I looked out the window onto the street below. School girls in dark blue skirts and sweaters meandered through the narrow, cobblestone roads. Their dark hair was wet with the light rain that had been falling all morning. The sky was grey, mimicking the sea that lay beyond it. A donkey ambled along the street, and its owner shouted to his friends in Arabic as he passed by. I looked toward the sea, where potholes teeming with sea life waited for the tide to cover the porous rocks. Beyond the sea bed, pillars marked the remains of a Roman road, and behind the road loomed a crumbling crusader castle, complete with cannon balls from past wars still imbedded in the walls. I looked down the streets we had come up, stopping for pictures as the drizzle wet the roads and ran off into the stone gutters. I saw the store we had stopped at to look at fish fossils, and the rocks we had climbed and tombs we had explored.
I smiled and breathed deeply. This was Byblos, Lebanon, and my soul was contented.