Kajsanmin on visit!

Ah, where to begin? Such wonderful and exciting weeks!! Three saturday nights ago my beloved Kajsa Liisa arrived at Hariri International Airport, and after two hours of waiting we had a tearbursting and joyful reunion in the middle of tired and happy Lebanese faces, familygatherings, and several meters of suitcases and stillettoes. It was easy to separate her from the crowd when she came walking in a hood sweather, good shoes and with a practical small suitcase and backpack. It felt increadibly good to hug my superduperfriend again!! Imagine that she came all the way to visit me, despite warnings from the Ministry of Foregn Affairs and everything. It amazing that we`re now sharing both Cuban and Lebanese memories.. Safe at home a satisfied Kajsa (and even more so Camilla) could pull out nothing less than 8 kilos (!) of Nidar and Freia chocolate and 2 kilos of books from that small suitcase of hers. And all these kilos only for me. Talking about packing with style, haha! The next morning we drove up north and straight to the sea with my friends Joe and Paul, and Kajsa could take this year`s first swim in the Mediterranian Sea. It would be a serious exaggeration to claim that the water was warm, but for two Norwegian women 17-18 degrees is both an acceptable and even a quite delightful bathing temperature. After the swim we prepared the grill and made spears of meat, chicken and vegetables in the real Lebanese manner, and the sun decided to show her face to honour the visit from the north. Excellent! A soft and pleasant beginning of Kajsas Lebanese experience. Except from a guy in a Speedo who lay down right next to us, and then did a show of some strange acrobatic yogapositions, and a family having a picnic a few hundred meters away, we had the place for ourselves. Fortunately, Speedo left quickly when he realized that we were not at all impressed by his performance, but at least we had a good laugh. Blissful from the sun and the sea we spent the night in a rented beach house, and then had to get up at the crack of dawn to avoid the crowded and increadibly slow “rush traffic” back to Beirut. A journey thay normally takes half an hour will take two hours if you make wrong calculations of when to departure, so why it`s called rush traffic is a bit ungraspable.. Well, we made it in 1 hour this day. I spent monday, tuesday and wednesday at the office, and poor Kajsa then got to know how it is to spend some time at home in the appartment i Hamra. It has been an important part of my Lebanese experience, espescially when the political situation has been more unstable than usual. Boring, but this is how it is to be a youth delegate sometimes. My workingdays are quite short however, since I`m also working Saturdays, so she wasn`t completely left to herself all day. By wednesday we had met some of my friends, studied the Lebanese traffic, walked around in the neighbourhood, visited the Blue Note Café (the oldest and coolest jazz place in town), Barometre (a cozy and leftoriented place with oriental music, nice staff, outdoor service and a simple Lebanese menu), and Casa de Pasta, a tiny italan restaurant with Bob Marley on the speakers and fine, silkysoft ravioli. We had also walked at the nice promenade, giggling at all the couples flirting in the cars, and posed in front of the drive by café Uncle Deek.

..to be continued..