Road Trip: Beirut [Now with photos]

With a break from school for a few days, Sara and I headed to Beirut. Less than three hours drive away, it’s really a different world.

At first, the changes from Damascus didn’t seem dramatic. Yes, there is Starbucks. (Full disclosure: Over the course of the weekend, we bought a half-dozen soy lattes.)

And the rebuilt downtown is spectacular and pristine, almost Parisian (although also antiseptic, almost Epcot-ian).

But, those differences didn’t seem that dramatic in comparison to Damascus. Then we went for drinks and dinner with our friend Rasha and a few of her Beiruti friends. They were a mix of ex-pats and Lebanese. The conversation was about what you might expect: language, politics, the situation in Lebanon, and more politics (where is Lebanon going, etc. etc).

And as I chomped on peanuts and sipped my one beer, it hit me. This is what’s really different about Beirut. It’s not  the Virgin Megastore, the Starbucks, or even the US Weekly at the bookstore (though that helped!). It’s the mentality. Obviously, I was with an exceedingly small, unrepresentative sample of Beirut denizens. After nearly two months in Damascus, I’ve had countless friendly encounters, and never any discussions that touched on issues like that.

The other thing that was impossible to miss in Beirut was the enormously heavy presence of soldiers and armor.

All of downtown was cordoned off by razor-wire and heavy concrete blocks, with soldiers on near every corner, and M113 troop carriers interspersed throughout.  (No photos of those—I decided I like my camera, and head, in one piece.)

The heavy footprint was apparently a result of Hezbollah’s protests over the past year meant to bring down the government. Hezbollah has had a tent city in downtown—next to the prime minister’s office—for most of the past year. The protests have petered out, and when we walked by there didn’t seem to be more than a few stragglers in the tents.  But the protests, and overall unstable situation in Lebanon, have obviously taken their toll.

The downtown was almost completely deserted. At the Virgin Megastore, Sara and I represented bout two-thirds of the customers in the music section and café. The store even had a big banner up that read, “To all those who have left us and moved on…. We support you and miss you.” (NB: That’s from memory.)

On Sunday morning before we left, Sara and I walked along the Corniche, Beirut’s boardwalk. It was a near-idyllic Mediterranean scene.  We stopped at one of the many private beach clubs (where I snapped a photo and then was promptly confronted by a  manager who asked me to delete it, which I believe I forgot to do).

On the way out of town, we again hit roadblock after roadblock, plus we began to see people hanging Lebanese flags (and themselves) out their windows. It turns out, the Lebanese army had, finally, routed Fatah al-Islam, the militant jihadi group that had been holding out at a Palestinian refugee camp for months.

It was a fascinating sight. A reminder, should you need one, that plenty of people in these parts abhor jihadists. And yet, with the roadblocks meant to look for jihadists who escaped, it’s also a reminder of just how fragile the Lebanonese state is. 

P.S. When Sara and I arrived back in Damascus, to our hip neighborhood of Sha’alaan, we were met with another interesting moment. About a dozen dressed in traditional outfits and sporting big, hopefully ceremonial swords, were doing some kind of choreographed  dance /sword-fight in the middle of the street. They clashed and swung their swords to the beat of a drum and to the delight of the gathered crowd.

The reason for the traditional celebration?  Why of course, the grand opening of “Mobile-Zone,” for all your cellphone phone needs. 

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