Advertisement
Published: April 7th 2007
Edit Blog Post
I’m getting used to my morning coffees in the Gemayzeh Café, with the sunlight pouring through its wall-length windows and Gourard Street slowly coming to life outside. There’s a long oak bar against the back wall and mustard-colored walls that somehow give an air of reassurance. Old men sit with their Turkish coffees, playing backgammon and arguing in quick, mirthful Arabic. A woman with heavy make-up and an elaborate coiffure sits on a stool behind the cash register, nervously smoking cigarettes. At night this place is packed past twelve, drawing a mixed crowd of young scenesters and dapper couples about as old as the chipped moldings along the walls. A band plays traditional tunes while some of the crowd - shapely girls in form-fitting dresses and lecherous old men with broad lapels - get up and do a few twirls, to the hearty applause of all.
After a grim first impression of its chic bistros and swank, dimly lit lounges, Gemayzeh’s begun to grow on me. Solveig - a Norwegian
CouchSurfer who’s called Beirut home for five years - shows me some of the area’s cozier nooks. Before the hipster invasion this place anchored the local art scene;
you can still find struggling painters propping up the bars, or young poets crouched over a spiral notebook, scribbling couplets in Arabic. She introduces me to Torino, a hip little café/bar that’s a favorite for the
Daily Star employees up the street. Ex-pat journalists and photographers puff cigarettes over their espressos and Nescafes, grumbling over visa issues or the fact that there are so many ex-pat journalists and photographers fighting for the same table scraps. Sitting by the door is RGB - one of the stars of Beirut’s nascent hip-hop scene - his face scrunched up over a pad, his lips moving over the lyrics he’d written out in neat, narrow lines just a few minutes before.
Solveig takes me to lunch at Le Chef, a Beirut institution that was one of the few places to open during last summer’s war. While Israeli bombs were carpeting Beirut International and the Hizbollah strongholds to the south, the restaurant was dishing out its
fattoush and
hummus to hungry locals. Each time Solveig passed, the gate was half-down - a wary guard stood frowning on the sidewalk - and after a discreet nod she ducked inside, where the fluorescent-lit walls and clamor
of the kitchen gave her life a hint of normalcy.
It hasn’t taken long for me to make myself at home around here, waving to the old women beating rugs on their balconies, exchanging pleasantries with the seamstress who hemmed my jeans a few days ago. Even outside Gemayzeh, Beirut is a cozy town, its nightlife clustered around a few reliable strips along Gourard and Hamra and the legendary Monot. Here you’ll find Ferraris and Rolls Royces idling by the curb, the men chomping on cigars the size of a Louisville Slugger, the women tottering in sky-high heels. For the record, it’s a scene from which I keep a guarded, tightly budgeted distance. I carve out a healthier nook in places like Torino and Kitsch - a cute-as-a-button café and clothing boutique that serves up killer cupcakes and a steady diet of jaw-dropping Lebanese girls.
You see the same faces everywhere you go. One night RGB and his crew are performing in Torino. There’s a handful of MCs in twisted baseball caps and baggy jeans crowding around the bar, spitting their verses and dodging to the side when the barkeeper needs to get to the espresso machine
or the ice cubes. They are, to put it mildly, keeping it real. A Norwegian film crew is shooting for a documentary on Lebanese hip-hop, training a spotlight on the crowd and pushing a camera into RGB’s face that would serve just as well in a documentary on Lebanese nose hair. Outside a pretty girl in a low-cut dress is bobbing goofily off-beat, proving once more that a girl with nice tits can get away with just about anything.
Later in the week I’ll meet RGB again at a party in Solveig’s place. He’s a quiet kid who grows suddenly intense when he talks about his music, or life in Beirut. He shakes his head fussily when I ask about religion and Lebanese hip-hop.
“There’s no Christian or Shia in our music,” he says. “There’s just one religion. One love.”
He plays a few tracks from a demo he’s just recorded, his lyrics popping like machine-gun fire over some hard, disjointed beats. One song is a collaboration with a Palestinian rapper in Ramallah. The two have never met in person, but they trade ideas, lyrics and beats by email - a high-tech collaboration over gritty, low-tech beats.
As the CD plays RGB gets up and paces the room. He bobs and sways in the corner, his hands moving quickly, his voice trailing the voice coming from the speakers by a fraction of a second. When it’s through he laps up our praise and smiles shyly. Then he goes into the kitchen and pours a stiff glass of Johnny Walker Red.
It’s a good crowd that Solveig’s invited - painters and photographers and a few travelers like myself who are just passing through. Sam - a bald, muscular Beiruti whose voice has a trace of the Antipodes - offers a word of caution: “Foreigners come to Lebanon and want to talk politics and religion, but the only thing the Lebanese won’t talk about are politics and religion.” So we pass a few hours drinking vodka and arak and flirting with anything in sight. Beirut is being very good to me.
After midnight we head to a party in Hamra, where the owner of two popular nightclubs in Gemayzeh is throwing a shindig in his sprawling penthouse pad. From the terrace we get broad, sweeping views of the city lit by night. It is, I reflect, not
a bad way to live. There’s a giant futon outside, a drunken tangle of arms and naked legs and stiletto heels that somehow don’t manage to take out any eyes. A tipsy blonde is singing “Yellow Submarine,” urging others to join the chorus. The host is a gracious, fiercely intelligent guy, who smoothly shifts gears from Lebanese politics to grape harvesting in the south. He also seems to harbor no ill-will toward me, though I’m sitting across from him and sliding my hand up his ex-girlfriend’s leg. Afterward he gives that same hand a hearty pump on my way out the door, and one of his cleaning guys offers me a lift across town, where - far from the penthouse, short skirts and stilettos - a stuffy dorm room awaits.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.421s; Tpl: 0.018s; cc: 21; qc: 143; dbt: 0.2481s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.4mb