Conversation with a taxi driver

Me: Sodeco Square, please.

Taxi driver: Sodeco?

Me: Yes.

(We drive.)

(Later...)

Taxi driver: Muthaf? (Museum?)

Me: No, Sodeco Square.

Taxi driver: Sodeco?

Me: Yes, Sodeco.

Taxi driver: Wayn fi Sodeco? (Where in Sodeco?)

Me: Just Sodeco. Binayat fi Sodeco. (A building on Sodeco.)

Taxi driver: Muthaf? Muthaf watani? (National Museum?)

Me: No, Sodeco.

Taxi driver (after we are almost at the museum): Muthaf.

Me: Not muthaf, Sodeco.

(Then he tells me I have to walk back the way we just came or get another taxi. It was a ten minute walk. By some miracle, I was not late to my meeting. If he was going to make me walk, he could have just dropped me off at the corner instead of driving a ten minute walk away from my destination. Sodeco Square is a well-known area in Beirut. I got out without paying. For all the times I've been ripped off by cab drivers here, why should I pay when I he made me walk to my destination?)

I see

I can see three churches and two mosques from my office window. I see enormous cranes erecting new high rises next to crumbling, bullet-riddled buildings. I see Roman ruins, Beirut ruins, and towering skyscrapers scintillating under the Mediterranean sun. I see the port where massive ships carrying goods from overseas come to dock. I see banks and satellite dishes and plants growing on top of buildings because there is no soil on the ground for them to grow. I see the reconstructed Ottoman building that houses the Prime Ministry and five star hotels and far too many cars.

But I should be at the beach.

961

I'm already getting sucked in.

So what are you seeing here? Well, here we go:

Memorial rally for Prime Minister Hariri's assassination. It's been five years now. Seems like an eternity.

He's not Superman. Popart exhibition at Art Lounge.

King Elvis - if you click on the image you will be able to see the bobblehead Elvis on the dashboard.

A can of Seven Up - I find the logo clever - what looks like a 7 actually says up, and what would be up actually says seven. From right to left, of course.

Down the road along the sea - rich people have stolen both a view of the sea and the sun. These towering skyscrapers and what will be new seaside developments (for wealthy gulfies) will also steal the air from the people, as they are blocking the sea which has had some effect on cleaning up the pollution that plagues Beirut. Look for increases in asthma, bronchitis, and other respiratory related infections.

Where my office is - no, not the bullet-riddled building on the right.

Racism in Beirut. Made in Germany. No one ever accused the Germans of not being racist.

Orange trees in front of a house. They picked them the next day.

Wall art in a restaurant.

Hizbollah poster.

Kaboom goes the tolerance

Earlier in the day, it was sort of raining, which produced an amazing rainbow over the sea. Now it is a bit brighter and there are some guys outside cutting up the street with some type of machine. One guy is doing the pushing while another stands with a jug of water, which he periodically pours on the machine to put out the flames it shoots out. The machine is running on gas. A gas can sits not too far from them. Cars are dashing and prancing by them - I wonder if their drivers even notice the fire.

I've been wrestling a bit with my biases since I've arrived, and I can't figure out why I have them. I never felt the need to say "why do they do it this way?" in the past, but most of my travel experience has been in the West, with only brief stints in Cairo, Jordan, and Istanbul. Perhaps since I've spent a few weeks in Lebanon (two last summer, one so far on this trip) I've had more time to notice things I deem "problems." Perhaps it's because Beirut seems like a Western city from appearances and I assume they have Western views on safety. Perhaps as I've grown older, I've become less tolerant of cultural differences.

Or perhaps this really is just stupid.

Come on, you're using a gas-powered machine that's spitting out flames and think pouring water on it is going to stop it from exploding before you finish cutting up the street?

You might want to get to the end of this rainbow and talk to the leprechaun if you're gonna keep doing it this way.

Floating on

It's been rainy and sunny at the same time all day and a little chilly, especially with the wind gusts. Everyone here thinks it's so cold and I laugh, the same way I laugh at people from the South or California who think fifty degrees in winter is cold. I've heard Jerusalem might get a dusting of snow after midnight, which might also hit here, but that was on Twitter so who knows if it will really happen. Even if it does it will be melted and warmed up enough to not feel like winter by the time I get up. The humidity is really something.

The Med's pretty rough today - white caps are aplenty. It sort of looks like a river good for whitewater rafting, if you can ignore that it stretches to the horizon...and now...the storm clouds are coming in...a ship is coming into port (how the heck do those things float?)...Beirut darkens...and the sea disappears.

But a few minutes later, it returns, and another ship, this one leaving Beirut, appears from beneath the nothingness. For where? What does it carry? Lebanese oranges? Beiruti bananas? Hizbollah drugs and weapons?

The gray has already lifted, revealing patches of blue that make the Mediterranean what it is, a way of life, the color of the soul. Fluffy white clouds laced with the yellow tint of evening follow what had once been darkness. In twenty minutes, a storm was here, then gone, leaving behind the sound of tires splashing through puddles, and what puddles there are, like in any old town, like in Washington, USA, turning the streets into rivers, and mud comes from seemingly nowhere to be suddenly everywhere.

Some Beirut

A few random photos: Roman columns downtown; snow and palm trees on Bliss Street; new mosque and bombed out mall; bombed out church; orange tree ready to eat; generators for when the electricity is out.

I suppose I should write something about why I took each of these photos, but that's just it - I don't know why. I only know that they caught my eye for being so typically Beirut, the kind of life crammed into a situation type of thing that you don't get in too many places on this planet. I mean, sure, there are Roman columns all over the place in so many different countries. But these columns, well, they were discovered after the Beirutis bombed whatever was on top of them out of existence, and they stand next to a T.G.I.Fridays in a downtown rebuilt from the ground up after it was leveled during a 15 year war.

And these snow-covered mountains? They're located about an hour away from palm trees. Lebanon is one of the few places on Earth where you can ski in full view of the sea and go to the beach on the same day.

Bliss Street is named after Daniel Bliss, the founder of the American University of Beirut, which is, obviously, located on Bliss Street, which is where I was standing when I took this picture. Funny, but in July, you couldn't see the mountains from this street through all the haze, so when I was on this street, looking at the snow, I didn't realize where I was.

And where else are you going to find the remains of a shopping center, crying for a bulldozer, near a shiny newish mosque where an assassinated prime minister who rebuilt a city lays in rest?

(Maybe it's not a shopping center - someone told me it was, and there is a parking lot beneath it that you can no longer get to. It's a strange shape, anyway.)
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A bombed out church, next to a highway, that I walk by every day on my way to the office. This corpse of a church is located across from the corpse of a shopping mall down the street from the newish mosque.

I wonder why it hasn't been rebuilt when so many other churches have been. It has trees growing in it. Someone hung a banner on it advertising some Christmas charity, so it isn't totally ignored. Perhaps they just decided to build a brand new church somewhere.

Perhaps the war made them give up God.

Some people have maple trees in their yards. Some have oak trees. Some have elms, hickories, and pines. In Lebanon, lucky people get to have orange trees. How tough it is to walk by and not pick one!

I love this building, too. They have such great architecture, Italian style. Still need some paint, though, and the buildings are covered with the sludge of pollution. (There's something to be said for government regulation of emissions.)

And lastly, the generators, ahh, the generators, the only way you get to have electricity 24 hours a day. Odd for a city that seems so cosmopolitan.

Ahh, the life...

I've never even had an office with a window and now I get this view?

So I finally will have regular internet access from now on, at least access that doesn't require effort like getting in an elevator and going downstairs. But oh, is it tough to focus when I can just stare out at the Mediterranean.

I decided I am going to walk to the office every day (unless it's raining, and maybe even then.) It is only a half hour, and I only half to dash across one crazy street if I cut through the government area, which will probably require me getting my bag checked every morning. Fine with me if it means being safe. The guard was really nice about it this morning, even apologized.

(Boy, is this internet connection is sloooooooooooo ooooooooooo oooooooooow. Perhaps I won't post photos here as much as I'd like. Been trying to upload a second photo for ten minutes now.)

Here's a church next to a mosque, a palm tree at AUB, a violation of copyright, and some palm trees on top of a building. I'll post more pics when my patience refills.

A new travel experience

This is the view from where I live, or at least the view to the east looking at Abel Aziz Street. Yes, I have a view. A view. Am I getting older, or what? I mean, here I am, standing on a balcony, taking pictures of a view. A balcony of an apartment I rent. Alone. In another country.

Bye, bye, hostels. Bye, bye, cheap hotels. Here I am in my new world, renting an apartment in another country by myself with a balcony and a living room and 24 hour electricity and cable television and a maid (and laughing from the cafe a block away while a girl proudly displaying a nose job walks by.)

Here's another view from my balcony. I took it in a t-shirt drinking a beer. In January. Evan says I should get a grill. (Evan is friend and former co-worker who is going to grad school here.) I think it's a fine idea to get a grill for my balcony to the apartment I rent by myself in another country with the living room and the 24 hour electricity and the cable television and the maid (the maid is a little excessive, but it's included in the price. I'd rather not have someone come in and touch my stuff, to be honest.)

Here's a view of the balcony from the bedroom where I had a very nice sleep last night, a very nice and very long sleep in which I missed the opportunity to go out in Gemmayze with a bunch of grad students and some couchsurfing Americans living in Ankara, Turkey because after I got ready to go, I sat down to see what television stations could help me learn Arabic (or relearn, I guess) and what do you know, I feel asleep, waking just long enough to drag myself to the bed. Stupid jet lag. Unless that disgusting chemical air freshener that lets off some horrific flowery scent every 15 minutes is actually sleeping gas put there by Lebanese intelligence. Or Mossad. Or both. I got that turned off today. We'll see if I fall asleep there again.

Here is the kitchen where I doubt I'll do very much cooking, what with me being afraid to light things that have gas going to them. That and I'm just too lazy. I mean, why on earth would I try to cook something when I've got hummus and tabouleh and fatoosh and kibbe and all of this wonderful food prepared by other people? And the orange juice...the freshly squeezed orange juice that makes me embarrassed I ever thought Tropicana Pure Premium was good. And the stand on the corner where they bake fresh croissants every morning...I guess I'll need to use the burner to heat water to make coffee since my tongue cannot take the bitterness of the stuff here.

Here is the living room, which was the difference between this and another place. Not that I plan on watching much television - I only have four months, why waste them? - but it will help with my language skills (I have French channels, too.) Still, it's nice to have some place separate from a bedroom to work, read, and blog. (Though I don't have internet in my room. :( I can still type up what I want to say, hit up Cafe Prague a block away, if I can mind the communist wannabes, and have high speed access better than what I had in my apartment in DC, which is unreal here.)

Look for this bookshelf to be filled by the time I leave. UPS is gonna love me.

A view of the kitchen from the living room. I even have a table for eating, which I've already turned into office space. I do need to get one of those pen organizers.

Even though the sun never directly hits my apartment, there is plenty of light, as you can see from the scintillating glow emanating from the balcony to the apartment which I am rented by myself in another country with 24 hour electricity, cable television, and a maid. Oh, about that electricity thing - Beirut rations electricity so everyone loses it in three hour periods every day. The losing time varies, but many places have a generator. Thanks, corruption! Thanks, Israel! Thanks, sectarianism!

A view of the living room from the other side. Yes, that's my Reds blanket on the couch. I have to do some streaming video tests from Cafe Prague to see if this is the place from where I will be watching our Holy Opening Day or if I'll have to go to another country for such an important holiday. I also have the baseball Billy Hatcher threw me in DC last summer and a little Reds sundae helmet, as well as my Reds cap and jersey. Despite everything, I am still pumped for baseball season as much as if I were in the States.

Here's another view from the balcony, this one more typical of what I'll be posting here. This building stands abandoned, yet one (obviously) squatter hangs laundry outside. I felt the squatting was juxtaposed with the palm tree, the latter being a symbol of prosperity in so many places in the world. The building itself is juxtaposed with the others around it, as the whole block aside from it is under construction. As I was marveling at the situation I found myself in, that being standing on the balcony of an apartment I've rented by myself in another country with 24 hour electricity, cable television, and a maid, I felt a guilt looking at that one occupied apartment among trash-strewn ruins. But hey, I'm here to help Lebanon overcome such an injustice as a squatter in ruins among wealth. We're going to fix this.

This photo is what I think of Beirut, with the contradictions and the absurdities and the imbalances of life. How among the new high rises and the furnished apartments for foreigners can a ghost of a building house someone who has no place to live? Of the 18 different gods who rule over this place, can't one of them dish out some justice?

And so I will live across the street from this squatter, neighbors by location only, and I'll pay a rent equal to what I paid in DC to have much more. I am going to enjoy every second I am here. I mean, look at this photo - how could you not? (Just don't look at the enlarged photo - there are two ships participating in the salvage operation of the plane crash from Monday. This is what's going on.)

Oh, and HA HA - I'm getting tan and you're not!

First day: Success.

Feeling pretty good after sleeping 12 hours and getting up about 6am. Ran out for some coffee before some places were open and got back to take a shower by candlelight, my first introduction to the power issues which plague Lebanon.

Yesterday, or rather on Monday, I embarked upon a turbulent flight from Washington DC to Paris on my way to a four month stint in Beirut. Three hours of rather scary turbulence that made us reroute our trip (adding a mere three minutes to our seven hour journey) were three hours of hell for a nervous flyer like myself, especially when the meal service was suspended and the flight attendants strapped themselves in. And to think that the takeoff hadn't really bothered me...

The flight from Paris to Beirut was a breeze and quite beautiful. When we got to Paris, I felt like I was home. Charles de Gaulle has become so familiar that I know how to find everything. Sadly, I have not been to Paris in a decade, but I've seen it from a plane many times.

What you see here in this first picture is Bulgaria in all its winter glory. Nostalgia came to me as I sat so high above it, face pasted to the window as soon as we left Europe's winter cloud cover and hit a clear shot of the Balkans. The rest of the trip was cloudless and amazing. Most of Turkey was snow covered and beautiful.

This may be the creepiest photo I've ever taken and I hope I never take one like this again. This is a ship that is part of the rescue operation for the plane crash that happened the day before. (You can see a clearer version from Reuters here.) Nothing like seeing the rescue operation of a plane crash from a plane as you are about to land. It was pretty easy to figure out what was going on, because I was looking for it, being the nervous flyer I am. The Reuters photo of the same ship confirmed it. I saw more rescue boats today - I knew they were rescue boats because it was too cold for people to be boating for pleasure.

On a better note, I like a place where you can choose whether or not to have winter. Snow-covered mountains, Mediterranean Sea, a great big city with a lot happening, and warm, beautiful sunshine...I really couldn't ask for more.

Some more photos:

The Bullet Hole Post

I saved this one until I could think about it some more. This is the one that affected me the most. Twenty years on, and the rich build new buildings while the poor and the ordinary continue to live in structures riddled with bullet holes. This is the contradiction that hurts. This is the contradiction I can't understand. This is what makes me wonder how they don't rise up against their nepotistic government, rise up united against those who only seek to get rich no matter how many they leave in the dust. This is where I realize my good fortune, where the superficial comparisons to the more developed countries end. This is where I grab my passport not as a badge to brag about where I've been, but as a blessing I don't feel I deserve.

This is reality.

Yet, life still goes on. And you're left to wonder about the resilience of the human soul. All of those deaths, all the blood, all the destruction, all the hatred...yet they still live, they still breathe, they still dance, they still hope.

Life makes no sense to me.

This place was an apocalypse twenty years ago. I don't know how anyone could have come out of that sane (and is anyone there who lived through it really sane? When people say they are afraid to drive anywhere, when half the country floods the airport and the roads out of town because six fighter jets pass over the city - even though they were the Lebanese Army - is anyone older than 25 really sane there?)

You know, I walked by the old American Embassy and didn't realize it until I was back in DC. It was a pile of rubble overlooking the ancient blue of the Mediterranean. There was no building there, just a bunch of rocks. I was probably too distracted by the beauty of the sea to realize I was standing next to the place where more than two hundred United States Marines took their last breaths. But god, two hundred deaths was nothing compared to the tragedies of the fifteen year war. And that was just the 1975-1989 stuff - there were the 1860 massacres, the first civil war in 1958, and all of the Israeli crap in the last two decades.

And why didn't we call the fifteen year civil war World War III? Every power in the world was involved in that catastrophe. The US was playing both sides in supporting the barely functioning Lebanese government and giving Israel free reign under the table. The French were there, the British were there, the Saudis were there, the Syrians were there...what a freaking mess.

What. a. freaking. mess. It's been twenty years. Two decades. But so many buildings are still riddled with bullet holes.

I went to Belfast the day after the peace treaty was signed in 1998. It's the only thing I can compare to this, and it's nothing like Beirut. I've never seen brightly colored laundry hanging off a balcony of a bombed out building. I've never seen a wartorn highrise in which the first three floors are inhabited and six above them cannot be.

Anyone who thinks war is glorious, anyone who says there is honor in battle, anyone who supports a government who would go to war...you are responsible for these holes. You have blood on your hands. It matters not what country is involved - the mentality for war is universal.