Baalbek, the city of the sun, is the most famous Roman ruin in the Middle East. We drive an hour and a half from Beirut through the Bekaa wine valley to find this unlikely place rising from crowded tourist shops. On our last stretch we pass migrant camps, day laborers, and dormant grape vines.

Every fifty meters there are billboards of martyrs along a new highway. This is Hezbollah country. As an American, I am nervous. "Our country is friendly with Israel," my mother explains to our driver. "Is this a problem?" she asks. "There is nothing between America and them. Nothing," he says of his home, dusting both hands as if to say, it's finished.

We arrive at Baalbek and it is raining. We wait it out, stopping to eat in a smoke filled shop with thyme pie and Turkish coffee thickly brimming. An old man with tourist books complains in Arabic that it might freeze overnight and kill his future harvest. Laughing, a young man sits in a corner, his water pipe curling smoke. We nod sympathetically to the old man and buy his books. Standing up, our driver pays the bill, whispering to us in English that this is the proper way in the countryside.

Hawkers flock in the rain but I am steadfast in finding silence among the ruins. Confused, the gate keepers can't decide whether to charge me the foreigner rate or the Lebanese entry fee.