April 11: Saturday Night in Beirut
We were planning to do a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Lebanon in Harissa – i.e., a hike up the closest mountain with a hikeable path. For some reason, though, Aune decided it was a bad idea, and we decided to go running in Aamchit instead. According to Yolante, a friend and a former neighbor, there's a place there that's good for running, by the sea, at the end of a small road that goes between the fields.
There were about 35 such roads. Since we didn't even know exactly what we were looking for, we didn't find it, whatever it is. So we ended up driving back to Jbeil (twice through completely blocked traffic), and running on the breakwater near the old port. Typical – sit in a car for two hours to be able to run back and forth on a breakwater for twenty-five minutes. Jbeil was full of schoolchildren on excursion; some of them, from Zahle according to the text on the bus, had apparently never seen a running blond before, because they took my photo every time I ran past.
After midnight.
We went to meet Doris and Tania in a restaurant in Gemmayze. Gemmayze is the happening place in Beirut right now. It's pretty much one street heading north from Martyrs' Square, just by the Paul bakery and café. It's proudly advertised as being a street with “traditional character.” It gets decidedly more traditional the further you go, with too-narrow sidewalks often blocked up by trash bags, Ferraris, pre-civil-war-vintage dinged-up Renaults, and clutches of fashionable teenagers and twentysomethings. Manaqish grills and popular eateries alternate with flashy in-spots. Since the electricity is out (except for the floodlights on Hariri's enormous mosque by Martyrs' Square, of course), it's also very dark, and there's a real risk of stepping into some traditional character if you're not careful.
The place was named Sepia. It was hard to find and packed to the gills, with an interior design that was flashy but impractical, food that was indifferent but overpriced, the music eclectic but loud, and there were only three seats for a reservation for four. When asking for another chair elicited no reaction whatsoever, we just took one from the next table. Then the staff demanded that we put it back. It took a certain amount of yelling to get this little problem sorted out (according to Joanna, they thought I was French, so that was OK), but eventually everybody in the room had a chair, except for one table that had none. (The people who had reserved it showed up too late to get any chairs of their own, so they left in a huff.)
That was a disappointment; on previous visits, the eating in Beirut has been good to excellent. Plus there was a group in the next table that spent the entire evening taking flash photos of each other, which got rather irritating as well.
Anyway, Doris is working freelance in Beirut. She still doesn't have Lebanese citizenship because her father's Dutch, although there is a movement trying to make it possible for Lebanese women to transmit citizenship to their children (currently only the father can do that). Carlos is still in Dubai, still holding onto his job, but very uncertain about how long – the crisis has hit there particularly badly, and the construction business being what it is, on-site architects are suddenly not in all that much demand. But she seemed a great deal happier than the last time we met, certainly because of her engagement with Carlos. The sadness that she somehow always seemed to be carrying was gone.
The evening in Beirut downtown is pretty unique, more so for easter.
You have your usual hubbub of cafés and bars and restaurants, the young, bold, and beautiful going out to see and be seen. When darkness falls, the mu'ezzins start their chants, one mosque at a time. To add Lebanese flavor, at that very instant we almost got trampled by a clutch of fashionable teenagers, the leading lady of which had TEASE picked out in pink sequins across her rather skimpy top. Then he church bells across the street ring in response, with the Easter mass piped onto the streets for good measure. Crazy traffic along recently-renovated, broad, new avenues, where somebody forgot to put in pedestrian crossings. One new way to cross the street in Beirut: wait for a bunch of nuns to show up and use their God power to miraculously stop the traffic, then cross with them.
I really don't get the Beiruti taste for an evening out. What happened to good food, a homelike atmosphere, welcoming service, and reasonable prices? Or, alternatively, great music, dancing, and general partying? Wherever they are, standing compressed like sardines in an overpriced, overdesigned eatery isn't it.
...
Every anarcho-capitalist should be forced to come live in Lebanon for a while. Here you can see first-hand what happens to power generation when there's no grid; security when there's no national army; traffic when there are no traffic rules. Meaning, solutions will appear, but they'll rarely be very good or efficient ones – a stinky, polluting, expensive diesel generator in every house, a militia for every sect, tribe, group, or, eventually, block, and traffic that flows like a flock of sheep, with honks instead of baas. Amazingly, only about 500 traffic fatalities a year – I chalk this up to the permanent traffic jam, which makes for pretty low speeds.
Speaking of, I know I'll finally have mastered driving in Lebanon when everybody stops complimenting me for it. Right now I'm feeling more like the dog that impresses everybody by walking on two legs – it's not that he does it particularly well; it's that he does it at all.
I manage reasonably so far, though. I haven't killed anybody, I've gotten us where we want to go, and I don't appear to make my passengers unduly nervous, nor attract more than the usual quota of honks and yells. Here's what I've learned so far:
1.If there's space ahead of you, you can move into it.
2.No sudden movements.
3.To go from one side of the road to the other in packed-solid traffic, just sort of drift casually, and it'll go fine. The same goes for merging into a crowded motorway from a parking lot next to it.
4.Turn signals just confuse people.
5.When in doubt, honk. Or stick your hand out the window and gesticulate.
Joanna figures Lebanese traffic is an example of swarm intelligence. I think there's something to that notion. The traffic really is like a crowd of people in a railway station, where everybody's on the move, but mostly avoids bumping into each other anyway. It's very reactive and flexible. Also horribly inefficient and feels like you're tap-dancing on the edge of a knife, but somehow it manages to sort itself out, even in absurd situations like two motorways intersecting with no traffic lights, yielding rules, or what have you. (OK, to be fair, they did rebuild that particular intersection since our last visit; it's now on two levels.)
The only way it could be worse, though, is if the roads were much emptier and the speeds were much higher. Which they are, of course, at night: that's when you get big, fast cars hurtling past you on both sides at meteoric speeds.
