Lebanese food is delicious.

With Lebanese food I don’t just mean the actual dishes (even though they are epic) but the raw produce itself, too. I knew cucumbers as fairly big, sometimes slightly floppy green things. Here they are small, light green, super crispy and full of flavor. Onions and potatoes on the other hand are absolutely massive (the other day there was a bowl of potatoes in the kitchen and when glancing over at them I mistook them for bread rolls because of their size) and last for weeks before losing their taste.

And the tomatoes… oh the tomatoes, they are divine. They don’t look like much if you’re used to the perfectly round, dark red ones we get in the Netherlands, but they are rock-solid proof that appearance has very little to do with taste.

The business of buying said yummy food, however, is full of eyebrow-raising moments if your mind is as European and practical as mine.

Supermarkets are staffed by approximately seventeen-thousand guys in overalls who will weigh your veggies for you, put your shopping in bags for you, carry said bags to your shopping cart and even push the cart to your car for you, in case you don’t have any arms and are therefore unable to do things like pushing shopping carts.

Sure, I understand that an uneducated Syrian laborer costs next to nothing to employ so why not, but really? You need someone to put your groceries in a bag for you? The arm movements involved in picking up an item of food and depositing it inside a plastic bag is simply too complex to perform yourself?

What really baffles me more than anything though, is the sheer amount of bags you end up with. For some obscure reason the bagging guys are told to separate items in a certain way, which means you regularly find yourself with bags that contain nothing but a single tube of toothpaste, one bottle of wine or a bag of crisps.

Why? What is the reason for this ridiculousness? Why do they seem to think putting the wine, the toothpaste and the crisps in the same damn bag is completely unacceptable to the general public? My fiancé tried to explain, but it will never make sense in my head.

Those tomatoes though… Yum.

“Well, if all else fails, we can always get married”

Immediately after speaking those words I turned to my boyfriend, expecting him to have an expression on his face that was a mixture of horror and panic, thinking of ways to make it sound as innocent as possible. In stead, he was grinning.

“I was actually thinking that myself”

Holy crap! No panicking? No frantically slamming the car brakes (and we were on a highway too, oops), no red-faced, stuttered objections? I found myself on unknown territory.

We had talked about marriage, true enough, but only as one of those “in the future” things. In fact, he had said once that he wanted to make a million dollars first and then marry me, which in my overly pragmatic European (Dutch…) mind is a bit like saying “I want to roller blade across the Sahara desert first”.

Either way, I think that short (and not entirely serious) conversation we had while driving down the highway to Beirut planted the seed of an idea in both our minds.

I was supposed to get a work visa that would be valid for a year. Before I moved to Lebanon I didn’t actively look into getting a visa, both because I was rather busy with my graduation but also because my boyfriend assured me it would be easy to get a visa once I was here and there was nothing to worry about.

As it obviously turned out, it wasn’t that easy at all. After only a few weeks in the country, we had been in and out of countless government offices that, to me, did not look very official or governmenty to begin with.

During the work visa application process, we found out that one of the requirements is a “down payment” of a sizeable sum of money into a bank account, which can not be accessed until the applicant of the visa leaves the country again. To me, this felt like having to be “bought” into the country, which felt incredibly stupid and wrong.

In stead, we thought, we might as well be pragmatic about it and admit that we’re madly in love anyway, want to stay together forever and have children (he didn’t panic at that one, either!) anyway, so we should just skip the whole visa thing.

We are getting married and I couldn’t be happier. Pragmatism rocks.

Moving abroad was a fairly straightforward procedure for me, as far as the actual “moving” was concerned. I transported myself and one reasonably massive suitcase by plane, obviously, but when you go to another country to stay one suitcase is usually not enough.

Fortunately, I didn’t have too many possessions I absolutely needed to take along with me, so everything I own ended up fitting neatly in just four cardboard boxes. About 60% of said boxes was filled with shoes, which definitely says something about my priorities in life. Ahem.

I arranged for a cargo company to transport my boxes for me by air (which is apparently cheaper than by ship if your freight is small; prospective emigrants take note!) and they would be delivered safe and sound to Beirut airport in only a few days. I’d get a phone call with details on picking them up as soon as they got through customs.

In my European naivety, I expected the pick-up place to be a quaint little office somewhere on the airport. Maybe staffed by a friendly, elderly man who would take twenty minutes just trying to spell my name correctly (even my boyfriend gets it wrong, to be honest) and then get out a cute little cart to put my boxes on. Maybe.

In reality, we arrived at an overcrowded parking lot where we ended up driving around in circles looking for a spot for at least fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, my boyfriend was ever so gently trying to convince me to stay in the car while he picked up my shipping, because the dock (because it was a dock, yes) would be full of… uncivilized people, and I was wearing a relatively short dress.

Of course, being my free-spirited, rebellious, stubborn self, I was having none of it. I would damn well walk into that dock and be perfectly able to ignore any sort of cavemanesque leering. It was MY shipment, MY passport was needed to pick it up, I wasn’t going to wait behind like a little girl…

…until the guy who told my boyfriend where to park also mentioned to him that it would really be a bad idea for me to come inside with him. With an almost victorious ahaha-I-told-you-so look on his face, he got out of the car and said “I love you, get used to the country, I’ll be right back”.

I scowled, I crossed my arms, I muttered and I growled but I handed over my passport and waited.

As I was waiting, a man who just walked out of the dock with his shipment told me he had been there since seven in the morning, and it was around eleven at this point. The wait time was terrible, the dock was extremely hot, dirty and uncomfortable. My boyfriend is a bit of a cleanfreak (I love you honey) so I immediately felt bad for making him do all this for me.

Yet, a mere ten minutes later he walks up to the car, accompanied by some guy who worked there and looked like he had just found his new best friend. My boxes were nowhere to be seen. As he got into the car, I told him about the other guy who had waited for four hours and if he’d just decided the wait was too long?

“No, the other guy obviously didn’t know how to bribe.”

“But where are my boxes?”

“They need to finish some paperwork so this guy is delivering them to wherever we want him to. Let’s go have some coffee.”

I think I can get used to this country after all.

I am a Dutch girl living in Lebanon. When I moved here, the 2010 Fifa World Cup was in full swing and the Netherlands were doing so well that I bet most Dutch football fanatics wouldn’t have left the country if their mothers’ lives depended on it, unless it was to catch a last-minute overpriced flight to South Africa.

I left the country regardless, because I am not a fanatic and because love is a much more powerful force than football. Usually.

The World Cup is a big deal in Holland. Streets turn orange overnight, half the workforce takes a day off or calls in sick when there’s a match during the day and the most outrageous orange attire is suddenly for sale on every street corner.

It couldn’t possibly be as popular in Lebanon, or so I thought. After all, the Lebanese national football team, if not entirely fictional to begin with, does not compete and isn’t likely to do so anytime soon. Reliable sources tell me football matches in Lebanon usually end with either the players or the supporters starting a gunfight on the field, and I seriously doubt the Fifa will look kindly on this.

So surely, nobody cares right?

Wrong. It’s huge. Walk down any busy restaurant street in Beirut and you’ll see big screens showing the matches everywhere. Every other car driving past you as you do so will have one of the most popular countries’ flags stuck to it. Whenever one of these teams wins a match, the roads are swarming with honking cars and people leaning out of the windows waving oversized flags.

These flags are for sale everywhere. Small roadside shops have display stands outside, but you can also opt to buy one from the vendor who comes up to your car and taps on the window as you’re waiting for a red light (and if you are, you’re probably not Lebanese).

In the past few weeks, I’ve seen the flag sale displays change, and the collective support of the Lebanese people with them. Brazil and Germany were two of the biggest favourites, but when the Netherlands beat Brazil (oh yeah) the entire green/yellow/blue crowd changed into assorted other colours without a second thought. Loyalty to a team lasts only as long as they’re winning, as far as the Lebanese are concerned.

What makes the whole thing interesting is the fierceness of their loyalty. Ask any Lebanese Brazil supporter why they support Brazil, and they will simply tell you “Because I AM Brazilian!” and their friends will all nod in agreement. Ask further and you’ll find out that no, they do not have a Brazilian passport and no, they’ve never been to Brazil, but their great-aunt’s second cousin’s uncle twice removed is Brazilian. Or at least, they think he is.

Of course, as soon as Brazil is out the great-aunt no longer exists and they suddenly regained contact with a long-lost friend in Spain.

Spain beat the Dutch team in the finals and the crowd around me cheered for them, because they figured out a while ago that you’ll have more fun if you support the most likely winner I suppose.

I was sad, but only for a moment. After all, I also swapped my own flag, for one with a little cedar tree on it that held promises of a brilliant future.

Now if only these people would learn to play football…