In Beirut

I In Beirut
On 15 December 2012 I took my very first steps on Lebanese soil.
At last, a dream I had cherished most of my life was coming true.
Lebanon had been the country of my childhood nights. In the
eighties my parents started their evenings with the news bulletin,
and as a boy, I joined them in this ritual. Night after night, while
sipping my pre-bedtime warm milk and gingerbread, I watched as
buildings turned into skeletons. In the background the gunfire of
snipers ricocheted while people ran across streets for shelter, for
dear life. This was Beirut during the Civil War, constantly on the
international news in those days. At the time I had no understanding
of what I was witnessing, but the images stuck in my mind as I grew
older. Through the years, my curiosity about Beirut grew. I yearned
to travel to Lebanon to discover the country and its capital with my
own eyes. What had become of this city, this nation, the people I
had seen huddling to escape the snipers, more than twenty years
after the end of the bloody Civil War?
It took a long time for my dream to come true. Not by choice.
In 2006, I had firm travel plans in place when the Lebanese
Hezbollah movement (literally ‘Party of God’) showered rockets
onto Israel. The Southern neighbour’s brutal retaliation struck
Lebanon heavily. Apart from military targets and civil ‘Hezbollah
areas’, the Israeli fire also destroyed bridges and power plants.
Once again, Lebanon was left in darkness, in a very literal sense.
22 Lebanon 24/7

The media famously portrayed the young Lebanese jet set driving
through the battered capital in a sporty red convertible, flaunting
trendy sunglasses and expensive outfits, the wind in their hair.
The war with Israel caused me to cancel my trip, but this odd
cliché caught my attention and intrigued me even more. I had to
go to Beirut, no matter what.
Everything went smoothly once I landed at the small, modern
Rafiq Hariri airport. The signs at customs seemed absurd to me:
Lebanese in the left lane, Arabs in the right. As if Lebanese people
weren’t Arabs. It was only later that I discovered that many Lebanese
people feel Phoenician, claiming as their ancestors the Phoenicians
who inhabited the land from 1500 BC. This learned group
settled in the city of Byblos, north of Beirut, and developed one of
the world’s first alphabets (which forms the basis of our alphabet).
Recent DNA research has proved the Lebanese right; the majority
are indeed genetically related to the Phoenicians, rather than to
the Arabs. A collective sigh of relief was breathed all over Lebanon
when this news broke.
From my past travels through Egypt I had found taxi drivers in the
Arab world to be lying, cheating thieves. Once, in Cairo, a driver
told me he had no change, but only after taking my banknotes. He
then forced me out of the car. So I arrived in Beirut as a cautious
man, to say the least. I ignored the men shouting ‘taxi, taxi’ in
the arrival hall (who tend to be the crooks) and went outside to
the official taxi rank. There I found a driver who said he knew
my hotel and offered a fair price to take me there. Off we drove,
into the busy late night traffic, in a ‘free style’ that immediately
reminded me of Egypt. It was my first experience of what I later
realised were the driving rules of every Lebanese driver: overtake
from the left or right on the highway? Fine. Take up two lanes? Be
I In Beirut
23

our guest. Force your priority at a crossroad? Sure, if your car is
bigger than the others, that’s your right. Indeed nobody follows
the actual rules, neither in traffic nor in anything else for that
matter. My driver was very talkative. He spoke elementary French
and sometimes used a few English words. He couldn’t get over the
fact that I had chosen Lebanon as my holiday destination. ‘Pourquoi
Liban? Pourquoi?’ he kept repeating. Ordinary Lebanese
workers like him can’t imagine foreigners visiting their country
by choice.
From the airport the road led us through the Hezbollah ‘controlled’
district of Dahieh, to the heart of the city. When I spotted the famous
mosque with the blue domes which was beautifully depicted on
the cover of my travel guide, I knew we had reached the centre
and that my hotel wouldn’t be far now. The final leg however, took
longer than the drive from airport to the city. At a snail’s pace
the car crept through a street bursting with bars, restaurants and
nightclubs that all looked very inviting. Double-parked vehicles
and a constant flow of cars trying to enter or leave a parking space,
meant that we came to a halt every few metres. The air was filled
with the noise of impatient tooting from the line of cars. I didn’t
see the red convertible with the jet set youngsters, but what I did
see was everything I had dreamed Beirut to be: energetic, alive, a
city that never sleeps. The taxi driver pointed out a few nightclubs
that had an entrance fee of about a hundred dollars (I found out
later that he wasn’t exaggerating). He didn’t drop me off in front of
my hotel. That was complicated, he said. Little did I know then that
a lot of things were complicated in this country. I meekly accepted
his directions and starting walking, to find out that my driver had
not been lying to me – on the contrary. When I arrived at my hotel,
I realised the one-way traffic would have forced the taxi to take a
huge detour that, in this traffic, would easily have lost him an hour.
24 Lebanon 24/7

On top of that, the entrance turned out to be in a small, pedestrian
side street of the charming Rue Pasteur. A sign instructed visitors
to go down the stone steps for the ‘Saifi Urban Gardens’. On the
steps I heard lively Arabic music. A band was performing in Em
Nazih, the vibrant café next door. A young crowd was dancing;
everywhere you could smell the shisha, the water pipe. Almost
none of the women wore a hijab, while most men sported a fa -
shionable barber-trimmed beard. Now I really felt I was in
Lebanon. The man in the hotel lobby handed me the key to my
room, which turned out to be exactly thirty steps from the café’s
dance floor. Yet I fell asleep quickly, exhausted from my trip, the
Arabic music rocking me as I drifted off. I felt euphoric – overwhelmed
by how surreal it was. At the same time things couldn’t
get any more real than this. I was in Beirut, at last.
I In Beirut
25