141_4174.JPG My sisters and I are with three boys. Their names are Alexi, Karl, and Ralph. Karl and Ralph are my cousins and Alexi is my friend. Karl is on the left, Alexi is on the right, and
Ralph is next to Alexi.  Karl and Ralph are twins.  Behind us on the shore is the town of Jounieh.We have lots of relatives living there. 

141_4175.JPG Looking in another direction, behind us on the shore is the city of Beirut.

141_4180.JPG We went to a restaurant where they had a lady making bread. She took a small ball of dough, flattened it out, flipped it around like a pizza maker, and put it on a black hot thing. Then she cut it up and gave a piece to each of us.

141_4182.AVI (Big movie file): Here she is giving us bread.

142_4202.JPG My sister, my parents, and my uncle Paul are in front of buildings along the beach in Beirut. I think there are more palm trees there than in Hawaii.

142_4205.JPG We went to an amusement park. Here we are in the Pirate Ride. I wrote about this in my journal. You get into a big pretend boat with seats. You sit down and the person pushes a button and it swings higher and higher until you are looking straight down.

142_4237.JPG From here we had a pretty ocean view.

142_4252.JPG My uncle and my Giddoo ("Giddoo" means grandfather in Arabic) are next to two guys from the Lebanese army. They let us take their picture.

142_4254.JPG This is ancient city that has been uncovered inside Beirut. The square area with circle things inside is a giant bathtub, and people sat on the circle things while they were bathing.

142_4292.JPG Here we are having bouza (that's Arabic for ice cream). I was so relieved to get out of the car because we drove a long time, so the drivers decided to stop and let us have some refreshments to get our energy back because we were going to have to do a lot of walking.  We were driving up the mountains to see the famous cedar trees of Lebanon. There is a picture of a cedar tree on the flag of Lebanon.

143_4321.JPG These are mountains in Lebanon. The trees live up in the snowy part of the mountains, so far up that nobody has ever bothered to go up there and cut them down.

143_4338.JPG My sister and I are in front of a big hole. It is a valley but it is very very far down. It is hard to see the bottom.

143_4345.JPG My sisters and I are in front of a cedar tree. It is over 6,000 years old! It is the oldest living cedar tree in the whole world. The cedars smelled heavenly!

143_4346.JPG Here is the same tree. This time we stood back far enough to see the whole thing. It is HUGE!

143_4366.JPG This is a building built into a rock. Part of the ceiling is part of the rock, and part of the floor too. It is a museum and tomb of a famous writer and artist named Khalil Gibran. His most famous book is called “The Prophet".

143_4393.JPG We visited a place called the Jeita grotto. It had a cave. This is a statue outside the cave, and water splashed out of it, like the stuff in the cave.

143_4392.JPG We are on a trolley going to the cave. It is kind of far away so we had to take the trolley.

JEITA021.JPG We are taking a boat through the cave. There are lots of stalactites.

JEITA.JPG Here we are walking through the cave.  It looked like a Dr. Seuss book.  I think Dr. Seuss must have seen this before he wrote his books because in lots of books he drew nooks and crannies and roads that are suspended in the air.  

144_4486.JPG These stalactites were made by water dripping through the celiing.  And after many years the stalactites grow from the celiing and the stalagmites grow from the ground where the drips fall.  We also saw a stalagmite growing on a cement stair. The stairs were maybe about 50 years old.  It was just building up, maybe half an inch thick.  It will take a long time to build up into a big one! 

144_4413.JPG Now we are in Baalbek seeing some ruins.  These were built during the Roman empire, almost 2000 years ago.  It is huge huge huge!  A lot of stuff has fallen down and that will be important in the next few pictures. 

144_4421.JPG My Dad is showing that the columns are bigger across than he is tall. 

144_4424.JPG My Mom is pretending to have her hand bitten by a lion! 

144_4441.JPG I have a super-sister.  She is very strong.  They hired her to re-build the ruins. 

ALLYCE065.JPG My sister and I are riding camels.  It was very bumpy and very scary at first, because when it got up it went front-feet first so it jerked you backwards.  And it went down front-feet first, you felt like you were going to flip over forwards, and it stayed that way for a while.  But then I did it another time and I got used to it.  Now I know how people felt when they rode camels to get around. 

IMG_3744.JPG Alexi's parents own a school, called the "Ataya New School". Alexi went to that school. I went to school there for a day. I met a bunch of new kids. Alexi brought me to his class for a while, and I expected they would speak English. I passed out the sheets because the teacher asked me to. But when I sat down and class began, all of a sudden I heard a lot of talking in Arabic and I didn't understand a bit! But after the class, Alexi told me that what had happened was that someone didn't want to work, the teacher and he had a long discussion about working or leaving. Lots of kids laughed and I did too but I didn't know why. Then a kid looked at me like I was coo-coo so I stopped.

ALLYCE005.JPG These people live in a shack on the cliffs along the sea in Beirut. They have a great ocean view. They are playing cards. We went to visit them.

ALLYCE002.JPG This is a room in the house that is an emergency room. If the waves got too high and crashed the house, they'd go into this room and lock it. There was a pipe that went way way up high through the rock so they could breathe.

ALLYCE003.JPG My sisters, Alexi, his father Ramsey, and my cousin Allyce are in front of the ocean on the roof of the house.

ALLYCE009.JPG We are in a boat. We are going to go under a famous rock named Pigeon Rock. Allyce lives in Boston, but she lived in Beirut for a year when she was 10. She said she always wanted to go under that rock but didn't get a chance until now.

ALLYCE011.JPG This is pigeon rock. It is shaped like shorts. People dive off the top of it! Beirut is in the background. They call it Pigeon rock because lots of pigeons used to live there, but they don't any more. We went through the little hole in the middle of the shorts.

ALLYCE018.JPG My sisters and I and Alexi are in front of the ocean at a little hut-like thing. The two things with pictures of trees are the Lebanese flag. Good night!
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