An educated, aware Lebanese citizen, she served the Lebanese Women's League last year as acting president. A mother of three children and a modern housewife, she recently returned from a second journey to Europe in the company of her husband, Mr. Hassan al-Daouk. She spoke to the representative of "The Woman's Voice" about her most striking impressions of France, England, Belgium, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Istanbul.
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Q — I know that you are one of those with a passion for travel, and this is not the first time you have gone far from family and home to roam wide new horizons. What is it that endears travel to you?
A — Among the treasured sayings of the Arabs is this: "He whom his Lord loves, He grants him a view of His kingdom." And the French writer Philippe Morand wished that his skin might be stripped off after his death and made into a traveling bag. So you see that the impulse to travel is shared between the mind that thirsts for learning, knowledge, benefit, and provision, and an instinct — an inner feeling that drives man to movement and wandering. I believe that travel is the great, all-embracing school from whose varied and manifold
Mrs. Hassana with her children in the gardens of the Louvre, the "Tuileries"
streams a person can draw such knowledge and experience as is not to be had at the school desk or in the university hall. It places within reach of our hearing, our sight, and our senses geography, history, society, politics, art, commerce, and industry. And on the other hand it is a supreme, incomparable pleasure: once you have passed beyond the soil of the homeland aboard an airplane or a steamship, a fine, delicious feeling
The Carnival King, Nice, February 8, 1953
steals into your inmost self — a feeling of release from the cares and bonds with which daily local life burdens you.
Q — What are your overall impressions of the countries you visited on your many journeys?
A — I have visited France more
The blossoming float that won first prize in the 1953 carnival season
than once and stayed there for long months; I have also visited England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Turkey, and the sister Arab countries: Egypt, Syria, and Iraq.
If I wished to express in a single word the sum of the impression these countries left on my soul, I might say without exaggeration: it is "admiration." It shows itself in the aspects of life in each of them — in alertness, good management, and order, and in the safeguarding of the national