Beirut

The sea – most of all the sea.
Coming from Damascus, two things are sights for sore eyes: the sea, and green things. I drank in green; on corners, on waste ground, balconies, flowerpots. My friends had lived in, and not really left Damascus, for a month at this point and I can only imagine how they felt. Nurseries. Trees in pots. Trailing ivy. Gums. Mimosa (?). Breathing air.

And the sea.
Awfully toxic and polluted, but to see a horizon. Delicious. Sniffing salt air.
The Mediterranean sea, basically a very large and deep bathtub with originally only the shallow Gibraltar strait to replace water through, the oceanographers estimates it takes a century to replace all the water in the Med, so it’s saltier (evaporation, narrow flow) than the atlantic, and have less nutrients.
The nutrient-poor, high-salinity of the Mediterranean sea getting mixed with water from the Red sea, through the Suez canal, and tiny marine creatures with it. It’s been going on for a while, but no one know quite which way it’s going.

Do we ever?

And the Black sea, literally dying, adds it’s twopence.
And then there is us. The greatest problem-makers. Pollution, pollution, pollution. Indescrimenate fishing, ship traffic, water pollution and all sorts of nasty toxic waste.

I knew all this. And still it was joy to see the sea.
Selective memory.

We walked along the Corniche in the afternoon into the night and breathed salt air and the mediterranean. A few guys with fishing rods, a few guys playing backgammon, the esplanade filling fast with strollers, joggers, youth, coffeedrinkers, kids on tricycles, gaggles of girls, flocks of boys. The decorative streetlamps not in service, we wandered in silence around in semi-darkness, smiling at strangers that couldn’t see us in the backlight from cars and towering blocks of flats. That friendliness. That calm.
Keep a flashlight in you pocket.

Beirut is a little french, a little arabic, a little bit of Sydney, but not entirely either of them. Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Arab, Crusader, Turk, Mamelukes, Druze, Ottoman, Syrian, missionaries, French, Americans. If this is the result… I could live here.

We got the hotel ridiculously cheap. The prices on the wall was a tad steep for three students. The girl behind the desk said: «don’t look at the wall. Look at me, and tell me what you need.»
Beirut does not have a thriving hospitality business these days. Things looked good back in the nineties. Things are not so hot now- or maybe that’s precicely it. Rumours says people stock up on food and arms. Buns and bullets. Elections going pear-shaped. The parliament are supposed to elect a president, but it’s been postponed for …the fourteenth time now, I think it is. When they finally elect the poor sod, it’ll be one tough job.

Sometimes, to some people these things are immensely important. Sometimes, to some people these things are incredibly uninteresting. Sometimes this is the people it concerns. Sometimes not.

My grasp of Lebanese politics is a little sketchy, and webpages do not go on forever. Well. They do. But I can’t be bothered. Sectarianism, splinter here and splinter there, deals, paras, cloak and dagger, Syria, Israel, refugees, bombs, history, rockets, coalitions, guns and superpowers. Religion, faith, beauty and the horrid. The best and the worst.

(«All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry.» – Edgar Allan Poe – )

To me, Beirut was gorgeous.

There’s an undertow of Belfast awareness under it all, but on the surface all is seemingly well, if not swimmingly. («Sick of it, nothing will happen», I heard. That’s what they said in Northern Ireland before the Omagh bomb. But Beirut is too busy for Belfast antennae to work. And a nose for nutjobs and paramilitary groups is not much help when the paras are the ones securing the streets. I imagine IRA, OIRA, UDA, UDF, UVF, RIRA, CIRA and INLA doing that- it makes me laugh.)

Beirut is a tight city- narrow streets, high concrete buildings in various state of repair, poshness, falling-down- and going-up-ness. The skyline is littered with cranes pulling things up and dumping things down. It’s not always obvious which it is. It could have been claustrofobic, if not for the slight hillyness and the sea.

And people? The very best. I only met smiles, service, friendliness, laughs. And I was overwhelmed by that Derry-thing again – a guinness, and I would have started telling the stories.

We walked and walked, and I fell in love. Textures everywhere. The brand, spanking new, the unbelievably ancient, and things you can only guess the age of. And miss by a millennium.
So we needed regular latte breaks- which suited me fine, with one foot bulging with blisters, and one thigh-muscle acting 80 years old.

If they could just stop arguing and blowing things and people up… and clean the beach a little…

The American University is wonderful – S and I wandered around, said hi to the cats, bushes, trees; sat on various benches under cool, shading trees with a perfectly elevated view of the sea. Postcards, croissants and coffee. Holiday good enough for me.

I’ll go back, as soon as I can make up a reasonable excuse, find someone to feed the cat, and get the money together.

When I think of it… the cat is old, and there’s always that ‘rainy-day account’.

It’s been raining a lot here lately.