Lebanese Lovin’

I spent this past week in Beirut, where the internet crawls along at 1998-era dial-up speeds (hence the lack of blogging) but the views of the Mediterranean from your hotel room balcony aren’t too shabby:

It’s a trade-off, I suppose.

Beirut’s a funny place. If you’ve never spent time in the Middle East, the images you associate with the city probably come straight from a CNN newsreel: Hezbollah rallies. Bombed-out buildings. Political assassinations. Israeli airstrikes. Palestinian refugee camps. Back in another life, I even had a French boyfriend who used the phrase “on dirait Beyrouth” - “looks like Beirut” - to describe anything destroyed or decrepit.

But when you live in this part of the world, especially in a place like Dubai, Beirut is a lush oasis featuring every civilized attribute the nouveau riche Gulf countries lack. Good restaurants that aren’t in hotels! The actual presence of indigenous culture! Buildings that were built before 1990! (Even if they are pockmarked with bullet holes… hey, it adds character.) Beers that cost less than $10! Cool Mediterranean breezes instead of incessant hair-dryer hot sandblasts from the Gulf!

Beirut is also the city that first got me interested in the Middle East - I blame reading Thomas Friedman’s From Beirut to Jerusalem as a wide-eyed 20 year-old for most of what has transpired in the ensuing decade - so I jump at the opportunity to visit every time I have an excuse to go.

And honestly, with scenery like this, can you blame me?

I mean, you know, there’s also scenery like this:

(The erstwhile Holiday Inn, which was a prime sniper perch during the civil war in the 1970s and hence was on the receiving end of… well, uh, whatever weapons leave holes that big.)

But again, trade-off.

While I wouldn’t want to live in Beirut (the developing-world dysfunction and the men - oh, the lecherous, fawning, harass-the-shit-out-of-anything-with-lady-parts Lebanese men! - are pretty much deal-breakers for me), it’s a great place to get away to, and there’s much to love.

The food:

(Saj with mortadella and halloumi, featuring fresh herbs and tomatoes that were actually grown in-country as opposed to shipped from 3,000 miles away, which is the case for all produce we get in Dubai.)

The shisha:

(I know I’ve spent years convincing Americans to call it shisha rather than hookah, but this is the part where I have to thicken the plot a little bit and reveal that in the Levant, it’s actually called arguileh… confused yet?)

The beer:

(Coming from the teetotaling my-way-or-the-highway Muslim states of the Gulf, it always soothes my soul to see a country in this part of the world producing its own beer… as Frank Zappa said, you can’t be a real country without it.)

The ample opportunities for backgammon, a.k.a. tawla:

And, of course, the patriotism:

So much patriotism. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Lebanese person in Lebanon or abroad who didn’t hold a near-evangelical conviction that they come from the best country / society / culture in the world.

And honestly - if we overlook a couple civil wars, a few collapsed governments, a skirmish or two with Israel, and a pesky US State Department travel warning here and there - who can blame them?