Rational Grounds

We touch down exactly on time on Monday the 19th, and proceed relatively quickly through the airport up to passport control, where apparently everyone but me has failed to realize that they need a visa to enter Lebanon. Go me! The border guard checking me through seems cheerful enough working the night shift, and welcomes me generously. He even jokes around a bit.

"Benjamin.. Benjamin... Netanyehu?" He grins slyly.
"Ha ha!" I respond. "No relation."

My taxi driver finds me as I exit customs, and I'm off into the Beirut night. The driver is the second Lebanese person I meet, and the only one to date who speaks not a lick of English. Still, I have directions to the hostel I'm staying at, and he seems to know the names "Ashrafiyeh" and "Mehanna," so that's good.

One thing to note, if you ever go to Beirut, is that specific addresses of buildings don't really exist. Streets sometimes have names, but these are of minor importance, and change from block to block anyway. There are no building numbers. I mention all this because as we are driving around Beirut at four in the morning it quickly becomes apparent that my directions to the hostel - "Rue Cheikh al Ghabi 64, Ashrafiyeh" - are desperately inadequate. Fortunately there are lots of gentlemen hanging out on various street corners at that hour, and we ask about ten of them for directions before I remember that I've got the phone number for the hostel as well. Toufic, the hostel manager, guides us in and the driver soaks me for $20. I don't quite have the heart to protest.

I wake up on Tuesday achy and starving, and there's a cheese pita still waiting for me on the kitchen table. There is no phone. Or Toufic. Or anyone else. I look out the windows at an impressive view of what I assume is Beirut, and I have no idea where I am, how to tell K., my contact here (a recently graduated SIPA student), how to
get to me, and no way to contact her if I did. I'm not even sure that I have a key for the apartment building I'm in.

I spend the day making short expeditions, exploring my surroundings. A couple people are willing to let me use their phones, but there's no answer when I call K. I'm able to use the map in the hostel and several street signs to triangulate my exact location, and determine that I'm fairly close to what looks like a more commercial area, which might have a pay phone. I hike up to this Sassine Square, and I just about laugh out loud when I see the green umbrellas outside the first restaurant I come to. I've never been so happy to see a Starbucks in my life.

Sassine Sq. has Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Hardees and, around the corner, a full-on shopping mall. But no payphone, that I could see. I got an AC transformer from the Virgin Megastore there (which I subsequently used to blow up my laptop adapter - turns out it converted US (110 volts) to European (220 volts), not the other way around) and directions to an internet cafe back down the hill from where I'd come. I was able to email K. from there with my location, and incidentally fend off the young man who kept asking whether all Americans were indeed bisexual ("No" was apparently not the answer he was looking for).

K. was able to pick me up the next day and whisk me over to the University Hotel here, just outside the main entrance to the American University of Beirut. She'd gotten me a deal here for two months at $400/month (she co-owns the restaurant next door, and seems to know everybody here). Set up with an air-conditioned studio apartment with my own bathroom, fridge, and cable TV, my life has since been much better. I found a grocery store around the corner, so the fridge is full of food and drink, and the Arabic cable channels have been a very useful learning tool, even if I can only understand one word in twenty. I got a new laptop adapter for $45 down the street, and this internet cafe one block down. And I've been sneaking onto the AUB campus and reading in the shade when I'm not walking around exploring the city. Life is pretty decent.

Beirut is a city half-built and half-demolished. There isn't a block that doesn't have some construction or demolition going on. (Usually the only way to tell whether a building is being torn down or put up is that the ones being put up don't have bullet holes in the cement.) Downtown has been completely reconstructed in the old pre-war style, which gives it a strange feeling of being both a century old and crisply new at the same time. Western culture is everywhere - there's a TGIFriday's a block from Nejmeh Sq. at the city center. Two nights ago I met a fellow American (dockworker) and a chap from New Zealand at Paddy's Irish Pub, around the corner from said TGIFriday's. But much like New York the neighborhood can change between one block and the next - one moment it's all designer clothing and cell phones, the next it's chadours and rugs as doors and curtains.

Traffic is pretty crazy, comparable to Moscow or Italy. Honking is an integral part of the process, lanes are merely voluntary, and speed limits are something of a joke. Crossing any road is a contest of wills between the pedestrians and drivers, and I haven't discerned any hard and fast rules to that game yet other than "Don't flinch." I walk most places, because I'm cheap and I expect that any taxis are going to end up ripping me off, but once or twice I've taken a cab with interesting results.

"Ah! Ta'alum arabiye?" (Ah! You are learning arabic?)
"N'am." (Yes.)
"CIA ta'alumoon arabiye..." ([Loosely] The CIA learns arabic...)
"Ha ha! Le CIA." (Ha ha! I am not CIA.)
"Seteth-heb ila Iraq?" (Will you go to Iraq?)
"Ha ha! Le, Lubnan faqat." (Ha ha! No, only Lebanon.)
"Kathiroon yeth-heboon ila Iraq." (There are many people going to Iraq.)
"N'am. Oh look, it's my stop."

The public beach was extremely dirty, and though the heat made me go in the water once or twice I didn't put my head under, and showered very thoroughly the moment I got home. The beach and sidewalks right along the shore are almost the sole preserve of men - and what women are there at all are much more conservatively dressed than those a block or two in. Probably the excessive attention that the fisherman pay to any sweet young thing that comes along, I suppose. Along the water is the only place guys wear running shorts and no shirt - anywhere else it's rare (though not out of bounds) to see shorts at all.

I've registered for a colloquial Lebanese Arabic class at the Universite' Saint-Joseph that starts July 3rd. This should be interesting, as the registration process was entirely in French (which I speak slightly less of than Arabic), though I am assured that this will not be an issue in the class. I may have an internship lined up as well, with an interview happening today.

Just yesterday I finally located some fellow Columbia students here - M., from my program at SIPA, via email and A., an undergraduate who was in my Arabic class last semester, by randomly running into her on the American Universitiy campus. Both are either in or around the AUB, and A. has roped in a bunch of people from the nearby Lebanese American University as well, so I should now have some people to hang out with in the off hours and go clubbing with. We hit up a local restaurant last night where M. introduced us all to a professor she's working with at AUB and a woman from the Netherlands who's going to be in my Arabic program at Universite Saint-Joseph. We capped off the night at the Hard Rock Cafe with beers and the Swiss/Ukraine World Cup game. Next project: clubbing along Monot St.