Beirut, Lebanon

Beirut is a fabulous city. I'd been hearing Beirut's reputation since I last lived in Egypt as an undergraduate student in 2006.

Dubbed the "Paris of the Middle East," it definitely lives up to its name, and then some... Everything is clean, organized, and my god....they party.

The oddest part of all, for me, was thinking that there had been a war there only three years ago, and a twenty-year long civil war that ended only as many years ago. There are still some remnants of the destruction, as you'll see in the pictures above, but not much.

The war is as absent in the people's consciousness as it is in their city's infrastructure--no one talks about it, no one wants to talk about it. You can see how they've masked the memory of the war by looking at the pictures of Place d'Etoile (the two pictures with the clock-tower). This was the location of the famous Green Line. The extent to which Beirut has been able to recover from two wars in recent times is remarkable.

Equally remarkable is a fact (?) that I heard from a friend of mine while I was there--Lebanon is apparently the only country to have suffered no internal losses as a result of the recent economic crisis (someone fact check me?). Lebanon has long been considered the banking capital of the Middle East, and the story goes that banks here dumped all their bad mortgage investments about two years ago. Obviously, though, the country has suffered indirectly from its investments abroad which were hurt.

Beirutis are overall very friendly, I found. They certainly have no reason to be otherwise--driving a Mercedes there is the equivalent of the Toyota Corolla or Honda Accord in the USA--everybody has one. I even saw three or four Ferraris and a couple Rolls Royce's, too.

Anyways, I arrived a few days before Christmas to spend my first Christmas away from home. This was also the first time that I had traveled on my own (besides the obvious, of moving to Egypt by myself). I pleasantly discovered that there were decorations for Christmas, people singing Christmas carols, etc. As you see above, in the center of the area in which I was living in Beirut (Gammayzeh), there was both the impressive mosque and an enormous Christmas tree.

Lebanon is interesting in this way, the Muslim along side Christian system. Despite what you may think after reading the link above about the Green Line, Muslims and Christians do for the most part live in a harmony that many people could learn from. Their system of government is totally unique, to my knowledge. After the French colonized Greater Syria after World War I, they set up the 'Confessionalism' system of government, in which religious sects have proportionate representation in Parliament dependent upon their representation in the population at large.

Interestingly enough, no population census has been done in Lebanon since 1932. Coincidence?

These are the things that make Lebanon a land of contradictions in my opinion. Yet, it works (another contradiction). Christians, Muslims, and Druze live side by side, but there is an undeniable stagnant tension about the balance of power in the country. And again, no one talks about it, but it is most certainly there.

Beirut was really just a place for me to go and hang out. Sit at cafes, talk to the people, play backgammon, and then BARS. Bars like you've never seen before. Acting somewhat out of character, I abandoned my tee-totaling status for a period of ten days. Couldn't live in Beirut (on account of superficiality and craziness--clubs stay open till about 9 am), but I'm damn glad I went, and would absolutely go again.

Iskandar