off all places to eat a manoushe pie!

I brought the wrong cable to upload the photos from my camera onto my laptop so I will have to rely on online images. I brought my son's camera to Lebanon but my camera's cable and they are not a match. The above image is an old street scene, a postcard from 1930 of the Beirut National Museum, where I went yesterday.

The street outside the museum today is a mess of cars and congested traffic; the Roman columns are still outside the front, but now behind wrought iron, fencing it off. The trees behind them are taller, but strangely, not by much. My toddler nephew got hungry just after we bought our tickets to go in, so we stepped outside to see what we could find to eat. My husband ran across the street -- or should I say, dodged traffic and endangered his life getting to the other side to pick up some manoushe sandwiches and fresh squeezed orange juice from a shop we spied across the road.

So, like vagabonds we munched our sandwiches outside the palatial columns of the museum as rows of schoolchildren filed in and drivers honked their horns and sped by. I noticed someone was growing corn in the small plot of land on the side of the building where all sorts of unrestored ancient artifacts lie scattered on the ground under the scorching sun.

After sating our bellies and checking for flecks of stray zaatar on the teeth (inevitable to eating manoushe pies), we went inside into the coolness.

The museum was co-designed by architects Antoine Selim Nahasco and Pierre Leprince Ringuet (these images are from the Nahasco site). The museum is also featured on Lebanese currency.