The aeroport in Beirut is small, neat and swarming with taxi drivers. My friend Aaron and I are pursued, at times escorted through the terminal by smiling men pretending not to hear us decline their services.
Taxi? Service? [A kind of shared taxi service.] Where are you from? Welcome to Lebanon.
We are determined to take public transport, the best source of local culture, into the city, so fight our way into the parking lot and approach for directions a family getting into their car. They are clearly apprehensive at our approach; we must look like taxi drivers. ‘Bus station?’ They seem to understand and gesture vaguely toward the nearby motorway. Five minutes later they drive across the car park to correct our course and embellish their earlier directions.
Dear Mum and Dad,
You were right to be worried about this trip to the Middle East. They are killing us over here. With kindness.
Despite this improved guidance the bus station remains elusive. After another passer-by suggests that ‘Everyone in Beirut takes a taxi’ we relent, and he cheerfully flags and negotiates our ride. The car is an ancient green Mercedes, rusting out from bottom to top; unbelievably, the driver is even older and more rusted. Let the adventure begin!
Car accident.
It is amazing this only happens one time. The driving in Beirut, in every place we visit in Lebanon, is crazy. Most roads have no lines; where there are lines, even double centre lines, these are completely ignored. Car horns are used more than clutches: to signal passing, to invite passengers into a taxi, as a substitute for stopping at intersections. The driver of the jeep that runs us into a guardrail launches from behind the wheel, screaming Arabic at our driver while reaching around behind his right hip. He’s going for a gun – wait, wait, where’s my camera! – but it’s only his license and insurance, which he waves angrily. A police officer arrives and order is restored. Our taxi trundles off down the middle of the road.
There are other obvious differences between home and away, East and West. We start keeping score as soon as we board the plane, with the safety presentation from Cyprus Airways:
If the cabin pressure drops, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling. If this is a smoking flight, put your cigarette out immediately…
Please do not smoke while standing or in any of the designated non-smoking sections of the aircraft.
Even in cosmopolitan Beirut there are far fewer women than men out and about, shopping or working, and many more of these women wear a veil or hijab. We never travel far without seeing buildings scarred by gunfire: since 1975, Lebanon has endured fifteen years of civil war (until 1990), a presidential assassination (in 2005), armed conflict with Israel (in 2006) and Palestine (in 2007), and more internal conflict involving Hezbollah (in 2008). The corollary to this is a highly visible military presence: tanks, Humvees and soldiers keeping watch over major intersections, roadways and buildings.
The thing to notice, however, is how these differences are only part, even a small part of what is actually happening in Beirut. It is abundantly clear, even after our first frantic hour, that the city and its surrounding areas are shot-through with a crackling, anxious, enviable purpose. The traffic is a function of the life crawling everywhere, much like the cranes pulling buildings from the ground or the tenants chasing-up the scaffolding to occupy units on an as-completed basis. We see dozens of buildings where first-floor businesses operate beneath rows of cinder-block shells, infant apartments. A blown-out building downtown garages military vehicles on the ground floor and, indifferently, squatters up above.
When we finally manage to take a local bus, heading south to a town called Saida, the driver leaves the station with only our seats filled, but before reaching the motorway he has found, with minimal detour, enough passengers to fill every seat.
Saida, Saida! Yalla, Yalla! [Arabic for ‘Come on!’]
Our bus driver’s enterprise is everywhere: in crowded markets, banks, travel agencies, corner coffee merchants offering impossibly bitter liquid, restaurants, shawarma stalls, hotels, Internet cafes. North American fast food chains have built gleaming outlets that underline local self-confidence. (Schadenfreude alert: we are delighted to see locals opt for shawarma over the Burger King next door.)
My parents were nervous about this trip, displaying a mystical authority over the unknown: ‘They just think about things differently over there.’ Without effacing its caustic, violent history (some lingering effects of which we will recount in a subsequent article), it turns out that the conditions on the ground in Beirut are significantly ‘different’ only in the version they depict of how people everywhere get-on with the happy, gritty, unpredictable work of life. The posh city centre (called Place d’Etoile) stands atop the former Green Line, the devastated centre of the Lebanese civil war. (It feels like Slumdog Millionaire when our local host has difficulty finding his car in the underground car park.) Next to this is the Hariri Mosque, a massive dedication to the assassinated former president. On its soft carpet, under its looming, gleaming chandeliers, we discuss self-identity through group membership with a Lebanese ex-patriot who fled Toronto and its pervasive anomie.
Who am I, what am I doing tomorrow, who are you and what do you want? The concerns of the global village are alive in Beirut as much as anywhere, in some ways more visibly, the renovations are still so new and developing. We meet the child in the picture en route to Damascus, sharing a hired van with his Lebanese family and some other men going home to Syria. He and I spend the ride exchanging high fives and fist bumps and everyone shares snacks after we make a rest stop. For all our differences – language, religion, history, colour, worldview, income, life experience, mores – all of us are hushed as we drive up and out of Beirut, away from the coast, watching white clouds pile-up and spill over the horizon, stained red by a dying sun.
