18.2.11

On the Inside

During our recent long weekend we drove into the mountains. We hadn't gone that direction since 2007. It was wonderful to see Lebanon's amazing landscape of mountains and valleys again. It had been too long.

While we were there we went to Ksara, where we had lunch and a tour of the caves with friends. While we were there I had the good fortune to look up. This is what I saw:

It's the inside of the roof. Traditional buildings like the Chateau at Ksara almost always have a red tile roof. From the inside, you can see the support structure, you can see the way the tiles overlap.

The light in there wasn't the best, but I was able to capture the imprint on the tile, the cute moth insignia and the mortar sealing all the overlapping edges.

7 comments:

  1. A bookshelf!
    Was what I thought at first glance without reading the text.
    Very interesting. And the first photo is really nice with the framing and light.

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  2. Oh, fabulous. How lucky to get away for a little excursion into Lebanon's beautiful interior. We went to Ksara the day we went to Baalbek, stopped there to taste the wines. Hope you took a bottle or two home with you...

    Is the highway bridge open again over one deep valley on the road through the mountains from Beirut to Zahle ? When we were there the bridge had been badly damaged by bombs in August 2006, and was closed, we had to detour down a dirt road into the bottom of that valley.

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  3. Owen, yes, I know what you mean. The bombed out bridges and roads were very quickly repaired. We drove that highway in the spring, 2007, to visit some distant cousins in the mountains and it had already been redone--better than before.

    But, when we were evacuated in 2006 we made MANY detours like that. The alternate paths sprang up within hours of when the bombs fell.

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  4. I too, thought it was a bookshelf at the beginning.

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  5. I thought that was a bookshelf too. I love the way you use photography as art, research and documentation all at the same time. It is so interesting. I did a bit of this in Dublin, in the biggest state cemetery which is being renovated at the moment, American style, which is a good thing. They are leveling the ground, straightening the stones, getting rid of the kerbstone borders and planting grass so it will look more like a park than an overgrown field. See http://gaelart.blogspot.ie/2012/12/restoration-work-in-glasnevin-cemetery.html

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