13a The Silk Museum

Recently I went to the Silk Museum, where I discovered Lebanon's history with silk, which dates back to the Phoenicians.

Though there is no real relevance between this and the silk Museum, there is a movement of predominantly Christian Lebanese who claim to be Phoenician and not Arab. This dates back to the civil war Lebanon experienced in the 70's and a good ways into the 90's. Those who countered the Palestinians and the Arab Nationalist causes, claimed that they were destroying the nation by using Lebanon as a battle ground against Israel. This they would not tolerate; interestingly they are the same people who initially supported the French Mandate on the grounds that Lebanon was a predominantly Christian country. Now they internalize their struggle and rationalize their culture as being unique to those of the region. It really is a pity that faith can be such a wedge between people, when (especially Christianity) was meant to harbor peace and love between all.

Though all the groups in Lebanon share a history of militancy, today it is only Hizballah that is actually a militia. Many questions arise as a result of their military presence in the country. For one, who will protect Lebanon? The government's security forces are not equipped for securing Lebanon's borders! For another, who will securely protect and represent the Shiite community. They are underrepresented in most everything in the country and this imbalance is largely due to a class struggle they have to cope with. (Though some might disagree with me on this last note, I would say there is a historic precedence of over representation of the Christians in Lebanon, and today an over representation of the Sunni in Lebanon) No balance has been properly found or made, even though the system is built on an assumed thread of equality. It inherently categorizes people, and thus creates power struggles between these categories, which debunks and destabilizes the balance of power it is presumptively based on.

What a mess!?

 THE SILK MUSEUM

:)

These are the worms that start off really small and eat till they reach triple and then some there weight.

When they have reached the right size (they only live for a month) they begin creating thread around there bodies, cocooning themselves inside.

This is what they look like when fully cocooned, they die inside the cocoon, turn into hard rocks!

Then they wash and process the cocoon shells, slowly extracting the string from the cocoon (remember this is how the Phoenicians did it, not how its done today). This takes several men to process.

Finally they stretch out the string and process it into silk. One silk scarf can take up to 10,000 cocoons.

The museum is lined with pictures of the old days and how the silk was made in those days!

It also has a garden that has such beautiful flowers and fruit trees!

And a view of Beirut from afar with the sea right in front of it. The museum is in Bsous!

Finally, I found my favorite wild flower growing in the mountains (its a resiliant bugger!)