Around Beirut

		Jounieh is a resort community outside of Beirut, and the marina there was among the finest of the EMYR rally. The grounds were manicured, the pool shimmered and overflowed its sides, and clay tennis courts overlooked our boats. Once a sleepy village of 3,000, Jounieh's population is now 300,000, and the streets are filled with designer shops, restaurants, and cinemas.
Our tour took us to the spectacular ruin of Baalbeck, in the Bekaa Valley. Baalbeck began in 24 BC as a Phoenician city named for the god Baal, then the site was taken over by the Greeks, who named it Heliopolis, and then the Romans, who brought back its original name. This well-preserved Temple of Bacchus was known to Romans as the "small temple", which gives you some idea how large the main temple was. The temple was actually dedicated to Venus/Astarte rather than to Bacchus. Apparently this temple was a breakfast gift from Mark Anthony to Cleopatra, which makes you wonder what he gave her for Valentine's Day.
The columns are about eight feet in diameter, as the fallen column shows below, so you can estimate how high these columns are. Note the tiny people at the bottom of the big photo.		These six remaining columns of the Temple of Jupiter (the big temple) at Baalbeck are all that remain standing of the fifty-four that surrounded the courtyard. Pink granite, and each made of one piece, it's hard to imagine how these columns were transported from Aswan, Egypt, as were others that grace the monumental entrance to the site. At twenty-five meters high, about eighty feet, the columns of the Temple of Jupiter are the highest Roman columns in the world. The lintel carvings of lions with mouths agape at the top of the columns caught rain water and redirected it out as fountains. Though remnants of carvings and columns and infrastructure are all over the site, so much is gone forever. Niches around the great courtyard probably once held about one thousand statues, but the emperor Constantine destroyed them when he converted the chambers to chapels during his reign.
The Place d’Étoile in Beirut is a new, vibrant commercial area built over the civil war zone of the 1980s. The time to visit is at night, when it is the spot to see and be seen. We visited around lunchtime, and watched a group of artists shoot a video in which the singer was in love with a model. Apparently the director thought that Dave, with his white ponytail, looked more like a photographer than did the actual photographer that was to be in the video, so the photographer handed Dave his camera, and eventually Patti joined in with her own camera. So if you watch Lebanese music television, look out for Dave and Patti on a new rock video.