Beirut to Byblos -2

The horrors of the Armenian Holocaust became very evident to us in the ensuing days - unlike the Jewish Holocaust this has attracted less international coverage and attention. And when I looked at the Armenians around me, it gave me a deep sense of pain at what their forefathers went through - a collective sense of their suffering seems to be infused in their bodies.
It was carefully portrayed at the Birds Nest orphanage in the coastal old town of Byblos, 40 kilometres away, and which preserves all the photographs of the genocide events - of Armenians living in prosperity before the holocaust, the shaping of the persecution and the massacre over a four-year period. Birds' Nest was run by a Dutch lady who called it so because the children gathered around her like birds at feed time.
Byblos, like the Bible, means book in Greek, and refers to the main item of trade - papyrus - from its port during the Phoenician/Canaanite civilisation. It apparently is one of the oldest inhabited cities of the world and has seen continuous human settlements for 7000 years. The original alphabet also came from there. Byblos is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has ruins from the Pheonician, Egyptian, Greek and Roman periods. Unfortunately I had no time to visit them.
In the evening before my departure, I roped in a couple of my team members for a short sight-seeing tour of Beirut city, once the Paris of the Middle East. Roman ruins like the Bath are preserved in the middle of downtown Beirut - they blend seamlessly with the sleek office spaces, restaurants and outdoor lounges. Huge TV screens were kept everywhere for the football fans; it was the World Cup season and Lebanon seemed to be in a football frenzy going by the flags on cars and buildings and for sale. Downtown Beirut has the Parliament, a modest slim structure in yellow that has very little of the grandeur and inaccessibility of the Indian Parliament. One reminder of the 15-year civil war is the presence of gun-toting soldiers in central Beirut, standing unobtrusively under any available shade in the summer heat.
Just as the sharing of power in Parliament between Lebanon's Christian and Muslim population (the Prime Minister is elected from the Muslim community and the President from the Christian), there is a sharing of space between churches and mosques in downtown Beirut. After visiting the Greek cathedral, we hesitated in front of the Blue Mosque next door. A mosque official ushered us in, once we had enrobed ourselves in the abaya rented out to female visitors. For the first time I bowed my head in prayer in a mosque - my previous trips to mosques like the Big Mosque in Abu Dhabi or the Jama Masjid in Delhi had been touristy and photo-op.