Friday, September 24, 2010

Dear Chase MasterCard

I LIVE IN BULGARIA! That is in Europe. So when I make a purchase in "Austria????" that is not as ridiculous as you think, especially because I have told you on a monthly basis for the last year that I LIVE IN BULGARIA, and Bulgaria is Europe. So when your fraud detection shuts off my card because I bought gasoline in "Croatia????", that's not even as far as when I drove my car from Montana to Denver. It seems far, because it's Europe, but it's not, because I live there. Here, actually. I live in Europe.
Do you remember last month, when I told you "I LIVE IN EUROPE," and you very politely (thanks for that, by the way) told me that this time, you've really made a note in my account? Do you remember that? Because it was kind of like the month before. And kind of like last August. And last September. And last November. Quite a bit like last December, in fact. Vaguely similar to January and February too. I appreciate that your employees are polite, because we chat more than I do with most of my family.  I hope your computer system has room for a lot of notes. Lots of notes in there.

Also, I think it is pretty neat when your fraud detection system decides that a purchase I made in Austria was clearly fraudulent, so it locks down the card. (You've gotten pretty good at doing that.) It's extra helpful that you don't tell me you've done this, because it makes a fun detective game on a Friday night trying to figure out why I can't buy something this time.  You earn high marks for cleverness, by the way, by also keeping this a secret from your first-level call center representatives (who are polite, by the way). They are definitely not to be trusted. Sure, they can take the hold off my account for the purchase I just tried to make, but they too will be surprised when even after they've "fixed" it, the card still doesn't work, because you've placed the card on triple-secret probation. That's very secure, so thanks for that. 
Just to keep things interesting, I appreciate how your fraud detection system didn't have a problem with me buying gas in Tirana, Albania (nothing weird about that), but CROATIA? Someone surely stole my card! And what diligence: good on you for not believing me when I called you after the fact and verified that it was in fact, me buying gas in Croatia. Surely any crook could call your fraud center and know my social security number, ZIP code, date of birth, and mother's maiden name. I couldn't trick you guys -- so you made me also respond to an email the next day.  If there's anywhere short of Fort Knox that's secure, it is certainly my Yahoo email account. No thieves or Nigerian Lottery winners allowed.
If I were allowed to buy anything with my Chase mastercard, I'd use it to send you a thank-you present as a token of my appreciation.  I'd buy you a map to hang on your call-center wall, and circle Bulgaria. Maybe I'd even circle Europe, because that's where I live.
Thanks.
-Guy living in Bulgaria

Sunday, September 12, 2010

The Amazing Race - U2 Edition

Sunday Night, 10pm
Current location: Beirut, Lebanon
The Clue: get to a U2 concert 24 hours from now, then be back to work in Sofia, Bulgaria on Tuesday morning. Use every form of transport possible. The team that does not get to work on Tuesday morning might get fired. Bonus points for seeing the opening band.

Only flight from Beirut to Istanbul (that we could afford): Monday at 7 AM.

With no more than 4 hours of sleep per night since we left for our trip to Beirut (see these two posts from Jeff for all the details of our stay in Beirut: here and here), Jeff and I bade goodbye to Beirut and our friends Andris and Prairie to catch a 5 AM cab to the Beirut airport on Monday morning.  We had about 2.5 hours of sleep this night.  The streets of Beirut were very sleepy on a Monday morning.  So were we.  The flight from Beirut to Istanbul was uneventful.  I read.  Jeff managed to sleep a little bit. TRANSPORT: plane.

We arrived at Sabiha Gokcen International Airport on the Asian side of Istanbul at around 9 AM.  This was about an hour away from the European part of Istanbul and where we had a hotel.  Although Jeff had some information on transit options from this airport, we still had a hard time finding the right bus as few of them were labeled.  Luckily, Jeff is much more outgoing than I am, so he asked a couple of different people and got us on the right bus.  After about 50 minutes we were let off at the bus and ferry station. TRANSPORT: bus.


Having had no breakfast yet (except a small snack on the plane), we were immediately drawn to the pretzel stand and then to the doner stand.  With our bellies temporarily full, we headed into the madness of a bus and ferry station on a Monday morning.  We went to several wrong ticket booths: one for the buses, one for a tour ferry, a confusing electronic ticket dispenser, and finally found a person to sell us the tokens to get on the ferry across the Bosphorus to European Istanbul. A mere 1.5 Turkish Lira each (about $1).  Seated on an upper deck outside, we enjoyed watching as our ferry dodged the innumerable cargo boats headed to and from the Golden Horn of Istanbul.  Not a bad price for a cruise from Asia to Europe. TRANSPORT: ferry.


Off the boat into a tram for another 1.5 Turkish Lira each and we were off to Sultanahmet, the touristy area of Istanbul that we both have been to before (Jeff 2 more times than me with friends and family).  We got off the tram near the Hagia Sofia and Blue Mosque and walked the rest of the way to our hotel hoping fervently that our room was ready (it was only about noon) so we could take a nap before working on actually getting our tickets to the night's show.  Hallelujah!  The room was available.  And quite nice!  A lovely place called the Tashkonak Hotel.  Next it was time for a 3-hour nap. TRANSPORT: tram/train, by foot.


Luckily we set an alarm because we were both so exhausted that we passed out completely in our comfy bed at Tashkonak.  Our next task was to figure out where to get our tickets. We had already purchased them online, but we'd gotten mixed messages about where we should actually pick them up: the first message said we HAD to get them at the stadium, and the second email said that we could NOT get them at the stadium, but instead had to get them at a Biletix outlet near Taksim Square.  Considering that Ataturk Olympic Stadium was generally agreed to be in the middle of nowhere, and our most recent email said go to the Ticketmaster-owned Biletix, we decided to try that first.  We walked again to the tram, rode it to the end of the line, and hopped on the nearest (OK, the only) funicular to get to Taksim Square (we love funiculars!).  Arriving at insanely-busy Taksim Square we navigated our way out by following the trolley rails to the bookstore that had the Biletix outlet.  And a line coming out the door.  It was 5:15 PM. Opening band Snow Patrol was supposed to go on stage at 7:30 PM.  We did not expect to wait in line here. TRANSPORT: tram/train, by foot, funicular.


I grabbed a spot in the line while Jeff went and asked a bunch of people if this was the right line.  Or at least tried.  Many people did not speak English, but he was lucky enough to find a group who spoke English that told him they had been in the line for 1.5 hours already!  And they weren't even in the door to the bookstore yet!  Was the line even moving? This is when we started worrying.  Were we going to miss U2?!  After all we did to make this happen?!  I tried to be optimistic and assumed the people he talked to were just exaggerating.  An hour later Jeff went to get us some food.  He asked more people and everyone seemed to think we were in the right place.  We wondered if we should just get to the stadium and hope our tickets were there, but we decided that since we were already in line and had waited an hour we might as well see it through.  Plus the stadium was really far away and we'd really be in trouble if we got there and needed to get our tickets from here. Meanwhile we were trying to figure out how to actually get to the stadium which by some accounts was 2 hours away.  After waiting in line for 2.5 miserable hours, we handed over our reservation number only to have the nice man (only one guy running this show) tell us he couldn't help us.  We had to go to the stadium.

Both of us almost burst into tears right there.  I stormed out and Jeff followed me wondering if I was going to go postal.  I was seething!  How did it take so damn long for the line to move?! It's a pretty simple process: I want/have a reservation for a ticket.  Here's my money/reservation confirmation.  Print ticket.  Bye bye, have fun at the show!  Seriously!  How was that line so impossibly slow?!  And why were we stupid enough to stay in it all that time?  It was 7:30 PM.  Snow Patrol was on.  Damn. U2 was on in an hour and a half.  Double-damn. Could we get to the stadium in time to see this band that I've been dreaming of seeing for over 20 years?!  TRANSPORT: none.


I wanted to cry, but I also knew that that wasn't going to help us get to the show.  So we speed-walked back to the Square in hopes of getting a taxi.  But no one spoke English and no one had any idea where we wanted to go.  U2? Really? You haven't heard of the biggest band to ever play a concert in Istanbul? There are posters all over town. Whatever. The subway then.  So down, down, down into the bowels of Istanbul.  Two stops down the line, then up, up, up to find a bus to Yenibosna where we might be able to find another bus for the concert or maybe could grab a taxi.  As we were searching for the right bus, we found a couple of Turkish guys that were also heading to the concert, so we asked if we could latch on to them to make sure we didn't get lost (they admitted to not knowing how to get there either, but at least they spoke Turkish!).  The bus slowly got so packed that we couldn't move but we suffered from the smell of humanity for 14 stops to get to Yenibosna.  Off the bus we asked our new Turkish "friends" if we could share a taxi with them.  And let me tell you, I wish I'd gotten this taxi driver's card, because if I ever need to get anywhere in Istanbul, this guy will get me there.  I've never been in a car that had such an aggressive driver.  He kept calling someone who was paying attention to the traffic for the concert, so we new there was a nasty traffic jam at the stadium.  But that didn't faze this guy.  In and out of traffic.  Driving down the shoulder.  Pushing his way past vehicles 10 times his size.  More in and out of traffic.  Driving off an exit then back on an on-ramp, just to pass a few cars. Suddenly he decided to go the other direction, then into some side streets. Not really side streets, actually, but a small village. Where was this village in the greater metropolitan Istanbul area? Who knows?  Jeff and I had no idea where we were.  I guess that was good because I would have started freaking out if I knew he was going AWAY from the stadium.  But somehow he wound his way through some neighborhoods and business parks and finally, there it was.  The stadium in all its glory.  And hardly anyone there!  It was after 9 PM and it looked like absolutely nothing was happening in the stadium and that it was barely half-full (is this the right place??). And the friendly Turkish guys didn't even let us pay for part of the taxi ride! TRANSPORT: subway, bus, craziest/best taxi ride ever.


But we still didn't have tickets.  This is when we started joking about the amazing race and the title of this post was born.  From one person to the next we kept asking "official" looking people where we were supposed to go to pick up our tickets.  No, not this booth, you have to go to K section.  You should run, they might be closing.  We ran. No, not here.  Try the next gate.  Hmmmm.  I'm not sure.  OK, I'll let you in here.  No, this is not the right place.  ARGH!  Now I know what it's like to want to pull your hair out.  Finally, a nice young man actually walked with us to the correct booth - he even said that no one there really knew what was going on.  Truly the organization of this show was pretty dismal.  So, at about 9:45 PM we FINALLY had our tickets in hand.  Just had to walk half-way around the stadium to get to our seats.  And U2 wasn't playing yet, so we didn't miss any of their show.  Too bad about Snow Patrol - no bonus points for us.  I wanted to see them and this was their last show on the U2 tour.  Such is life or "такъв е жхвотът" in Bulgarian.  TRANSPORT: by foot - walking and running.


You have to see this stadium to believe it.  It looks like either it's still under construction or that it's been left to rot.  It looks like it could be a beautiful place for shows, but it is in pretty bad condition.  I guess it was finished in 2002 in hopes of winning the bid for the 2008 Olympics, but has been rarely used.  It seats almost 80,000 and certainly has the capacity for 100,000 with standing on the floor.  But tonight it was only half-full.  50,000 people showed up to see U2, but it seemed so much smaller than that ("only" 50,000, on their first time ever playing in Turkey, with the cheapest tickets on the whole European tour?!?).  There were barely any people sitting in our section but there were people sitting in our seats.  On any other day I probably would've just sat somewhere else.  Not today.  Today we went through so much to get those tickets, no one but Jeff and I were going to sit in those two seats.  The girl I made move certainly gave me a look like I was an idiot, but how was she to know what a crazy day I had?  We made it.  TRANSPORT: by foot, with beer in hand.


OMG! U2! LIVE!  Need I say more? :)  Almost a week later and I'm still thrilled by it.  In fact, as Jeff and I were discussing who would write the Beirut blog and who would write the U2 blog, he said something along the lines of, "That smile every time U2 is mentioned means you're doing the U2 blog."  I'll put the set list at the end if anyone is interested.  OMG!  It was awesome!  Some of my younger coworkers here who think I'm an old fuddy-duddy since I don't go out that often would not have believed their eyes that I was up til 12:30 AM dancing at a concert.  Fantastic!  Oh so worth all the difficulties of getting there.  TRANSPORT: U2 LIVE! I was in heaven!


Now we had to figure out how to get back to our hotel so we could catch one or two winks before getting on a plane back to Sofia.  After the show we just followed the crowds hoping to find a line of taxis or maybe even some of the buses set up for the event.  We piled onto a minibus that seats about 12 people but by the time we started rolling had at least 30 people in it. I could only hold on to Jeff while we were tossed around as the bus made turns.  It was so tight that no one could possible fall.  We were sardines for 20 minutes.  At least we didn't pay, because the guy collecting money literally could not reach us.  Next we got onto another (bigger, but no less packed) bus towards the main part of the city.  Some locals convinced us the trams would still be running, so get off at such and such stop.  A few other gullible people got off as well and we all discovered that the trams were not, in fact, running at 1 in the morning.  We found a pair of ladies from Slovenia to share a cab with and half an hour or so later we found ourselves a couple of blocks from our hotel.  In bed about 1:45 AM.  TRANSPORT: by foot, minibus, bus, taxi.


An early morning taxi got us to the airport for our flight to Sofia.  Phew.  We made it work on Tuesday with but a few hours of sleep, but still buzzing from the concert.  What a weekend!  I think this past weekend was the closest we have come to anything like the Amazing Race. 


Thanks for reading my brain dump.  Hope you enjoyed it!
-Shannon


U2 360 Tour
Istanbul/Turkey
6 September 2010
Setlist

Return of the Stingray Guitar
Beautiful Day - Always Forever Now
New Year's Day
Get On Your Boots
Magnificent
Mysterious Ways - My Sweet Lord
Elevation
Until The End Of The World
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
Pride (In the Name of Love)
In A Little While
Miss Sarajevo
City of Blinding Lights
Vertigo
I'll Go Crazy... (remix) - Discotheque - John I'm Only Dancing
Sunday Bloody Sunday - Get Up Stand Up
Mothers of the Disappeared (Bono was joined on stage by Turkish folk singer, Zulfu Livaneli, to sing this song, and then Zulfu, along with help from the crowd sang his own song: Yigidim Aslanim)
Walk On - You'll Never Walk Alone
One
Amazing Grace - Where the Streets Have No Name
Ultraviolet
With or Without You
Moment of Surrender

WELCOME Lebanon! WELCOME!

[For a Flickr slideshow related to this post, please click here (the same one I posted in a previous post.]
Back in July, as my friend Andris and I were climbing Maroon Bells Peak in Colorado, he mentioned "Prairie [his fiance] and I are going to Lebanon in September. You should come visit for the weekend."  I thought it was crazy, but couldn't get the idea out of my head. I had just noticed the week before on one of our many flights this summer that there were direct flights from Sofia to Beirut (who knows why?), Shannon and I had both wanted to visit the Middle East, and both Prairie and Andris had lived in the Middle East, so could make good tour guides (Prairie had lived in Beirut itself for a year). Plus Prairie and Shannon hadn't met yet, so that was an extra incentive.

I started poking around into flights, but couldn't find the direct one I thought I'd seen. All the flights required ridiculous connections, and we'd spend almost the whole weekend flying. I forgot about it. Then Andris mentioned he'd seen some direct flights on Bulgarian Air, which for some reason doesn't get picked up by search engines like Kayak.com.  Maybe it was possible...
Maybe we also had a 3-day weekend. Maybe we had a 4-day weekend.  We weren't sure. The Bulgarian government is notorious for adding extra days to holiday weekends, often with only one or two weeks' notice.  Shannon's supervisor told her "I think I heard that that's a 4-day weekend, but I'm not sure." Well hopefully it is.  No internet searches about Bulgarian public holidays were helpful, but that's also nothing new here (they would probably be more fruitful in Bulgarian than English).  When we worked out a plan to let us see U2 in concert in Istanbul as part of the same trip, Shannon was sold (seeing U2 had been a dream of hers for a few decades now). Sofia --> Beirut --> Istanbul (U2!!!) --> Sofia, and back to work by Tuesday morning.  It would be a crazy, expensive outing, but hopefully fun and worth it.

We were nervous.  After all, Lebanon is somewhere that Americans are not supposed to go. The US State Department "continues to urge U.S. citizens to avoid all travel to Lebanon due to current safety and security concerns."  Well that seems pretty unambiguous.  Was this really a good idea? I asked for reassurances from Prairie and Andris, as well as from my former Westridge colleague Sandy, who had gone to high school there and calls Beirut her "favorite city on Earth." All parties were reassuring, and said that while there were risks, the more dangerous areas (such as refugee camps) weren't places I'd have any reason to go as a tourist. Plus the NY Times and various other "serious" papers had called Beirut a hot new tourist destination in the last year or two, so how bad could it be? Still, we were nervous landing, especially as we arrived at 3am (suck) and Andris & Prairie wouldn't get there until 10pm that night.

After a mostly-empty but still crappy Bulgarian Air flight (not a recommended airline), we had arranged an airport pickup from our hostel, so as not to have to deal with buses/taxis in this strange land after midnight.  After seemingly driving in circles all over the city, our driver pulled into a random sketchy alley. Please don't let this be the place. Please don't let this be the place. Let this just be a stop for cigarrettes. Oh damn. This is the place.
I'm glad we had a driver from the hostel, because we never would have found Talal Hotel on our own. (Which would have been just as well, in retrospect.) No sign on the street, and a peeling, stained 8.5x11 sheet tacked to the second floor door was the only indication that there was a hotel there. After knocking loudly for several minutes, the manager sleepily stumbled to vertical and let us into our moldy prison cell of a room.  One window was 6 feet up and permanently sealed shut. The other window opened into a 1 foot crawl space to another building filled with construction debris.  It's just as well, because when I looked out the window in our bathroom later that evening, the view of rooftop refuse was not exactly inspiring. At least the beds were acceptably comfortable, at least until the overly aggressive A/C turned us into little icecubes.

Groggy after a short and poor night's sleep, we set out for the day. It was sunny. Very sunny. And hot (36C/97F). Plenty of traffic too. 
We strolled around Martyr's Square, site of many famous rallies and protests, but now full of construction cranes and scary traffic. We walked past the beautiful al-Amin Mosque to a farmer's market in the nearby neighborhood of Saiifi Gardens that had been recommended. We sampled a few items (it was not so different from a farmer's market in the US) then set about finding a real meal. We went to the nightlife district of Gemmayze (in the afternoon) for a Lonely Planet recommended low-key lunch spot called "Le Chef." Highly, highly recommended. Yum.  It certainly catered to tourists and ex-pats, but did so in a way that it still felt authentic and local. The menu was all in French (and I wouldn't have known half the words anyway, even in English), but the host helpfully explained the offerings. I got something like the "Egyptian's King's Special" and it was awesome. A bowl of rice with small pieces of beef and chicken, over which I crinkled crunchy thin bread, then poured an amazing bowl of greens (nettles?) and onion/garlic sauce. It was a very unique flavor, and fantastic. I also appreciated the sheer efficiency of the kitchen -- look at the use of space!
The host greeted various newcomers with a hearty WELCOME LEBANON! WELCOME! It seemed like he was giving an order. "Yes sir! I feel welcome!"

After a lunch like that, it was all we could do to struggle back to our crappy hostel room for a siesta. Lucky for us the power went off shortly after we got there, so the A/C went out. That was a very stuffy prison cell with no A/C, but we managed to get some sleep. At some point later while we were trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the day before Andris and Prairie arrived, we heard a loud bang, saw a bright flash, and soon saw smoke pouring out of the other side of our shared "private" bathroom (one room with a 3/4 wall to separate the two loos - the smoke was coming from the other side of the wall...).  Yikes!  No terrorists, just poor electrical wiring.  Apparently when the power came back on the air conditioner in the other room blew a fuse.  When I went to the lobby to tell the hostel staff, they were just sitting around and had no idea anything had happened. ("Um, the air conditioner in the other room is on fire...") Lucky for them we were around, otherwise that could have been a much worse situation.
After our naps, we set out for some serious Beirut exploration on foot. We walked a lot...mostly non-stop for about 5 hours. We walked through the newly renovated downtown, through hasn't-even-opened-yet-brand-new "Beirut Souks" mall (home of easily accessible free public toilets!), past countless luxury high-rise apartment buildings under construction, past the bombed out shell of the Holiday Inn, along the lovely waterfront promenade known as the "Corniche," past the swanky American University of Beirut, and back to the hotel in time to meet Andris and Prairie.

Whatever Beirut was in the past ("The Paris of the Middle East," a hellhole of civil war, take your pick), it is now full of two things: luxury apartments, and cranes, building more luxury apartments. From one vantage point in Martyr's Square we counted 17 cranes, working on at least 12 different projects (including one that took you and 12 dining buddies up for an unforgettable "SkyDinner" as the entire dinner table hung 6 stories up).  I'm not sure where the money for this comes from, but there is a lot of money flowing into Beirut. Construction is everywhere. The new shopping mall downtown was swanky, full of international brands and high-end labels. At the airport we saw before/after pictures of the downtown, and the recent transformation is incredible. Dozens of city blocks where every single building had been damaged, many reduced to complete rubble from the 15-year civil war, had been completely restored or rebuilt. It looks a little Disney-esque now, it's so shiny and new, but I'd take that over a pile of rubble any day.

Beirut still has signs of a troubled past. The Holiday Inn was opened a few years before the civil war broke out, and had been carefully designed to withstand earthquakes. The high-rise building became a favorite for snipers, and the thoughtful earthquake-proof design also apparently allowed it to withstand mortar shells. There was hand-to-hand fighting in the hotel rooms. It still stands vacant, wind and rain pouring through gaping holes left from the fighting, while brand new luxury apartments and hotels rise all around it. [There are apparently long-running disputes about who now owns the building.]  Many other buildings are still falling down and derelict. Some scars are more recent. Prairie showed us stains on seaside cliffs near Pigeon Rocks, leftover from the oil spill that was caused when the Israelis bombed a power station in 2006, causing the largest-ever oil spill in the Mediterranean [The Israelis also prevented international oil response teams from dealing with the oil spill].  There's plenty of razor wire around the Saudi embassy, along with a tank parked out front for good measure (I decided not to take photos of these things...).  A few times HumVees full of soldiers with machine guns routinely drove past, but the soldiers seemed more bored than on-edge (one waved at us, unsolicited). Security at the airport is high (you go through security when you walk in the door, then again after you head towards your gate). There are well-armed police, soldiers, and guards in many prominent places. Strolling the grounds of the swish American University of Beirut required leaving our passports at the gate and going through metal detectors.  I write all that because it's true, but it's also true that that is not what defines my visit to Beirut.
What defined our visit to Beirut was the terrible ordinariness of it all. Here was a city that reminded me of Los Angeles (though I honestly felt safer walking around Beirut than in many sections of LA).  People were just living, doing ordinary things. Walking along the beach. Going to work. Trying to make a buck. Going to dinner. Shopping. Here was a place that as an American we were not supposed to go, but it felt remarkably normal.  Here was a place devastated by 15 years of civil war, trying to rebuild, trying to get back to normal. Here was a place shocked by what many considered an unprovoked (or at least a gross over-reaction to Hezbollah nastiness) bombing by Israel in 2006, a massive month-long airstrike that destroyed the Beirut airport, the port, and many roads. Here was a place that had the prime minister assassinated in 2005, right by where I went for a lovely morning run along the seaside.  It's hard to put it all together in your head.
Prairie talked about the demonization of the "other" that takes place in both Lebanon and Israel, how all contact between the two nations is restricted (including radio/TV), but how similar the people are across the border from each other. Both nations full of "ladies in pink track suits walking their little dogs."  If only they could realize how similar they were.
It's funny...we've traveled a LOT this year, and this is perhaps the most "exotic" destination we've been to yet, but I still keep coming back to the idea that places really aren't that different after all. People aren't that different, anyway.  Sure, it's hard to read the road signs in arabic, but so is French or Cyrllic or English, for most of the world. I keep traveling to new places, only to find they remind me a lot of old places.

But I digress...
Saturday night after we met up with Andris and Prairie we enjoyed a few drinks in Gemmayze and watched insane people bike down a many-level set of outdoor stairs for a Red Bull-sponsored event. Awesome. ("Drink Red Bull, and you'll do stupid, dangerous things!") We were all pretty tired from our day, so we particularly enjoyed the best feature of our crappy hostel: the after-hours night-club in the basement. What's that, you say? An after-hours night-club? What's that? That's one that opens after the regular ones close, in case you didn't get the hint that it was time to sober up and go to bed.  It ran from 3am to 10am. TEN IN THE MORNING! The earplugs I wore did little to stop the thumping bass that was reverberating through the building walls all morning. Doom-Doom-Boom-Doom. Doom-Doom-Boom-Doom. Why is it light out? Doom-Doom-Boom-Doom? Where is that coming from? Doom-Doom-Boom-Doom. By 8:30 am I couldn't pretend to sleep any more, and got up to run. By our front door I saw a lady all dressed up for the club in tight pink sluttiness, waiting for a ride. Let me tell you, that outfit is a lot less hot in the bright glare of the morning sun. (Which is why you should GO HOME before the sun rises.)  For future reference, I will avoid hotels that have a really nice website with lovely photos of the country, but no photos of the actual rooms (there was a definite reason for that!). Lonely Planet recommended Talal, but maybe it was under a different owner, or maybe it was pre-night-club. We ended up changing to a different hostel across the street, the Al-Nazih Pension, that was much, much nicer, despite the circuit breaker on the A/C that kept flipping off, causing us to slowly suffocate at 2 in the morning, until we repeatedly woke up the manager to fix it (which he thankfully eventually did).

On Sunday, Andris, Prairie, Shannon and I had much transit luck in getting out of town to visit Jeita Grotto, a fabulous cave complex that is rather openly self-promoting itself as one of the "7 new natural wonders of the world." While I don't honestly think it really rivals the Grand Canyon or the Galapagos, it was really cool, and probably the most impressive "tourist" cave I've been in (where there are walkways and installed lights). It has a HUGE upper cavern, entirely full of stalactites and stalagmites (and annoying French ladies trying to tell you how to remember the difference with a mnemnonic that does not translate well from French).  It was impressive (The 7 new wonders link above has some nice photos). Even more awesome was the smaller lower cavern, where you got to take a short electric boat ride on the underground lake to view the cave. Very cool. I wish I could share photos here, but for some inexplicable reason, photography was expressly forbidden, to the point where they had little lockers at the entrance where you were supposed to store your camera and they said they would confiscate any film/memory cards of violators. I don't really see the point of this, especially as there wasn't a particularly impressive selection of "official" postcards/photos/posters or anything to buy at the gift shop. Maybe all the flashes were a safety hazard or something. At any rate, I don't have pictures, but it was cool. It is certainly a recommended 1/2 day trip from Beirut.

Speaking of transit luck: you don't "pick up" taxis or buses in Lebanon. They pick up you.  Seriously. If you're walking anywhere near the street, every taxi (and many, many more cars that are informal taxis) will honk at you, letting you know that you can get a ride. Sometimes they hassle you too - honking incessantly, slowing down and stopping next to you, even yelling at you to get in. Does this actually work for some people? "Oh, well I was enjoying this walk, but since you yelled at me, I guess I'll get into your piece-of-crap car and pay you to hopefully take me somewhere I'm going, and not kidnap me or triple-charge me or something."  It got pretty annoying. As a pedestrian in many non-pedestrian-friendly places, I am used to looking at a car when they honk at me, to see if I am about to meet the blunt end of a speeding Mercedes, but making eye-contact only encouraged them, so I had to start ignoring as blatantly as possible all the honking at me.  The buses too...we only had to walk within 2 blocks of the supposed bus station before a bus slowed down, yelled at us, and when we tried to wave him away, he really stopped and convinced Prairie (the only one of us to speak any Arabic) that he was going in the general direction we wanted to go, or at least would go that way now if he picked up these 4 sucker passengers. It was really easy to get on a bus, although the random spot next to the highway outside of town where he dropped us off wasn't really where we wanted to be, so we walked a while on a frontage road until a minibus honked at us and convinced us to get in, driving completely out of his planned route because we were paying more than the other passengers, apparently. It was interesting, and I'm sure glad we had Prairie with us to help navigate.

Back in Beirut that afternoon, we toured the swanky campus of the American University of Beirut, where "Jewett Hall" is a women's dormitory. Seriously. It's supposed to be one of the best universities in the Middle East, and it has a lovely sea-side campus that reminded me of UC Santa Barbara (but with a bit more razor wire).  We then walked along the waterfront Corniche to Pigeon Rocks, a lovely rock outcropping just offshore. Though Shannon was self-conscious about swimming in a Muslim region with a bunch of males around (and no females swimming except one or two fully-covered), we wanted to take a dip in the Mediterranean. We timed it just for sunset. The water was really warm, and bracingly, eye-stingingly salty (much, much saltier than the Black Sea).  We treaded water while we watched the sun dip into the western horizon...very, very nice. Later on we enjoyed an expensive but leisurely dinner at a seaside restaurant, all before getting up at 4:30 am to catch our next flight. Onward to Istanbul, onward to U2!
 It was a quick but memorable and informative visit. Lots to think about, lots to remember. GOODBYE LEBANON! GOODBYE!

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Photos from Beirut

We just took a crazy, crazy long-weekend trip to Beirut, Lebanon, then Istanbul, Turkey. In Beirut we had a chance to meet up with our friends Prairie and Andris (who live in San Francisco, but are vacationing for 2 weeks in Lebanon) and get a taste of the Middle East from people who have lived there a little bit (Prairie in Beirut and Jordan, Andris in Jordan).  We'll post some stories later, but here is a slideshow on Flickr.

To properly view the slideshow, press the button on the lower right that has four outward-facing arrows to get the photos full-screen. Then click the "show info" button on the upper right of the slideshow to get explantory titles & captions. I suggest the "slow" speed setting on the slideshow (under "options") to have enough time to read the captions.  I'm trying this embedding of a Flickr slideshow instead of manually loading all the photos into the blog, because it's both faster and allows full-screen images.  Let me know if it works for you.