Soap!

So what did we buy in Lebanon? Soap, soap and more soap! When in Beirut, we laughed when J told us about the Soap Museum in Sidon... but after reading about it and the Audi family in his inflight magazine, we decided to go and found that it was actually really interesting.
But in Tripoli, the seeming important of soap was even greater than in Sidon... Below is an abandoned courtyard in an old souk where you can see old tools of the soap trade just sitting there...
The photo below shows soap shavings. What you can't see is how strongly fragrant these shavings were... It was impossible not to go in and purchase some soap. I brought some from this shop which was scented with Jasmin... I wanted to send this one home with a gift for my mother, but when I unpacked my bags, the friend who was with me absconded with the jasmin soap.

Later in Tripoli, when we finally returned from the trip up to the castle and were trying to find a restaurant, we were grabbed by a lady who took us to her family's soap factory. Of course I bought a couple of cakes of soap, this time pine-scented. The photo below is her husband who is busy shaping the marbled soap balls that Tripoli is famous for.