Ayoon Wa Azan (It happened one summer)

Summer is nearly over. I have spent two months or so moving between London, where I work, and the south of France, where the family is on vacation, while trying to convince myself that I was ‘on leave’ for two months, even as I work every day. Indeed, I have arrived at the conviction that there are two kinds of holidays: One with the family, and one from the family. Today, I content myself with some observations that the reader can perhaps add to. In my experience, the best tourists are those who come from countries in the Far East, such as China, Korea, and Japan. I find them to be extremely polite, permanently smiling, all while having a high purchasing power, so they rarely annoy anyone. Tourists from the Far East are also almost always in groups and rarely alone (I know they are not angels and that they have criminal gangs in their countries, but I am just noting down what I observed in the summer). In all cases, Arabs and Americans are not the best tourists. Most of them act like they are nouveau-riches, and perhaps they are, and usually repulse people with extravagant wealth and appearances. I write about Arabs and Americans because I am an Arab who once lived in America, and have experience on both peoples. But I will continue with the English and French, because I have been living among them for decades now. The English may be racist, but they always control their temper (except drunken football hooligans). If an English person is annoyed by something, he can keep his opinion to himself. By contrast, French people are Mediterranean, and therefore, are quick-tempered but also quick to calm down, and are not racist. What I can say with confidence is that French cars, and the family has been driving Peugeot and Renault models for years, are built with finesse, and some feature cutting-edge technology that you cannot find even in German or Japanese cars. My youngest daughter has rented a French car every summer since she got her driving license. This year, she rented a medium-sized convertible Peugeot. When the car stops, the engine turns itself off automatically to save fuel; when the driver raises his foot from the brakes or changes gears, the car restarts automatically. If this feature exists in other cars, I have not seen it, but I say from direct experience that French cars are very well made and deserve to be much more prolific than they are. During the holy fasting month, Arabs were absent from France and Britain, but flocked there afterwards. There were a number of Arab events, and it struck me at one of them how many familiar…and face-lifted faces there were. I saw many people running near my house in the summer too, and I tried to come up with short stories about them: The man I saw running was escaping from the police after he tried to rob a store, and a woman I saw, I imagined, was running away from her husband who beats her. If I saw a man and a woman walking and holding hands, the reason I thought was that the man did not want her to go shopping. I heard about an Arab man in a hotel who ordered a coffee from room service. When the room service attendant brought the coffee tray, he noticed women’s clothing in the room, including a sleeping gown on the bed. So he asked the man whether he wanted anything for his wife, and the Arab man answered: Yes, please get me a postcard to tell her how much I miss her. I travelled this summer to hot countries, and even hotter ones, but there were there things to compensate for the weather. But the best news yet was waiting for me back in London, where lawyer Amal Ramzi Alamuddin was chosen as Britain’s top law beauty, for her successful career and also her huge warm eyes and silk hair. Why was I pleased by the news? Because Amal is the daughter of Baria Alamuddin, our colleague here in Al-Hayat and an old friend whom I knew ever since we were both in our twenties, when Baria was a young journalist. The great poet Said Akl was mesmerized by her ‘Greek’ beauty, which he praised in poem. Baria is still beautiful and excellent in her work. I knew Amal when she was little and then later as a grown woman, and we spoke in our last meeting about her work in defending Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks. I was impressed with her intellect as much as I was impressed with the beauty of her mother, when we were all single and young, with no responsibilities of the kind that plant wrinkles in the face. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arab Today.