americans. Later on, after I booked the plane tickets to Beirut, she sent me the State Department Travel Warnings as an effort to get me to change my plans. I would counter that by sending her any story of violence of places she had travelled to or would travel to (such as Tucson, Brookfield, Eagle Heights - a student housing project in Madison that we lived at when I was young) and asked her if she had checked the travel warnings on the place.

In December, Becky and I went to Chicago for a weekend trip. We ended up stumbling into a Middle Eastern restaurant called Old Jerusalem. When we talked to the owners - after having a very delicious and reasonably priced meal - we found out that they were from Lebanon. We took that as a sign that we must travel there.