El Mina By Bike December Ride

This morning I woke up with a 7:15 A.M. smile, because it was El Mina By Bike’s 1st December Ride! I got up, got dressed, had a quick baguette with Philadelphia, grabbed my sunglasses and keys and drove over to pick up Ymn and her friend Mayssa before meeting up with the rest of the group near the Cornish…

Al Jazeera TV was there, wanting to film us (to air this Friday 10/12/10 @ 2:30PM). And as soon as we got out of the car, a reporter came over to us asking if we were part of the group. We said “Yes!”, and so she asked us to rent our bikes and meet her where the camera was being set up. We did, and she asked us to bike around infront of the camera for a bit and then come close so she could ask us (in Arabic) “Where are you going?” and we’d have to say “بالاسكلة ع البسكلة” (Translation: El Mina By Bike!)

Those 2 Photos were taken by my friend, Taha Baba. In fact, Taha is a great photographer, that I'm going to leave all the pictures in this post to him! Check out two more of his great shots from yesterday:

We biked from El Mina, all along the Cornish, past the BAU, past the Olympic Stadium, past the Beirut/Tripoli roundabout, past Dam & Fares, past Maarad, past El Mina Street, and all the way back to El Mina. Once there, we were taken to a little boat-making workshop where a man (Mr. Mohamad Hamra) not only built boats but also little boat replicas and other wooden souvenirs:

Remember the “El Mina Street Festival” where I bought a little wooden boat and TJ got me a seashell? Well, it turned out to be from the same guy! I also remembered back in November of last year, Ymn, Diala, and I had once gone for a morning jog and came across his shop, where I also bought a rosary with sea-shell shaped beads. This man was quite “a talented craftsman and he told us his stories about the sea, his love of boats, and the untold history of El Mina”…