Category : Daylife
As some of you know, I spent the best part of 22 years living in London. This means that I’m possessed with a sort of permanent wistful melancholy, a penchant for a mug of PG tips and the occasional violent outburst at a football match. You can imagine that the cultural baggage one accumulates in the UK is kind of hard to share with someone who doesn’t understand the culture. The English sense of humour is famously puzzling to anyone who hasn’t spent time on the British Isles.
True, it’s hardly as obscure as say being from Botswana, but when I want to reminisce about watching Newsround and Bananaman, I’ve always felt fellow Brits were few and far between in Beirut. Any Beirutis who grew up in the US have it easy, American culture being so ubiquitous that I’m sure even Massai tribesmen in Kenya are aware that Ross and Rachel were on a break. Anyone who grew up in France is also spoilt for choice when it comes to popular culture. Lebanon is a francophone country, and prides itself, sometimes misguidedly, on its links to our ex-colonizers, something of a prolonged Stockholm syndrome. You even get the full bouquet of French terrestrial and satellite TV stations from your neighborhood pirate cable provider. My provider comes in the form of a diminutive Armenian man who seems to have inherited very little from his ancestors beyond one tooth, a stutter, a sweaty disposition and no understanding of what the BBC is.
I can’t complain too much though, because things are much easier than the last time I moved to Beirut in 1997. Back then I had to rely on memory for any attachment to my native London. I had to dig out old VHS tapes of Have I Got News For You, Fawlty Towers and Blackadder. Oh, by the by, VHS tapes were those big boxy things we used before DVDs, for you kids out there.
Now I download the latest episodes of QI and Mock The Week on YouTube. I download podcasts from BBC Four, and enjoy the surreal prospect of listening to Germaine Greer discuss post-feminism whilst I’m stuck in traffic behind a pimped-out yellow Honda Civic with two of Lebanon’s finest soldiers whistling at everything in a skirt.
And more recently, I’ve actually been meeting Brits, of the proper kind and the Lebanese kind, like myself. And as they say, once it rains it pours. I went from not knowing a single Brit for years to suddenly being surrounded by people from all corners of the UK. I’m overcome with a very un-English sense of joy when I speak to someone who has a proper English accent, never mind if it’s from Godalming, Somerset or Manchester. So in the last few weeks I’ve been remincing about a childhood spent watching Superted, Neighbours and The Bill. I’ve been recounting tales of meeting Jet, Hunter and John Fashinu at a taping of Big Break’s Christmas special with John Virgo and Jim Davidson. This probably means nothing to most people, but it means the world to me.
I’ve been away from Beirut for a couple of weeks now. I spent a few days in London last week, and it was refreshing to walk around aimlessly on pavements under a gentle drizzle. It was nice to wander into Waterstone’s and ask knowledgeable staff for book recommendations. It was nice to walk past my old school, my old university and my old flat. It was nice to walk into a pub with carpets rendered pungent from years of spilt lager. It was nice to have a conversation with a cabbie “bout all these fecking foreigners”, with a delightful sense of irony and self-awareness.
One particularly chilly day I headed to Canary Wharf for an interview. I boarded the Jubilee Line armed with a well-stocked iPod and a copy of the Financial Times. As the train trundled along, I caught a reflection of myself in the window. I was far paler than I was a week ago, especially in the unforgiving neon light. I looked like a caged corporate slave again, my Windsor knot choking any ambitions of creativity I have been harboring for the past year. My lips were chapped. I looked down at my hands clutching the FT, dried and cracked from the subzero temperatures outside. When I got to my interview, I gave it my all. I was even invited back for a second round, which I’ve politely declined.
I’m afraid London isn’t home anymore. I’m afraid there are ambitions I have for myself in Beirut, I want to be part of the generation that comes back and makes a difference. I have role to play in Beirut that surpasses my role as a faceless zombie on the Jubilee Line. Plus its warm in Beirut. And most important of all, I miss it.
Right off the bat I’d like to apologize, I’ve been absent for a couple of weeks, which is inexcusable in the world of blogging. However, I haven’t been particularly inspired for a whole host of reasons, and I would rather not write than unleash a load of piffle unto the world. However, I finally have something to say again, so you can revel in my superficial insights and nagging tirades once again.
The worst cliché amongst the plethora of bad clichés available to mankind is the one that states your abhorrence of clichés, promptly followed by the use of one. So here goes. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder.
I recently spent a week in Qatar, experiencing the Gulf beyond Dubai. As one might expect from a bourgeoning oil-rich Gulf economy on the shores of the Arabian Gulf, it is replete with shimmering skyscrapers of all shapes and sizes, man-made islands, gargantuan shopping malls, white Land Cruisers, sun burnt expats and south-east Asian labor. It’s not a place particularly fussed about tourists or visitors beyond the transiting passengers of the wildly successful Qatar Airways. It’s practically impossible to hail a cab anywhere in the city, there’s essentially one museum, a souk and not much else. The city is infested with construction cranes and vacant buildings. Towers rise out of the desert and stand empty, corroding away in the gentle caress of the sands. But all in all, it’s a great place to make a living and it doesn’t have any of the gaudy excess of its shinier neighbor (you know, the one with all the “Biggest” and “Tallest” in front of everything).
The Lebanese friends I saw are making the most of it, settling into healthy routines and giving themselves completely to their work. They do so almost joylessly though; talk of a dreamed return to Beirut always creeping in early on in any conversation. I would try to comfort them, saying half-heartedly that Lebanon wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and that they were romanticizing the place due to their position as voluntary exiles. Until one of these friends asked me if I’d ever watched Beyrouth Derniere. I’d heard about the show (a one-off spin off of Paris Derniere broadcast by French cable channel Paris Premiere) but I’d never found it anywhere. So we sat down in from of his laptop and watched it.
Before I explain what the show’s about, allow me to indulge in a little rant. Contrarily to most of my beloved friends, I tend to be mostly irritated by foreign (and local) coverage of Lebanon and its supposed attractions. I cringe anytime I read about calls to prayer overlapping with the ringing of church bells as the sun gently sets across a shimmering Mediterranean. I shudder when I read about a veiled woman crossing paths with a mini-skirt wearing blonde along the Corniche. I’m left with a sour aftertaste anytime I read about the sense of impeding danger hanging in the air even as people party away at rooftop bars. Although I can’t deny that these things occur, I’m infuriated by the constant lacing of commentary on Lebanon with a touch of exoticism, post-colonial guilt and the conflict-porn of bored Europeans.
It seems we are relegated to being an amalgamation of clichés, some of them of our own making. For example, in 1968 Abdallah Farah published a series of postcards of Beirut. We’re all familiar with them, they’re the weathered and battered clichés of Beirut in the 1960s that are still sold in some bookshops that time has forgotten. In the early 1990s they were the only postcards you could find anywhere. So here we were, perpetuating an image petrified in time. A Beirut from the Golden Age, as if the war had never happened, and it was of little importance that half the places represented on these postcards didn’t even exist anymore. If anyone were to receive one them in the post, it would be a postcard from another era, let alone another country. Basically, I had always been waiting for an accurate portrayal of what Beirut was to me.
So, it is in the context of these various imaginings of the same geographic place that I return to the television show I watched in Doha last week. The concept of the show is that the host (who you never see) has a handheld camcorder, and goes around town interviewing people. He usually does this at various venues around Paris. The resulting feel of the show is very intimate and realistic, as you’re basically looking at the world through the host’s eyes (technically your vantage point is that of peeking over his shoulder). His escapades in Beirut are varied. He’s shown around town by renowned architect Bernard Khoury, musician Zeid Hamdane, he wanders around Sabra and Chatila with actress Beatrice Dalle (a favorite of mine because we both have gapped teeth). It basically feels like you’re showing a friend around town, the good the bad and the ugly. He even ends up at some sort of drug-fuelled sex party in the hills above town, which might shock some, but it does happen and is an integral part of our city. So here was Beirut, laid out on video, in its excess and its decorum. In its superficial intellectualism, and its deep superficiality.
But watching this show was almost like a revelation. Amongst the highly ascepticized skyscrapers of Qatar, I suddenly remembered I lived in a real city. It isn’t a city made up of artificial islands and towering temples to all that is shiny and new, built in the hope that people will flock to inhabit them. It is an organic city, sprawling and disorganized, and all the more attractive for it. A city that contracts and expands in tandem with the demographic and societal demands of its population and not some oasis-like dream. I have to say, my friend and I sat there in front of the screen in a nostalgia-induced numbness, mine tempered by the fact that I would be coming home the following day.
Being Lebanese and Mediterranean, our actions are often laced with a heavy dose of passion. We wave our hands about comically in order to convey our points in conversations; we greet people with “a thousand welcomes of welcomes”. Everything is superlative, from the size of our Hummers to the depths of our hospitality. So it’s quite natural that our relationship with our country is also one of passion. It’s a relationship between lovers. But like all romantic endeavors, after an initial phase of unbridled admiration and steamy romps, we settle into a facile habituation.
During this phase we take our partner for granted, and start complaining about the futilities of life. The way she squeezes the toothpaste tube from the middle rather than from the end. The way she places pot pourri in a bowl near the television. We start taking each other for granted and become infuriated at the slightest hint of one of our pet peeves. However, should you spend a week or a month away from your better half, you’ll quickly remember what it is you love about them, and you’ll find yourself in anticipation on the road home. You look forward to the passionate embrace, to the inevitable tryst. And so, on my trip back, I realized I was lucky to be coming back to this city I love and hate in equal measure. Source of all my frustrations and all of my ambitions. It’s good to be home.
Of all the pleasures one misses when moving to a new country, the most taxing are often also the simplest. I, for example, miss a certain sense of anonymity which comes with living in a sprawling metropolis. This same anonymity which allows you to head to the supermarket unshowered and in your Superman pajamas free from the anxiety of a possible encounter with a distant relative, colleague or classmate. There are plenty of these little things I miss, but by far the thing I miss most is walking.
Walking in the Middle East as a whole seems to be an activity that is frowned upon. Indeed it is a region where the car is ubiquitous and often gargantuan and gas-guzzling. It is a region where walking from one end of a mall to the other is considered physically strenuous, as evidenced by a recent Economist study which shows the region to have the highest obesity rate in the world (with Lebanon way at the top at number 1. Woohoo, world champs!). I can understand the aversion to walking outdoors in Arab countries in Saharan Africa or in the Gulf, where the climate isn’t adapted to the pursuit of casual wandering, but we in Lebanon have no excuse.
Overall, the climate is typically Mediterranean and temperate, set aside a couple of scorching months in the summer and a month of torrential downpour in the winter. Granted, the city is quite uneven topographically (which could exert a wheeze from the less fit, such as myself) and the sidewalks are an afterthought in the city’s urban planning, if one can speak of such a thing. Indeed, sidewalks seem to be built without really taking into account that anyone may be adventurous enough to walk along them. They are about 30 centimeters in width, and most of that is taken up by illegally parked cars. If you do find a spot unencumbered by an immobile (sometimes even mobile) vehicle, you have to spend your time playing dodge with a plethora of nonsensical, ignored and improbably placed traffic signs. But, nevertheless, if you decided to park your car and trek across town, you could do it with relative ease.
I have to admit, I never really bothered walking around Beirut before. Although I was addicted to walking everywhere in London and on weekend trips around Europe, I got sucked into the prevailing ease with which one goes through life here. People drive their cars from their home to their given destination where they proceed to valet the vehicle. If no valet is available, they go into a prolonged panic even though the street is littered with spaces and parking lots. However, over the indescribably busy holiday period, I came upon a novel idea. Drive close enough to where you’re going, park your car, and proceed to walk around form meeting to meeting for the rest of the day. Journeys started to take ten pleasant minutes instead of a stressful half-hour. I noticed buildings I’d driven past hundreds of times but never bothered to look at.
Cities everywhere are successions of comfort-zones we create for ourselves. Our living rooms, our office cubicles, our favorite cafes and bars. Wherever you live, you fall into a routine that involves roaming around from one of these areas to the next. The capitals of the world like London and New York start to become manageable when you settle into this pattern of habituation. However, the moments where you interact with these cities come from pounding their pavements and engaging with their hive-like public transports networks. That is where you overhear conversations, come up against interesting characters, catch fleeting glimpses of would-be lovers, sneak peeks over people’s shoulders to read to check the progress of their crossword puzzles. Sadly in Beirut, we don’t have access to this hive. Our cars become an additional comfort zone, where we fail to interact with our surroundings, beyond the occasional fender bender and flipped finger from a rolled-down window.
Let’s not forget, that much like any city, Beirut is has a treasure trove of alleyways, architecture and people to discover once you stand upright and put one foot in front of the other. There are streets in Gemmayze and Mar Mikhael which you can only access by ascending uneven steps into pedestrian alleyways. A whole network of decrepit traditional colonial houses, replete with interesting characters awaits you. Having ventured into this labyrinth I’ve been met with the vicious gnarls of barely chained guard dogs as well as the warm smiles of ancient veiled widows tending to their colonies of feline companions. Elsewhere, wandering around the structured chaos of Hamra’s main thoroughfare and side streets is really the only way to discover the wealth of cafes, holes in the wall and jazz bars that litter the area. Aimlessly sauntering through its newly cobbled streets you’ll see blonde, blue eyed expats retracing the steps of their Missionary forefathers, although they’re probably more interested in the eponymous sexual position than the religious mission these days.
Once you abandon your car and walk around, you glide through traffic jams and drown out the sounds you hate. Much like swimming underwater on a sunny day, the sounds from the outside world become a dull and soothing thud, that leave you alone with your thoughts. Walking has long been viewed as the only true way to commune with a place or even to engage in creative thought. In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau says “I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think, my mind only works on my legs”. Even in ancient Greece, the Peripatetic Philosophers, of which Aristotle was a member, owed their name to their inclination for walking whilst conjuring up great ideas. Maybe we owe some of our lackadaisical cultural pursuits in this town to our lack of curiosity to discovering it on foot. Next time you’re driving down the road for a kilometer journey, think of your health, the environment and your brain, park your car and hit our tiny and hazardous pavements.
Over the last few days I’ve been engaging mainly in two major activities. The first is ingesting as much food and drink as humanly possible at every available opportunity. The second has been explaining to all my visiting expatriate friends whether or not I’m enjoying Beirut. Both activities have their positives and negatives. The former is causing a tightening of my jeans around my waist and an arduous struggle against ever-present hangovers, whilst the former is sending me into deep meditations on the nature of my identity.
I’m not quite sure what to tell people when they ask if I’m enjoying Beirut. My automatic response is to say no, but I’m not convinced it’s the honest answer. It’s usually an answer that is elicited in the wake of a particularly annoying day on the roads or the ludicrously tardy arrival of a plumber. The truth is I don’t really know yet because I’ve only been here a short time. I haven’t really settled into a routine, a proper job and so on. And I’m not prepared to judge the place until I have that sense of normalcy. This brings me onto another point. Beirut is somewhere I have to get used to. I didn’t grow up here, and the only years I lived here (between the ages of 15 and 20) were just enough to give me a solid group of friends and a list of favorite places, but not really enough to give me a sense of belonging. I have always viewed Beirut with certain romanticism, and the time I spent here during those years gives me the same attachment to the city that a New York native would have for Michigan if he happened to go to college there.
Which brings me to a far wider ranging question with almost existential properties. Will I ever really be Lebanese or Beiruti? I have lived in the UK for far longer than I ever expect to live in Beirut, but have never really considered myself entirely British. I had Lebanese flags and posters of Baalbek on my walls as a kid before I even remember setting foot in Lebanon at the age of 11, yet I’ve never really considered myself entirely Lebanese. The struggle to find a definition of who I am has, ironically, become the best approximation of that definition. Then I realized, through my friends in London that this is a pretty widespread phenomenon amongst people in my generation. I had Russian friends in London who grew up in Prague but went to American schools. What would that make them? I had Mexican friends who grew up in Switzerland but now live in France. What would that make them? And I slowly began to realize that everyone I got along with pretty much anywhere in the world had the same deep-rooted crisis towards their identity.
As I was discussing all these elements with a friend of mine the other day, he brought up the subject of Third Culture Kids (TCK). I have to admit I’d never heard of the concept and it sounded a bit like an 80s pop group to me. However, being a serial-Googler, I headed home and started looking for information. What I found was comforting beyond anything I could have imagined. According to my extensive research (i.e. a leisurely perusal of the corresponding Wikipedia page), a TCK “refers to someone who, as a child, has spent a significant period of time in one or more culture(s) other than his or her own, thus integrating elements of those cultures and their own birth culture, into a third culture”. Then, going through the piles of research on my desk (scrolling down), I was relieved to learn that TCKs tend to have more in common with one another, regardless of nationality, than they do with non-TCKs from their own country.
It’s so nice to read that someone has the same problem as you, if indeed it’s a problem at all. It’s kind of like discovering you’re not the only person who likes watching reruns of Home Improvement on Sunday nights. You feel part of a community. Because ever since I’ve been back in Lebanon I’ve been having trouble really identifying where I fit in. But maybe that’s the point; maybe I’m not supposed to fit in anywhere. I’ve come to realize that for me the real division in Lebanon isn’t religious, social or economic. The main barrier between people is that between those who’ve lived abroad (by choice or by necessity) and those who never have (by choice or by necessity). And I’m not convinced it’s a surmountable barrier. Whether you’ve lived in Europe, Africa, Asia or the North Pole, you bring back characteristics with you, both positive and negative, which are irreconcilable with the prevailing order of things.
There has been a lot of research conducted recently in the field of existential migration, studying people who migrate for the purpose of self-fulfillment rather than refuge or financial necessity. In the context of the free-flow of people and resources that has accompanied globalization and the opening up of borders; this is a particularly interesting field. People can choose to move about far more freely. They have choices they wouldn’t have had a few decades ago. This excess of choice makes things harder in a sense, because we’re bound to take a few wrong turns along the way. A new book on the subject is entitled “The End of Belonging”, which I think is a poetic title in itself. As well as the new concept of existential migration, the research proposes a new definition of home as interaction; that the ‘feeling of home’ arises from specific interactions with our surroundings that could potentially occur anywhere, at any time. This is almost antithetical to the usual definition of home as a fixed geographical place.
I’ll never be fully Lebanese because I love Fawlty Towers too much. I love the feeling of a cold drizzle in South Kensington. I love dunking a Chocolate Bourbon into a mug of PG tips. I love complaining about the weather. I love queuing. I love living in a city where there are people from the four corners of the Earth, and plenty of ‘em. And I never lived through the Lebanese civil war, which I feel guilty for and will never allow me to fully participate in the nation’s collective consciousness. But then again I’ll never be fully British. I love the sun too much. I love waving my hands around and raising my voice when I’m trying to make a point. I love Kibbeh Nayyeh. I love the gentle breeze in the shadow of a pine tree. I love smiling old men selling Chiclets on street corners. Oh, and I’ve got a hairy face and a funny name.
So I’m neither here nor there. I’m somewhere in between and that’s where I have to really settle in. And I think I can make my peace with that. Ubi bene, ibi patria!*
*Where I am at ease, that shall be my homeland.
Merry Christmas everyone! May your stockings be filled with easily exchangeable gifts and your bellies be filled with undercooked turkey! Bah Humbug!
There’s been talk recently of Lebanon joining the ranks of civilized countries and banning smoking in public places. Although I think there’s a litany of more important issues to legislate, no harm could come of this. But I’m still highly skeptical they’ll have any success in enforcing any laws that come into effect. I’ve seen [...]
The wedding invites are piling up on the mantel piece. “Save the Date!” they shout out every day as I walk past them. It seems everyone and their mother is on the road to wedded bliss. I mean in one sense its normal. I’ve just turned 27, so it’s hardly surprising that friends around my age are tying the knot. But I’m sometimes alarmed by the absolute necessity which marriage seems to be in Lebanon.
I’m a guy, so it’s actually quite bearable for me. I get a few questions here and there about the existence or not of an unlucky lady in my life. But being a woman must be an absolute horror. Girls get molded into aspiring wives when they’re still potty-training. Two thirds of the female population grow into aggressive husband-hunters, whilst the rest actively reject this social imperative and try and delay things by a couple of years.
God forbid a woman would want something as unattractive as a career! She instantly becomes the conversational fodder of bored Aunties Who Lunch during their rendezvous’ at Paul Gemmayze in between hair and nail appointments. As the smell of hairspray hangs in the air and the 5th layer of foundation on their formerly wrinkled face (thank you Botox) begins to melt, they bring up the subject of poor Maya! “Yvette, you know I don’t laike to talk yaane. I’m very discreet, bta3rfineh. Bass cette Maya, she’ll never find a husband like zis. She wants to be a banker 2al. Haram her parents, 3an jad. Bass ca reste between us!”
The worst environment for a woman in her 20s to show up unaccompanied is undoubtedly someone else’s wedding. There she is showered with compliments and fake smiles, and asked when her “happy day” is due. People asking this tend to neglect that a wedding does not a marriage make, and that the “happy day” isn’t really what one should be planning for. The people egging this young girl on towards marriage are often themselves standing a few meters away from an alcoholic husband they’ve come to despise. Maybe they want to drag the young and the beautiful down with them into the realm of the Desperate Housewife.
Weddings themselves have become ridiculously lavish. I was invited to one last summer, and when I asked how many people would be there I got the most ludicrous response I’ve ever heard: “it’s a small wedding. 650 people.” Really? That’s a small wedding? That’s entire population of some island states in the South Pacific. The bride and groom probably get repetitive strain injury just thinking of all the hands they have to shake and the sweaty cheeks they have to kiss.
Then there are the less intimate weddings. The one’s with 1500 guests. The ones with a succession of Z-list Arab pop stars belting out their latest lip-synched tune. The ones with pyrotechnics worthy of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. The ones with vast untouched buffets and rapidly depleted bars. Weddings so gargantuan that they go beyond the realm of the fairytale and get lodged somewhere between the grotesque and the decadent.
I feel sorry for people from my generation who don’t realize that a marriage isn’t about the wedding. That after the sparklers have faded, the champagne has been drunk and the cake has been digested, there’s a real life full of ups and downs to envisage. When you look at someone you’re about to marry, don’t think of the good times you’ve had, think of the worst thing you’ve ever been through together. And think of that moment happening 50 times over the next 50 years.
I’m lucky I have a healthy example to look towards at home; my parents have been together for 39 years. When I look at pictures of their wedding it never fails to make me smile. Twenty impeccably dressed and impossibly glamorous people in small village church. My dad in a dapper suit brought back from New York where he was covering a story for his paper, my mum in a short white dress and big white hat like Audrey Hepburn on the poster for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. No pop stars. No papier mache center pieces. No ice sculptures. Just two people willing to face the future together. I hope I find that someday, and that you will too.
(PS: Please don’t dis-invite me from any weddings. I’m really looking forward to drinking your booze and hitting on your bridesmaids)
It’s that time of year again. The faint drone of Jingle Bells slowly emanates from the supermarket speaker system. Ghastly multicolor lights blink incessantly on every other balcony. Plastic coniferous trees propped up in storefronts are festooned with plastic decorations of all shapes, sizes and levels of aesthetic garishness. Papier mache caves featuring improbably blonde baby Jesus’ and donkeys and farmyard animals galore. It’s almost Christmas folks!
Soon the advertising banners will go up: “Stolichnaya wishes you a Merry Christmas”. It’s sure to be merry if they’re involved in any fashion. Then will come the incessant and pain-inducing replays of “Last Christmas” by Wham on every radio station. It’ll assault your senses so relentlessly that you’ll actually be happy to hear “Christmas Coco Jumbo” by Mr. President. And if you happen to have the good sense to switch off the radio during the month of December, roaming Range Rovers with booming speakers strapped to their roof will drive through your neighborhood assaulting your ears with the worst of Christmas cheese.
Television stations, terrestrial and otherwise, will begin to play Home Alone, where a pre-rehab Macaulay Culkin defeats amateur crooks with plenty of cheer whilst rockin’ around the Christmas tree. Back on the streets, the headrests on VW Golfs from the 1980s will adorn Santa hats on the driver and passenger seats. The more festive amongst them will even ensure the hats have flashing bulbs instead of a white furry ball at the end. The excessively festive will show up at work one day with a Christmas hat, and people like me will want to smack them.
Roundabouts will be decorated with fake reindeer, grazing on bottles of Almaza and cigarette butts. Mechanical Santas with improbable facial expressions (made in China) will scare the bejesus out of children. “Real” Santas in shopping malls, their fake bellies and beards making 20 bucks an hour, will listen patiently as spoilt children read out their reasonable Christmas wish lists. Hmm, a PS3, a Learjet and a Porsche Cayenne like mummy’s. Giant “trees” made of sheets of green felt plastered onto a metallic frame will tower above the traffic in some squares of the city. Families will park their cars awkwardly, stumble out onto the damp streets and take happy snapshots with the twinkling lights. Which is nice, I guess.
On the plus side it’s refreshing to see that the paraphernalia associated with Christmas is present amongst all religious communities. I’m not remotely religious, and find it charming that everyone can agree on something. Kitsch Christmas decorations are a must! And if I stop being a grumpy old bastard for a second, the decorations, the music, the gifts and so on do bring joy to lots of kids.
But for me Christmas is going to mean answering questions about what I’m up to these days to a bunch of friends I haven’t seen in years and who all converge on Beirut for a week. We should all stop asking this question I think, since if we’re not up to speed, we probably aren’t a very important part of that person’s life. Christmas also means more traffic jams. Nice rain-soaked traffic jams. And saturated cellphone networks that can’t deal with the confluence of mortal souls upon the city.
But maybe, just maybe, I’m angry at Christmas because I haven’t felt anything at this time of year for well over a decade. I think I’m jealous of people who still muster a childlike wonder when faced with twinkling lights and Rudolph’s red nose. There is hope though. Someone has just asked me to be Santa at their Xmas party. After assuaging initial concerns that it might be a hint at some sort of protruding belly, I was told that my selection was due to my occasionally bellowing laugh. I was immediately reminded of a friend who used to say I laughed like Santa Claus when we were in high school, and I’m suddenly in a festive mood. Deck the halls with boughs of holly, fralalalala lala la laaaaa.
The electricity generator in my building is undergoing maintenance for a couple of days, which means I’m at the mercy of Electricite du Liban’s rationing of power to the Lebanese population. As I was driving past their headquarters the other day and noticed half the letters on their neon sign were extinct (Eltric du Lbn, anyone?), this doesn’t bode well for my chances of getting much work done online or getting through the stack of Almodovar films I’ve promised myself I’d finally watch.
So, I’ve been spending the last three hours of this Saturday morning skipping from one laptop to the next, milking their power supplies for all they’re worth. It’s amazing how having your power cut is a reminder of how absolutely dependent you are on technology. The electric shutters on my windows are almost all rolled down, which means I’m sitting in pitch darkness although it’s nice and bright outside, I suppose. The battery on my Blackberry is drained, which means I have no access to Google for a few hours. My heart sinks at the thought of all the unanswered questions! I can’t switch on the television, so there’s no soothing background noise to fill the flat. Just eerie silence. I prop myself up against the one window whose shutters I’d left open during the night, and finish a book I’m reading. It’s exceedingly tedious, and isn’t helping me forget I can’t use a microwave for the foreseeable future.
It’s pretty shameful that we live in a country that doesn’t have 24 hour electricity. Some days I’ll be driving down the street, and I notice none of the traffic lights I’m so chuffed about are actually working (see previous posts). Then I look at the time, and realize the power must be out. They should put a sign up: “The 21st century will be suspended between the hours of 11am-2pm and again between 10pm -midnight. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Enjoy the dark ages.”
Who needs a time machine when all you need to do is have everything you use drained of its usefulness. On the plus side, it means my teenage neighbor, who seems to have just discovered Metallica, can’t practice on his Fender Stratocaster. And, I have to say it’s nice to be isolated from the world for a few hours. Alone with your thoughts, you have to entertain yourself. Much like a bored child.
Oh, hang on. The power’s back on. I can stop thinking now, and switch on every appliance in the house. So soothing, no need for cerebral activity whatsoever. Let there be light!
As luck would have it, I seem to have developed a bit of a cold over last couple of days. Yes, go ahead, crack the standard joke about H1N1 and turn your face away. Being a man, I have reacted to this cold as if it were the bubonic plague. See women, bless their souls, go through the pain of childbirth whereas we men seem to be rendered completely obsolete at the first sign of a throaty cough. The phenomenon is quite mockingly referred to as man-flu.
Why do I bring this up? Well, people sometimes accuse me of being too harsh on Beirut and Lebanon in general. I don’t think I am though, and any criticism I do level at the city, comes from a place of love. I criticize Beirut much as a parent would chastise a child for coming home with a report card that says “can do better”. It’s very frustrating to see that someone you love isn’t fulfilling their potential. Nevertheless there is plenty I’m thankful for in this city.
Which brings me back to my cold. Having a cold in Beirut, is something I’m grateful for, being the perfectly inept specimen of a man that I am. See, as soon my cleaning lady saw this morning that I had the faintest whiff of a runny nose and cough, she launched into the preparation of a wide array of concoctions to appease my growing misery. As I reached for my keys and headed out of the house, she enquired as to why I was leaving the house in such a condition. I told her I was popping down to the pharmacy to get some meds. Once at the counter, I was greeted by the same ear-to-ear smile I always get and the usually annoying questions about the whereabouts and well-being of my family, which seemed oddly comforting today. Then my pharmacist, after I’d filled up two bags with all kinds of exotic pills from the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, told me off for getting dressed and coming all the way down, and told me next time I should call her and she’d bring everything I needed to my door. A few minutes later, I got a call from my Aunt, who seems to be a member of the Illuminati or some other all-pervasive body, since she has mysteriously discovered I have a cold (probably through my mother 3000 miles away) and wants me to know she’s 10 minutes away if I need anything. Panadol, a nice plate of Shish Barak, or an assassination of the Pope. I might have made that last one up.
This is all a very stark contrast to being ill in London. Calls to work fall on deaf ears and arsy comments. No one has the time for you or your ailments, may they range from the sniffles to a broken femur. As you gaze outside, the streets still immersed in pitch black darkness at 8am, slowly dampening with the pitter-patter of the drizzle, you sit and wait. As your bachelor pad is ill-equipped for such occurrences, the only contents of your kitchen being a Tesco sandwich, a bottle of vodka and a carton of orange juice that’s past its sell-by date, you sit and wait for Boots or any other pharmacy to open. You then don layer after layer of clothing, throwing on an extra scarf today because of your condition. You trawl the streets for 10, 15 minutes, a lifetime. You ask around the pharmacy looking for the strongest stuff they have, the pharmacist looks at you as if he needs to call the Suicide Hotline. You politely tell the nonchalant cashier that you don’t have a Nectar card, and don’t really care that collecting loyalty points might get you a bottle of water after 3 years. You go home, and sulk, watching daytime television shows.
So, there are a ton of things I have Beirut to be thankful for. I can be thankful for the fact that eating at Snack al Mathhaf as a high school student has forever made me immune to any food the Third World has to throw at me. I love that I used to ride home from school in a serveece taxi when I finished before the school bus was ready to leave. Serveece taxis with their ancient nature-defying Mercedes’, furry dice and shiny CDs hanging from the rear view mirror, the curmudgeonly driver, sharing a cramped space with four strangers for the time of a cab ride. These were wondrous things for a kid from London.
I love Sunday lunches with what’s left of the extended family. I love Sunday lunches in August when the entire extended family is here from around the world. And I love that every August I feel older, as I see my cousins’ daughters turning into beautiful young women and realize their sons could probably now beat me to a pulp.
I’m appreciative, every single day without fail, that I’m by the Mediterranean all day.
I love sitting on a balcony and hearing the jingle to LBC news coming from the neighbors’ living room, whilst I ignore the country’s goings on and look across the twinkling lights of the city.
I love walking around the city, lost. Asking for directions and being invited in for coffee by random old ladies, who painstakingly keep their little corners of the universe spotless, especially for impromptu guests.
I love, that after years of celebrating my birthday in the freezing rain in London, it’s always sunny on November 12th here in Beirut.
I love that people have lunch breaks, where they actually break for lunch. I once read on the side of a cab in London: “A Sandwich at your desk is not a lunch break”. Truer words have never been spoken.
I love that people work to live, and don’t live to work. I love that we put olive oil on all our food, even though I can’t stand the stuff. I love the warped sense of pride people get when they realize a celebrity has some sort of Lebanese ancestry. I love that even the most competent linguists can’t help but say “eno” and “yaane” in conversations with foreigners. I love that people fight over who pays a dinner bill.
I love happy hour in Gemmayze, walking out of Torino Express slightly buzzed on a few beers while the suns still out.
I love Beirut because you’re never far from thousands of years of civilization, even though it’s usually hiding behind a Dunkin’ Donuts or a Virgin Megastore.
I love Beirut because it cares about you the same way you care about it.
