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!