You can take the man from the mountains but you can't take the mountains from the man

I feel that this blog should get a re-title-ing… My adventures now occur in Cyprus which is in many ways like Lebanon… There is Arabic spoken in the streets….By Lebanese even!!!
There is the same slow lilting irreverence for the rules…
There is the sea and the mountains…
Cyprus is also facing a collapse…
It has requested entrance into the EU…This translates to a Animal House hazing to end all hazings… The paddles and the beat downs will be coming…The older Frat brothers are going to hammer in the most deep scars possible and then turn it all into a welcome in handshake…
The Russians I have been told are not coming to Cyprus anymore as they require visas to enter the EU.

The Lebanese had left Cyprus to return home to Lebanon…I wonder how the homecoming party is going there.

Cypriots have themselves an interesting lot…They live for three months of the year feeding on the rich blood of the tourists…only to the starve the remaining…
Today I fell in love with Cyprus…all it took was a trip with the family to the ancient regions of the Black pines…

In truth I wasn’t falling in love with Cyprus….I was missing Lebanon… The switchback roads beckoned me as once they had done in the mountain towns of Broumana… The smell pulled back memories of the pines in Ithaca…The cool breeze rolled out memories of the sounds by the lake that hid between the dorms and the physics buildings at Cornell.

I always thought that smell came from the mulch…it was always an interesting hammered mix of copper, rusty nails and manure…I had finally realized that this incense was the black pines themselves. Their squashed tops seemed to have been bent down by a glass ceiling…

I have photos of the trunks of these beasts…the lichen and the moss…the sap and the boney scars from branches long forsaken to gravity…

I was sure that the Kurdish blood was the problem…The buzz clicking in my soul was almost unbearable…As we crested the rises and furrowed the switchbacks I could feel the rush and surge of the minute changes in altitude reverberate in my pulse. My uncle who was playing official tour guide got into a bit of a spat with my mountain woman aunt…was Shaklawa better than this? It had been ages since I had seen the mountains I was told…No it hadn’t I had been there less than 5 days before I decided to get tossed on a naval ship to wake up in Cyprus…The Lebanese mountains were beautiful…

Then came a quick baptism, the water of which, is made of curses for the Israelis who were pounding the Lebanese and those currently instigating the unrest in Iraq… We all participate in such lava laced obscenity fests…It feels like by pouring some bile out this far from the action we are actually affecting the Karma a little…maybe making a ripple might tempt the fates just to drop a stitch and let this part of the thread of suffering end…I wish I was doing more.

We passed through several little “resort” sections which sickened me with their unabashed consumerism… The real beauty, of such places, is the homes slapped on the side of mountain slopes… Maybe I’m a bit of an elitist but these single homes away from the “village” are the ones that get to me… The loaners… Those are the real mountain folk.
I wanted my bike…I wanted my Broumana bike riding buddy…I wanted to feel those feelings again…I only got the hollowed out close but not quite feeling. I had to open the window of the car to breathe feel the rush of the wind.

As we whipped along the road from the back seat of the car I knew it was too fast…The dream was folding up and as we descended the heat reminded me of the thump… The return of that feeling as the bombs pounded Dahiya…

I had descended Broumana on the Bike… I had slipped it down and around bends crushed a rise in Ashrafie and slung my brand new seven frame up past the Parliament house at the crest of the Downtown locality… I remembered the quietness of that ride punctuated by a tingling feeling of terror…How I had dropped my pump as I sped at over 70km/h down past the ABC shopping complex.

I remembered then and now days before the bombing…the restaurant Waterlemon (yes it isn’t melon) where they had mistakenly served us a walnut shell in the salad…

I remembered buying my “stand in” Louis Garneau helmet after I nearly melted down from lack of bike riding post hit and run accident…That was the Beautiful day…When I knew…

I remembered the great wedding dash-fest that bounced me between Zara…The hair salon…The manicure…Otter the tailor…and one of the most peaceful nights I have ever had.
But most of all I remember the mist…The cold, crisp, can’t see anything sort of thick cotton, that cloaks mountains even as they are destroying a city below…

The crushing feeling as I left that haven…The crackling of the wind as the bike laced down those drops… The return of the altitude…

But most of all I poured over the jagged edged hole of emotion…She was gone…