lebanon – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

Pictured on this table: Lebanese salad, tahini, beef shawarma, fried eggplant, homemade hummus, homemade baba ghanoush, fried chicken, hand-cut French fries, and Lebanese rice, along with pita bread, both homemade and store-bought garlic spread (made for the chicken, but also delicious with the fries,) fresh parsley, pickles, tomatoes and a homemade tomato sauce to go with the eggplant. Not pictured: a thousand deserts, including about thirty different varieties of baklava and nammoura, which I had never had before this weekend and oh my God.

I don’t know if I made this clear, but my cousin married a Lebanese woman, and for this and a whole lot of other reasons it is very clear that marrying her was the best decision he ever made. And this was only one meal. Like, these folks don’t cook, they COOK, and trying to claim you were full was just not going to work. I can think of three-day periods where I have eaten better in my life– work trips to Nashville and Raleigh come to mind– but I have never come close to eating this well for three days in a row when literally everything in front of me was home-cooked, and she (well, not just her; my cousin definitely pitched in, but it was clear who was in charge) didn’t break a sweat doing it, either.

(Have I paid for my overindulgence today? Maybe a little, yeah. Worth. It.)

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So this is a new thing. I’ve never come home from a wedding wanting to do research before. My cousin’s new bride is Lebanese, and her entire family are Melkite Catholics. The wedding woke up every last bit of me that used to be a religious scholar, and I walked away all kinds of full of questions. The ceremony was split fairly evenly between English and Arabic, which was already fascinating enough on its own, and the full name of the church is the Melkite Greek Catholic Church– and there was Greek in abundance all over the church itself– despite the fact that it is an Arab Catholic church.

There is history here, and I must learn it. I managed to wedge my way into an interesting conversation with the deacon at the reception, only to get called away by the distribution of wedding cake and Lebanese baklava, which caused me to ask my cousin all sorts of questions about the Melkite position on polygamy. Needless to say, I did not manage to acquire a second Melkite wife to make baklava for me. These are an interesting people, and I wish to know more of them.

So, yeah: the reception. The reception started off with what I would call typical reception music; the newlyweds walked into the hall to AC/DC’s Thunderstruck, which I approved of greatly. Maybe twenty minutes into the dancing, the DJ abruptly veered into what initially felt to me like Arabic pop music, but probably wasn’t, because her entire family immediately knew what to do about it. This was awesome, especially when the oldest, fattest dude at the wedding proceeded to manage to get every Lebanese woman at the reception, as well as most of the younger white ones, dancing in a circle around him while he cut a rug worthy of BB King in his prime– at which point he broke the circle and dragged my only-barely-willing cousin and his new bride into the middle of it so they could dance around them instead. Dude was amazing. Sadly, I wasn’t able to get good footage of him, because while my iPhone can handle darkish rooms for pictures, video with bad lighting just isn’t happening.

The song after the Arabic dance music? Yeah!!! Which was also hilarious.

Then there was this dude. I love this dude, just for rocking that suit:

The jacket matched the pants perfectly and was positively Zoot-suit like in its length. I didn’t get a chance to talk to this guy much but he is my favorite. Well, my second favorite, after that other dude.