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Published: April 2nd 2007
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I get my first taste of Beirut at the airport in Amman, where a young Lebanese knock-out is causing a commotion around Gate 6. She’s immaculately dressed in designer jeans and knee-high boots and a massive Louis Vuitton bag that shows a very creative interpretation of the word “carry-on.” The airport employees are more or less queuing up to get a better look, with one guy in particular - his broom making token, robotic sweeps of the floor - ensuring that this is the cleanest couple of square feet in Jordan. It’s impossible to ignore her, even as she does a remarkable job of ignoring us, and I’m already making mental calculations of how her impressive, store-bought breasts might keep me afloat should we take a nose-dive into the Mediterranean.
It’s a fitting introduction to Beirut, a city whose greatest assets are typically poured into skin-tight jeans and shaking on the dancefloor till dawn. After two months in Egypt and Jordan - an unforgettable stretch that, nevertheless, began to feel like a test of endurance - the “Paris of the Middle East” has picked the perfect time to squeeze into my itinerary. If my last few days in
Amman taught me anything, it’s that the sight of some long, lustrous locks tumbling down to a set of bare shoulders can lift even the most beaten spirit.
Which isn’t to say that this is really the “right” time to visit. Tensions in Beirut - sky-high at even the best of times - have been through the roof for months, since the Hizbollah sit-in downtown brought a big chunk of this city to a grinding halt. There are hundreds of tents clustered beside the highway, or in the shadow of the striking, blue-domed Al-Amin Mosque. Tattered Lebanese flags snap to attention over coils of barbed wire; bearded men in sandals mill around, mumbling into Hizbollah’s signature walkie-talkies. The Lebanese army - a proud, pubescent force in full-body camouflage suits - stand guard with their assault rifles at the ready. A few soldiers poke their heads out of tanks that are parked in front of the empty cafés and the Virgin Megastore, giving this whole place an air of “Patton” meets Barnum & Bailey.
I’m staying in a budget hotel nearby; when I arrive, there’s a group of anarchists watching wrestling in the lounge. They’re a motley
crew of Germans and Spaniards who have, it seems, spent the past few days bonding over cheap bottles of Almaza beer. They’re making wry comments about the greased-up musclemen on screen - “You know, Americans pay a lot of money to watch this” - though implicit in the way their eyes are fixed to the screen is the fact that there’s a fine line between irony and entertainment. We watch the wrestlers tumble and pounce and paw at each other like hungry jungle cats. “I can’t take this,” says one of the Germans, before proceeding to sit there and take it for another twenty minutes.
Still, it’s not hard to see why a bunch of anarchists might be drawn to this town. “You don’t need to study politics if you come to Beirut,” says one gravely. “Politics is in the street.” It’s a line he delivers with a rousing sense of self-importance, as if he’s spent the past decade funneling weapons to Hizbollah instead of reading Bakhtin in a cozy one-bedroom in Hamburg. But you have to concede his point. Around town you can find buildings still scarred by bullets from the civil war of the ‘80s; near the
St. George Hotel, a massive crater in the street shows the spot where, two years ago, former prime minister Rafiq Hariri was assassinated by a devastating bomb blast.
But with the vigor this town’s known for, life goes on in Beirut. My hotel is in Gemayzeh, a neighborhood of tiny storefronts and rose-bedecked Christian shrines that’s been discovered, in recent years, by Beirut’s young trend-setters. A five-minute walk to the west brings you flush against the Hizbollah tents; in the opposite direction, though, you can grab a seat at a swank bistro and blow forty bucks on duck confit and côte de bouef. It’s the sort of contradiction that makes Beirut so intriguing. More than any other city, this place epitomizes the political dramas of the Middle East. But it’s also famous for indulgence, a city where the locals get all decked out on weeknights and eat in overpriced restaurants and kick their heels up in a way that suggests life depends on it. A line of traffic snakes through Gemayzeh nightly, the restaurants full past midnight and the bar crowds spilling out into the street. In Achrafiyeh, where the paint is still fresh on the ABC shopping mall,
people are packed into the shops and dining in open-air restaurants on the roof.
It’s a swank Saturday-night scene, with willowy women wobbling on pencil-thin heels and showing off long, glorious stretches of leg. The guys are impossibly dapper: their pants pressed, their collars open, their faces reflecting a sincere appreciation for the exposed flesh around them. I’ve spent the past hour wandering around with Reem, a local
CouchSurfer who’s taken up the task of introducing me to her country. She’s quickly shown off the famous hospitality of the Lebanese. When my plane touched down at Beirut International she was waiting outside the terminal; in a whirlwind couple of days, she shows off the sights around town and then whisks me along the coast, the Mediterranean glinting and the green hills rippling down into the water.
We have lunch one afternoon in Byblos, the old Phoenician port town settled inside its ancient ramparts on the sea. Strolling along the waterfront, we watch the fishermen casting their lines into the choppy waves. The rocks are stained an inky black: during the war last summer, Israeli warplanes struck tankers in the waters to the south, sending a long, dark oil
slick up the coast. Even after the war had ended, the country’s beaches were spoiled for months. It took a massive clean-up effort by Greenpeace to undo much of the damage, though Reem worries - along with the rest of Beirut - if rumors of an Israeli encore later this year will lay waste to another hard-earned summer.
Back in Gemayzeh, the anarchists have spent a fine, sunny afternoon reading political theory in bed. Anarchy strikes me as a shitty way to pass the time. A storm blows in later that night, with blasts of thunder rattling the windows. In a place like Beirut, you can’t take anything for granted. I sit up and kick the covers back and listen to the thunder rumbling its way across the city. What fearsome things go through your mind in a town like this, at a time like this. In the morning the clouds have rolled back to reveal a dazzling blue sky, a shade so pure that the night before seems as vague and implausible as a bad dream.
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mary
non-member comment
Nice blog
Hello Christopher, From a foreign resident of Lebanon I had to write and say thanks for a nice blog. You have grasped the superficial aspect of Lebanon in a very short period of time.