Tick, tick, tick...

The writing said Sylvania at the end of the glowing tube above my head, a tube that was sucking the soul of out me. Octron, it was called, made in Mexico, probably manufactured beneath the same glowing tubes. There was a slight yellow tint to most of these soul-sucking abominations, though a few glowed almost purple and one of them was dark. I stared at them in revulsion. When I looked away, my eyes were filled with spots, spots that skewed the view of the glowing screen in front of me. Everything glowed, everything was artificial, even the afternoon fatigue that had routinely overcome me, the result of hours beneath those tubes and in front of that screen.

I'm leaving for Paris on Thursday to reclaim some of my soul. If only I could go to sleep and wake up Friday in Montmartre.

Bourdain returns to Beirut

The first time I ever saw No Reservations was a rerun of the 2006 Beirut episode. I was as angry about the invasion when I saw it as I was when it was first happening. I'll never forget the day the war began. I went screaming through the office halls and said some pretty nasty things about Israel, all well-deserved. And there I was, safe and sound in Washington, DC. It was a totally helpless feeling.

I didn't know back then how much Lebanon would become a part of my life. Now I know Beirut very well and have many friends in Lebanon. I am just as repulsed by Israel aggression as I was back then, but I know, too, that Lebanon is not innocent.

I'm looking forward to this episode - I even set my alarm so I don't forget. I hope he didn't stick to the overpriced, overrated pretentious restaurants but really got some of the local flavor.

Paris September 2010

Thirty-eight days. Actually, it's only 36 until I leave, insha'allah. I have to wait until payday on Friday to get my ticket. I saw Dulles-CDG for $579 yesterday, and I am praying that one of those fares is still available on Friday. The rest were outrageous, but I'm going to Paris no matter what, even if I have to survive on the sugar packets I can get in the office coffee room.

It's been ten years since I've set foot in the City of Lights, ten long years in which I have seen the city as a tiny Lego town from an airplane window more times than I can count. This time, the plane is landing, and I am taking the bus into the city. These last ten years have been peppered with moments in time when my desire for Paris has been overwhelming. I can remember the time I vowed I would go to Europe at least once a year for the rest of my life. That was in 1999, the third year in a row I was in Europe. I made it one year after that until I broke down and went to Eastern Europe in 2007. But it wasn't Paris.

It was, well, I don't even know when it was that U2 announced they would be performing in 2010 - sometime in late autumn, or maybe December. I can say with a straight face that those two shows in NYC in September 2009 were two of the greatest nights of my life. It was a natural high, and totally worth getting sick after because I went without food or drink and stood up for basically two days straight, even though I was sick for the DC show a few days later (but that didn't matter so much because the suburban zombies who pass for music fans in DC made the show suck a little.) When the band announced a few more dates in 2010 and they gave us U2.com subscriber folks (that's what they call a fanclub these days) a chance to get tix, well, something came over me, and I did. And what city would I choose but the subject of my urban lust for a decade.

Of course, at the time, there was no North American announcement and I thought now here's the chance to get to see them two years in a row after thirteen years of having to wait four or five years between shows. But logically I knew they'd come back to North America, in one of those many, many layers we sort of generically label as the human brain.

So, ten years. I left Paris in February 2000 after spending a week in France - Dijon and some tiny town in Bourgogne I can't remember the name of but it was the best France experience I ever had because, well, it wasn't Paris, and the French get a bad rap because Americans, the few who actually go to France, usually only go to Paris, and, well, Paris is a city, and in cities, people are less friendly to tourists because tourists are SO FREAKING ANNOYING. Believe me, I know. I have lived in DC for most of the last seven years, and my tiny town of 600,000 swells to 1,600,000 on any given summer day. Although I gotta give props to the parents who bring their kids to DC instead of Disneyland. You're doing something right.

Paris is definitely a city of the past. I once wrote something somewhere about how it seemed like Paris was the past, London was the present, and Berlin was the future. (I was 22. Give me a break.) I don't mean Paris is a city of the past in a bad way, and I know Parisians hate when people say this, but Paris is a giant outdoor museum to European history. Frankly, I think they should be proud of this. (And come on, Americans - without the French, there would be no America. They helped us beat the limey asses across the channel to get our independence. One of my favorite quotes of all time is Patton's quote on D-Day: "Lafayette, nous sommes arrive." It was a thank you. I'd much rather have a "special relationship" with France than with those folks up north.) But Europe is "Europe" now, and should always remain so, because they figured out a way to stop fighting (and if I prayed, I'd pray the EU sticks together, but they really shouldn't have expanded so quickly, and they shouldn't make those retarded laws they are prone to do, like German barmaids can't wear sleeveless shirts because they might get sunburn.)

I love Paris for its past, especially for its literary past. Not only did they have great thinkers and writers roaming those cobblestone streets, but the best in all the world roamed there. My personal favorite, James Joyce, did most of his writing there in the same places as some of my other favorites, like Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald. It's a place where thought once roamed, like New York.

But it's been ten years. I'm afraid. Please don't have a Charmucks on every corner.

That Toddlin' Town

My trip to Chicago USA over 4th of July weekend 2010 to see the Cincinnati Reds take on the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. Music by Frank Sinatra and Sufjan Stevens, both songs titled "Chicago." Photos are mine.

I Am a Visitor

I am a visitor in my town.

I am a visitor in my country.

I walk the wide, sterile streets and breathe the hot, sterile air and know that body and soul are two distinct things because I am here but I am there. I can't cross the roads because there's too much order and too many laws. I can't pick my produce because I know inside that big beautiful shell is a genetically engineered lack of flavor. I want my freshly squeezed orange juice and lemonade made from fruits that were grown a few miles from where they're sold. I want my bright Mediterranean sunshine, not this oddly weak light that trickles from the Washington sky. (When it's not raining.)

What is this rush? Why are the people of this city in such a hurry? Where are the people who stop to smell the acacia, the agalinis, and the scarlet pimpernel along the way? Where are those who take the time to appreciate the clean, clean air, who appreciate breathing?

I keep asking myself what time is it there? What are they doing? What is he doing?

And now - a ring. It's funny how a phone call can make you so happy. Just five minutes of Lebanon, five minutes of the voice of my friend, and now I am smiling.

I ordered a dart board today - it should be here in 3-6 business days. I hope it's three. I might enter a tournament held on Labor Day weekend that I discovered when I found the Washington Area Darts Association website. The prize is $10,000. If I practice all summer, I'm sure I could compete. What you see here is a game I won by hitting three bullseyes on the last shot to win the game by two points. The score was 121 to 119 (I had 121) but Amigo had closed his bulls and only needed to hit one to win. I needed to hit three, and I did.

I gave Amigo my Reds t-shirt beer coolie. I brought it to the pub once because the condensation from the beer was making it difficult to play darts and I knew he'd get a kick out of it. So there is at least one Cincinnati Reds item in Lebanon, and he's actually using it.

I'd love to be there right now, drinking Almaza and talking about the wobbly, wobbly world.

At least I have baseball. And this weekend, there will be lots and lots of baseball. The Cincinnati Reds will take on the Washington Nationals. Then on Sunday after the game I get to see the Cincinnati band The National play in Washington.

It's Beirut, no contest

If I were to write out a list of pros and cons about leaving Beirut, you would assume that I'd be ecstatic about returning to Washington.

PROS

• Clean air
• No smoking
• People speaking my language
• Live baseball
• Functional internet
• Clean city
• Sam Adams and varieties in beer
• Indian restaurants and any other kind of food you can think of
• No idiotic honking
• Cars driving between the lines, stopping at traffic lights, and using turn signals
• No Lebanese pop music blaring from cars and stores
• Time zone
• No World Cup insanity
• Not risking death just crossing the street
• Service in restaurants
• Substance over style
• Bike lanes
• More time and structure for work
• Not running all over Beirut trying to get to meetings without a car
• Public transportation
• Will get more than three or four hours of sleep a night
  

CONS

• No Evergreen Pub, no Amigo, no Johnny or General or Ahmed or Issam or Nabil or Ash (when he gets back to Beirut), no more listening to Amigo's excuses for losing at darts
  
• No Hamra - no filthy, beat up, tired old Hamra
• Washington is expensive
• Closing times in bars
• No office view of the Mediterranean, or window in general
• No beach, no sea
• No By the Way Pub or Rock Inn in the wee hours of the morning, no listening to Amigo's life stories or crazy ideas about the world over cardboard steaks or thyme-drenched pastries and laughing about how it's daylight.
• Back to using email instead of having face to face conversations for work
• Same old tired hangouts in DC
  

I used to live for the moment, but I finally found a moment I like and it has to end. C'est la vie.

Circumstance

A yellow crane stands tall amidst the backdrop of a deep blue sky and a tangle of wires and antennae as I sit on my balcony contemplating the string of events throughout my entire life that have led to this moment and how very little I actually had to do with it.

I wasn’t even born when the war started in Beirut, and I grew up with news images depicting an apocalypse in the city in which I now sit. If there had never been a war, there’d be no need to be here. If Hitler hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t be here, for the state of Israel wouldn’t exist and there’d be less conflict in the Middle East. If the Ottomans had won World War I, I wouldn’t be here. If the Crusaders had crushed the Muslims, I wouldn’t be here. If the South had won the American Civil War, I probably wouldn’t be here, either, because the United States would not be the economic powerhouse it is today.

Why is each chapter of history books marked by the beginning or end of another war?

Last night I learned that a friend’s son had been killed in an automobile accident. He was 21 years old. I thought about the circumstances of our friendship and how odd it is that we even met at all – me, a well-educated American and she, a Ukranian whose profession is considered unsavory in most circles of the world. Next week she was supposed to go back to Ukraine for six months. Instead, she is leaving today to go bury her son. What were the circumstances that led him to be in that car at that exact moment? Think of the billions of possibilities that could have put him two seconds behind. He’d have woken up today and his mother would cook him dinner next week.

My friend Ash told me “Time does not exist” but I keep trying to convince him he’s wrong. I tell him “time” is just a word humans created to help them talk about an abstract concept. Human language is so limiting because most human beings are either unwilling or unable to comprehend things that exist outside their minds. They invent things like God to explain away the things they can’t explain and believe words are static and narrow. But Time and God and Fate are all the same unknowable concept. They should be understood as something mathematical, for everything in the world is mathematics. E=mc². Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Our bodies are mathematics, too, just combinations of molecules, chemicals derived from various combinations of electrons and protons and smaller miracles. Mathematics is what distinguishes a human being from an ashtray. (Not a reference to Ash but to a conversation I had with Amigo last night when he tried to tell me there is no difference between a human being and an ashtray.) I’m human because the energy worked to create carbon and hydrogen and oxygen in the right numbers. The ashtray is an ashtray because the energy combined differently to create different elements.

Amigo was right, in a way. Human beings put too much emphasis on words. We call the yellow thing in front of me a crane because it’s a heck of a lot easier to say “crane” than to describe the physics and chemistry that allow it to exist and do the work it does. Mathematics. Look at how we transmit data these days – in series of zeroes and ones. I am listening to a man from Cincinnati sing about our wobbly world at the moment, but his voice isn’t real – it’s just a series of zeroes and ones translated by the miracle of Microsoft.

Oh, the things you talk in a pub about when politics and religion are banned topics of conversation. Anyway, it’s time to go play darts with Ash and Amigo and show them how poor my math skills really are.

Beirut Story

A young man stood beneath the ruins of what had once been a glorious Venetian-style building smoking a cigarette and wearing his idleness proudly upon his sleeve. He watched as the people walked by, watched a fat mother pulling along a crying girl in a bright yellow dress, watched the hijab-clad women walk behind those for whom modesty was no concept, watched the taxis go by leaving trails of exhaust behind them. The relic above him had been spared most war damage but was desecrated by years of neglect and disuse. Trees grew from the crumbling concrete balconies while the street level of the building held a stylish eye glasses shop, a cell phone store, and a tiny market selling useless junk, its windows covered in posters of a politician running for municipal elections who looked suspiciously like Alex Trabek. Flags of various countries competing for the World Cup hung from a rope outside. The American flag was noticeably absent, as it was in all the shops with World Cup displays across Beirut.

“Kifak?’ the young man suddenly shouted in greeting another young man across the street.

“Mneha. Shu fi ma fi?” The newcomer, a light-skinned man in his early twenties, narrowly avoided being hit by a motorscooter driving the wrong direction down a one way street as he walked towards his friend. He ran his hand through his curly hair and laughed.

“Where are you going?” the first man asked in English.

“Library. I have a paper due tomorrow.”

“You always have papers!” he replied laughing.

“Because I study a real subject!” His friend playfully slapped him on the shoulder.

“We go to meet for a drink tonight. Will you come?”

“If I finish. Wayn brooh?”

“Evergreen.”

“Tayib. I will call. Ciao.”

The first young man threw his cigarette butt on the ground as his friend walked away and reached into the pocket of his jeans to start a new one, pulling out a piece of paper with the pack. He mechanically read what was on the paper before throwing it to the ground.

Call me – 71693199 – Molly

Molly was an Irish chick he had met at the pub to whom he had paid a little too much attention. He didn’t like Western women. He told himself this was because they were too sexually liberal, but occasionally he recognized his dislike of the strength and confidence they exuded as a result of Western gender equality. Molly also worked for an international NGO, and he despised these neo-imperialist organizations who felt they needed to “fix” his country.

The old man who ran the small junk shop sat outside it in a white plastic chair. An empty one sat beside him until another man arrived to fill it. He was younger than the shop owner and what remained of his hair was still black. The two of them jabbered on in Arabic for a time before an old man shuffled up and greeted them with boisterous hand gestures that contradicted the limited mobility of his legs. The younger man stood up.

“Sit down,” he said in Arabic as he extended a hand to the place where his corpulent body had been.

“Yislamu, yislamu,” the old man replied in gratitude.

“Ahlan wa sahlan, ahlan wa sahlan. Kifak, ya Fadi?”

“Mneha, alhamdullah.” The conversation continued in Arabic among the three of them with the younger man standing in the middle of the sidewalk, oblivious to pedestrians who had to squeeze by him to pass. The old man pointed to the young man standing idly and smoking another cigarette.

“Look at these young people standing around all day doing nothing. They are spoiled. Their parents provide them with fancy cars and money to go to nightclubs and shopping and they do nothing with their lives. Nothing!”

“But there aren’t enough jobs for all of them,” the younger man replied.

“Of course there are but they won’t do them. Look at the construction works in this city – the Palestinians and the immigrants do the work because the Lebanese young people won’t do it!” He sighed. “This construction. They are destroying Beirut in a different way than the war. They build these skyscrapers that have no soul. I used to be able to see the sea and the mountains from my window. Now I see nothing. Nothing! Only ugly high rises. A tragedy in concrete!”

The shopkeeper lit a cigarette and kicked a candy wrapper on the ground. “I don’t recognize my city anymore. Downtown has no character. I remember running around in the days of my youth. Oh, the nightlife! Now it is Western chain restaurants and exclusive nightclubs for the superficial young people who only care about materialism.”

The old man broke into a song by Lebanon’s most famous chanteuse, Fairouz.

“To Beirut…
From the soul of her people she makes wine,
From their sweat she makes bread and jasmine.
So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?”

His mournful wail was but a pale reflection of Fairouz, but the pain and soul was just as deep. His lamentation was interrupted by the clatter of screeching tires, crunching metal, and angry shouting. Two cars had collided at the intersection. Culpability laid with one of the drivers who had refused to obey the recently installed traffic lights of Beirut. Despite driving through the red light, he still blamed the other driver.

A crowd gathered around the accident, more because it was something that happened rather than out of curiosity. The three men in front of the shop halted their conversation to stare at the scene before them, and the young man gravitated towards the corner because it was something to do. He flicked away his cigarette butt and lit another with the indifference of a child who gets clothes for Christmas.

The owners of the wrecks did not stop yelling even as they exchanged insurance information. They drove away without involving the police and the street returned to its bustling idleness.

“I am out of cigarettes,” the young man told the shopkeeper, who disappeared inside the shop before retuning with a pack. The exchange of money must have triggered something in the young man’s brain, because he took out his mobile and made a call.

“Allo, Fouad? Kifak? Mneha, mneha. Shoof, bedi birooh Costa. Yalla. Ok, see you in a few minutes.” He would meet his friend at the Italian coffee chain. The old man made a sucking sound so typically Lebanese and shook his head.

“See?” he began in Arabic. “The young people are the reason we lose our city. If they do not go to the Western coffee shop and pay four dollars for a fancy Western coffee drink, these chains would not be destroying the soul of Beirut.”

“What do you want?” the younger man asked. “We have war for fifteen years. Where does money come from to rebuild the city?”

“Hariri rebuilt downtown with no regard for the people of Beirut,” the old man replied curtly. “He wanted more money. Money, money, it’s always about money! Money and power! That monstrosity downtown is not a mosque; it’s a temple for Hariri!”

“Hariri, God rest his soul, did much to rescue us from our own destruction,” the shopkeeper replied rather timidly.

“Why did he not rebuild the buildings as they were? Why did he have to take the sea away from the people?”

“He’s not the only one building high rises,” the shopkeeper replied with an arm gesture that mimicked the skyscrapers.

“These rich people, they left like cowards during the war and made money in America and returned to take advantage of Lebanon being weak from the war!” The old man was shouting, but no one seemed to notice. “They cheat their fellow Lebanese. It is shameful. Shameful!”

“They are trying to make reforms,” the shopkeeper said. “Insha’allah, the government will make regulations and…”

“The government! What good is the government? They are all the same people who tried to destroy the country, or they are their sons! What good is the government, I ask you. They are the ones responsible for destroying Beirut during the war and now!”

Neither the shopkeeper nor the younger man could disagree.

“These men are not Lebanese – they’re slaves to the Syrians and the Iranians and the Saudis and the French and the Americans – especially the Americans!”

“Some of them aren’t.”

“Hizbollah are slaves to the Americans, too, because they are obsessed with the Americans! They would rather destroy Lebanon than stop obsessing about the Americans!” The old man threw his hands into the air. “Hizbollah is the whore of Lebanon!”

The younger man could not help but smile at that statement.

“When is Lebanon going to be Lebanon?” the old man continued. “When will we stop being puppets?”

Across the street, a young American sat at an outside table at the locally-owned coffee shop, sipping a cappuccino and trying to follow the conversation across the street with his limited understanding of Lebanese Arabic. His ears had swallowed the word “Amrikiin” and he could not help but listen. Despite being critical of American foreign policy and the materialistic way of life of Americans, he found himself increasingly defending America, which surprised him because he had left his country in disgust.

A young girl who should have been in school approached the American trying to sell him lottery tickets. She would be prevented from growing up to be a beautiful woman by the curse of poverty, a circumstance resulting from the coincidence of her birth as a Palestinian in Lebanon.

“Please sir,” she begged in Arabic. “Please sir, please,” she said as she pushed the lottery tickets under his nose.

“La.”

“Please sir.”

“La. La, la!” Her insistence made him angry. He shooed her away like a stray dog. He pretended to stir his coffee so he didn’t have to see the shame in her desperate eyes. She couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven but had lost the innocence of childhood long ago. As she drifted away the American tried to push guilt from his mind.

“I can’t buy from every beggar who approaches me,” he muttered to himself. “I can’t save them.” His cappuccino was topped with liquid chocolate in a pattern resembling a spiderweb. “We are all trapped in our own way,” he continued. A burly man stared at the muttering American as he walked past the coffee shop, but the American was unfazed by the attention. “Why are there no American flags in the World Cup displays? What kind of propaganda do these people hear?” The burly man disappeared around the corner, but not before the old man spotted him.

“Khalas!” he screamed. “This is one of Hariri’s slaves!” He nodded towards the burly man. “I knew his father. He was a very bad man and so is his son and his friends. They would eat from the floor if Hariri told them to. They cannot think for themselves! All of them are rotten!”

As the old man said nothing further, the younger man said, “Well, I should be going,” and left the shopkeeper to the ramblings of the old man. The American had lost interest in the conversation and was only waiting for his check when a young Lebanese man sat down at his table.

“Alex!” the Lebanese man said.

“Hey, Jad, what’s up?”

“We are going for drinks tonight. Will you come?”

“I don’t know, Jad. Anna and I were planning on dinner…”

“Bring her! And other Alex, too! It will be our own United Nations pub!”

“I just don’t know if I should drink tonight. It’s too much…”

“Every night is good for drinking!”

Alex’s eyes wandered to the flower boxes full of red geraniums that lined the rails of the terrace as if they reminded him of something painful in his past.

“We’ll see,” was his reply. “These damn Lebanese waiters! I just want my check. Where is he?”

The old man across the street was right about the young people. Jad supposedly had a job but there he was a 3pm cloaked in overpriced jeans and an overpriced t-shirt that said “LOOK AT ME!” in large silver letters. It should have been the uniform for these elite youth. Jad’s position was supposedly that of “graphic designer,” the typical program of study for these elites who couldn’t be bothered to work hard or dirty their hands. Rather than building the country, they played around on computers all day holding the most inane conversations on social media sites in bad English and broken Arabic using the bizarre linguistic system that mixed the Latin alphabet and Western numbers rather than using Arabic script.

“You are in a bad mood; this is the reason to have a drink!”

A bus rolled by with two boys in pinstriped uniforms dancing in the aisle with no concern for the movement of their dance floor. They would grow up to be like Jad.

“Fine, I’ll go, but not for very long.”

“You always say that.” Jad stood to go and made the slightest of hand motions, prompting the waiter to come to the table. Alex paid his check and included a tip despite the poor service. As he wandered down the street and out of sight, he muttered curses about the Lebanese people and the chaos and filth in which they lived.

A walking disaster

I have been in Lebanon for a mere three and a half months, and it has really sought to destroy me. In that short amount of time, I have:

• Had food poisoning four times, once for a whole week that made Montezuma seem merciful.
• Had several respiratory infections, two of which were pretty bad, one of which I tried to ignore and ended up passing it on to Amigo, who didn’t open his bar one Saturday night because he was so sick.
• Had shoulder tendonitis from playing darts – that was at the beginning. Apparently after playing so much for so many weeks, I have strengthened whatever tendons were inflamed and don’t have that problem any more.
• Hurt my back to the point where I couldn’t sit for more than an hour at a time without unbearable pain. I don’t know how I hurt it, but I think it was when I tripped over some random metal thing sticking out of a sidewalk.
• Had numbness in my left hand for a still unidentified reason.
• And the latest – Yesterday as I was walking home from the office, I turned to look at the progress made at the construction site next to the Roman columns downtown when suddenly I felt like my legs had been blown off at the knees. Turns out it was only a very hard park bench. Today not one but both knees are swollen enough that it hurts to walk.

What a mess.

World Cup Fever in Lebanon - it's an illness

I'm not much of a soccer fan. I mean, I played in high school and did some coaching, so it's not like I don't like the sport. It's just that I don't follow it. That being said, I do get excited for the World Cup. Last World Cup I watched the US lose to Ghana in the middle of Times Square. I remember going downstairs to the hotel bar at lunch to watch games with work colleagues and going to the Lucky Bar in DC to watch a couple of games.

But I am disturbed by what I find here in Beirut. World Cup flags are everywhere - every store sells World Cup merchandise, and it seems one out of five cars has a flag flying from its window. It's quite strange that people would be flying the flags of other countries like this. I mean, it's one thing to say you favor France or Italy because they have good players. It's another thing to detail your entire car with Brazil-related pictures, unless, of course, you are Brazilian. But when you're from a small dysfunctional country like Lebanon with no decent professional soccer league and you have no hope in hell of ever getting into the World Cup, what do you do? Cling to the role of the conquered you've played for nearly your entire existence by embracing the neo-imperialist flags of capitalism? While Lebanese people spout off their diatribes about the Evil West(TM), they've been suckered into one of the largest capitalist events in the world.

What's even more disturbing to me is the fact that of all the flags for sale, you can't find a single Stars and Stripes. I tell you what, that pisses me off more than anything I've experienced in this country. (Also notice the Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden masks in the window.) It's not America's fault they can't get along with each other. I'm tired of America being blamed for all the world's problems. We have our problems yes and we are aggressive, and when I'm in the US, I am very vocal and critical about these problems, so it's strange for me to have to defend my country in a way that mimics the America First crowd. But come on. America isn't the one keeping the Shia on the lower rungs of the food chain. America isn't the one preventing Palestinians from being able to work and live outside of concentration camps in Lebanon. We aren't the ones who created the culture of corruption and nepotism that keeps Lebanon from developing into a fully functional democracy. And we don't tolerate swastikas.

It took all I had not to egg this car sitting under my balcony. I had an egg in my hand. I thought of leaving a note on the window saying something like "$#@! you, you nazi scum." Well, at least the thought of doing it made me feel a little better about having to see that thing every day.

Racists are cowards, the lowest of the low, mangy stray dogs who rummage in the garbage bins of human existence, and racism is sadly a part of Lebanese national culture. Mein Kampf is not only readily available in the bookstores of Beirut, but it is proudly displayed in the windows of the shops. Hitler, who is responsible for the death of 50-70 million people because he waged World War II, is a hero to many Lebanese. Please, please don't glorify this demon.

Does Israel suck? Yes, yes it does. The State of Israel is one of the world's most evil regimes, right up there with the Iranian nutjobs and the North Korean psychopath. But pointing fingers and wallowing in self-pity and hatred has never changed the world except for the worse. Until the Lebanese people stop tolerating swastikas and other forms of hatred, conflict will be a regular visitor to the country. Man up, Lebanon! Show some courage! Seek peace!

Hamra to Achrafieyeh on foot

A few images from my walk to the office today:

1. Shoddy electricity infrastructure.
2. A typical view of Hamra Street, complete with motorscooter and taxi.
3. The rare corner with not just one, but two street signs.
4. Hollywood commemorates movie stars, Hamra commemorates businesses.
5. A building in the Solidaire district that I like.
6. Beirut's new skyscrapers take the soul out of the city.

How did you spend your weekend?

The sea between the land, the Mediterranean, no matter from what side I see it I find something resembling contentment. It's there for me in all its blue glory, waiting for the weekends when I can tumble down to its sandy existence, its boundless sunshine falling onto my skin, bringing the joyful hue of life in full appreciation lost to so many who take their breathing for granted.

I sat there on the sand reading Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night and listening to The National's new song Bloodbuzz Ohio, a song about being from Ohio but not being able to connect to it when you're back there, like that was some other life in a dream or a nightmare or something in between, a song in which the singer calls it home even as he's crooning about it feeling like getting stung by a swarm of bees. I looked up and noticed that instead of landing like they usually do when I sit on the beach, the planes were taking off, leaving Beirut. Appropriate. Despite the filth and the chaos and the dysfunction and the insanity and the self-absorption, the thought of leaving Beirut in five weeks invokes a physical reaction not unlike the food poisoning I've had about four or five times since I've been here.

Saturday was beautiful, the clearest day since I've been here, I think, and I could see all the way to South Lebanon. All I could think about was what lies beyond the last land I could see, that entity known as Israel. Suddenly, as I stared out at the Mediterranean waves turning over, glistening in the sun like the only gold that should matter, a rage ripped through me and the contentment was gone, replaced by the violence of hate and despair.

I watched a sand crab a few feet from me crawl sideways back into the hole he was digging. He crawled out again with legs full of sand, which he threw into a pile before disappearing into the hole again to repeat the process. I looked down the beach and saw other crabs doing the same thing, and I watched the human beings step on their holes, their homes, destroying all the work the crabs had done. And I suddenly felt like I needed to save the whole world, starting with that one crab hole a few feet from me.

But I suppose it's not sudden. I suppose I've always felt that way.

Nice

Well, this is a pleasant surprise. For 25 euros a night, I get this place. Seriously. And the weather is perfect. And you don't have to wear shoes to the bar. Suddenly, I'm lamenting I only get two days here.

The flight was strange. The trip began with my bartender friend Amigo calling a taxi to the airport for me so I could have one I could trust and not get ripped off. I got to the airport waaaaaaay too early - more than two hours early, and there was no one there. I didn't have to wait in lines, not to pick up my boarding pass, not to go through security, and only had to wait two people to get through passport control. So I played on the internet and drank Almaza, contemplating the vast quantities of beers I've consumed in airports across the world to calm m y frantic nerves. Finally, it was time to board, then we were up in the air.

Photos from Cyprus - with music!

So I recently discovered the Windows Movie Maker program that was pre-installed on my computer, and I find not only is it soooooo much better than posting each photo individually, but I can also add music to make the viewing experience more...how should I put it? Like you're there, too? The video is eight and a half minutes long, but I hope you'll watch the whole thing. Make sure you have the sound turned on.

I arrived on Friday night to Larnaca. The flight was strange. I got to the Beirut airport waaaaaaay too early - more than two hours early, and there was no one there. I didn't have to wait in lines, not to pick up my boarding pass, not to go through security, and only had to wait two people to get through passport control. So I played on the internet and drank Almaza, contemplating the vast quantities of beers I've consumed in airports across the world to calm my frantic nerves. Finally, it was time to board, then we were up in the air. Then we were down. The fasten seatbelt sign was off for about five minutes. Note to airport designers - will you stop making runways next to large bodies of water? It's not very comfortable feeling like you're landing in the sea.

It was after 10pm by the time I got to my hotel. I was there for five minutes before heading out to find something to eat. It was Good Friday, so I wasn't sure I'd find anything. I wandered around the darkened streets of Laranca, not sure where I was going, or even where I was, but I eventually found a fish taverna and had fresh red mullet, fried potatoes, and a Mythos beer. It was a lovely dinner.

In the morning I was up to wander around Larnaca for a bit, heading over to the town square where St. Lazarus Church is located, which you see in the video. Everything was quite festive, as Easter is very important to Greek Cypriots (it is, after all, the whole point of Christianity.) I was on the road to Ayia Napa by 11am, checked into my hotel by noon, and on the beach by 1pm after a nice pork kabob lunch (photo in the video). But I wasn't content to just roast in the sun on the beach - I was in a new country, and I wanted to explore. Cyprus beaches are perfect for such exploration, as there are no privately owned beaches and you can walk for miles and miles and miles along the beach - there's even a very nice walking path that connects each beach and each town.

In wandering the beaches, I discovered an archeological site containing tombs used by the ancient Greeks and later the Romans and a sanctuary. For me, this was thrilling - history on the beach? The area surrounding the cemetery consisted of odd rock formations. I wondered if it were an ancient coral reef. Of course, I was climbing all over it like a playground.

Then I hit the white sands of Micronissis Beach, then Golden Beach, then Nissi Beach, then more beaches. It was two or three miles before I hit the harbor of Ayia Napa. Now, you have to understand, walking 2-3 miles is not a big deal - I walk 2 miles to work and 2 miles back several times a week. But walking 2-3 miles on mostly sand is another matter. I was tired. I needed a beer, so I had one before heading back to the hotel through the town, stopping for a dinner of fish and chips along the way. Lots of English on the island, as Cyprus was once a British colony (the fate of so many nations in the world.) They even drive on the wrong side of the road, but they do it in a civilized manner, nothing like the chaos of Lebanon.

It was Saturday, so I wanted to return to the town to find a pub with a dartboard (Amigo still beats me nearly every time, but he now likes playing with me because it's competitive and he never lets me win anymore.) I found out from the hotel bartender that there was a midnight mass on the town square with fireworks, so that's where I went. It was only about 10pm when I got there, so I wandered around for a bit, watching people celebrate Easter with fireworks and bonfires and even the kids were running around at such a late hour. The start of the mass was actually about 11:30pm; I watched men ringing the church bells, hanging on a rope that was connected to the belltower of the monastery which sat next to the main town church, and then I went to the church itself. I've never experienced an Orthodox mass, so I got in line and went into the church with a lit candle like everyone else. The church was full, so those of us in line walked in, set our candles in some sand, and left the church, but for the minute or two I was in the church, I was fascinated. The whole mass is sung (in Greek) by men (priests?) who are sitting down, and it was played over speakers in the square so those who couldn't fit into the church could hear it. It was all quite beautiful.

Right before midnight the priest and other church officials led the congregation to the stage on the main square and finished the mass. At midnight, the church bells rang out and then fireworks were let off. Afterward, I found a great British pub on the square that served...gasp...DRAFT Guinness and Slovakians playing darts. I played them and won.

The next morning I ate my English breakfast and luckily found a bike rental place that was open - it was Easter Sunday, after all. Because it was Easter and the guy would be closing early, I got to keep the bike until Monday morning, all for 4.50 euros. The other great thing about the Cyprus coast aside from the walking path is the separate bike lanes all the way down the coast. It was perfect.

The whole bad world melted away as I rode the bicycle along the coast of the Mediterranean, further and further from the tourist town, past the white sandy beaches to the rocky Eastern coast, all the way to the end of the walking path where the terrain was too rough to walk or ride. Still I continued, pushing the bike across rocks until I couldn't push any more. And then, I found one of the most perfect spots in the entire world, a cove with a flat rock floor where I could sit while having the candy blue waters of the Med wash over me with nothing but the sound of waves to harass my ears. It was total seclusion.

I had to scramble down the rocks to get to this spot. In the video you can see these rocks and the tiny bicycle perched at the top. I spent perhaps an hour there before getting back to the bike, backtracking a bit, and finding the road to the town of Protaras, another 5km away. I took a different way back, going to Cape Greco, riding through a park full of none other than Cyprus trees. I saw birds I've never seen and flowers of divine colors and I kept shaking my head because the blue of the sea is such that you can't believe your eyes. The bike path was high above the sea and everything was so wonderful.

Then the chain came off as I was changing gears.

Good thing I know a thing or two about bicycles. I turned the thing over and put it back on. Grease was everywhere, but I was back on the bike and heading back to Ayia Napa, exhausted but content.

Now, because ethnic food in Lebanon is limited, I was craving Mexican food. You don't know how much of something you take for granted until you can't have it. I hadn't realized how often I eat Mexican food in the US. But I forgot that you should never eat Mexican food outside of the Western hemisphere, because no one knows how to properly prepare it. You don't use kebab chicken for burritos. You don't use ketchup as the base for your sauce. You put hot sauce on the tables, or at least have it available. Margaritas use tequila.

Oh well, at least the guacamole was good. I went back to the hotel after that and went to bed early. Well, to bed, not to sleep. I flipped on the television and found Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on (Johnny Depp version), so I watched that and fell asleep before 10pm. (Give me a break - I haven't been on a bike in a year, and I rode nearly 30 miles in one day.)

English breakfast again in the morning, then off to Nicosia. I stayed at the Hilton, supposedly a five star hotel, but no way it's five stars in the US or Beirut. Sure, it was nice - if I had a bed like that I'd never get out of it - but I couldn't find a difference between it and a Holiday Inn in a smaller city in the US. Still, no complaints, aside from how they charged for EVERYTHING. I suppose that's why the price of the room was shockingly affordable. At least it came with a free bottle of wine - but 15 euro to use the internet for 24 hours? And that burger I had for dinner on Monday? It may have been wonderful, but it was SIXTEEN EURO. Oh well, the things I do for Cincinnati Reds baseball.

It was about 1pm by the time I got to the heart of Nicosia. I wandered around for about four hours - it was plenty of time. I had a whole other day on Tuesday to see everything else. Besides, it was a holiday. No, not Easter Monday (although many things were closed for that.) It was OPENING DAY! I got back to the hotel around 5pm and turned on WLW. The game wasn't to start for three hours, but the festivities were apparent on the radio, even if I did have to suffer through that asshole Bill Cunningham.

Then, the game! And the internet connection was great! It was a disappointing ending, and Dusty Baker lost that one (Mike Lincoln for two innings? Come on.) By the time Molina hit the grand slam in the ninth inning, it felt like Baker had already given up.

Tuesday morning I went to the National Museum. It was truly a great museum. They had stuff in there from 6000 BC and from every interesting archeological period up to the Byzantine era. So much of it was in marvelous condition, as if thousands of years hadn't passed since these things had been created. It was one of the better archeological museums I've ever seen.

After that, I headed to North Nicosia, having to stand in line to get a "visa" to this fake country. (The only country in the world that recognizes the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus" is Turkey.) Standing in line felt like I was somewhere in England - everyone there was English. Apparently a lot of them live in Northern Cyprus because it's cheap (the UK is so expensive to live in that this happens in many countries - Bulgaria is one of these.)

North Nicosia is run down and obviously much poorer than the South. As my taxi driver said on the way to the airport, it's like South Nicosia twenty years ago. It had some interesting sites, mostly mosques that used to be churches, typical of the Ottoman world. Mostly it just kind of made me sad. Conflict is so stupid. I especially hate conflict over different versions of the sky genie.

When I had seen everything there was to see in North Nicosia, at least everything within walking distance, I headed back to the south and wandered around a bit. I wanted to find a supermarket to see if I could get a few things I can't get in Beirut, but oddly enough, I couldn't find a supermarket. I walked for about an hour and didn't find one. (Yeah, I could have asked someone, but I kept thinking "there has to be one up here, around this corner, down this street..."

A very odd thing happened as we descended into Beirut. I felt relief. I felt glad to be back in Beirut. I felt like I was going home. I set my things down in my room and headed out to the pub. And then Amigo proceeded to beat me four of six times in darts.

Some photos of Beirut's Corniche