from my first day

picture captions:
1. downtown on thursday night...i think. very close to martyrs' square.
2. raousheh (pigeon) rock. there are caves inside and you can borrow boats and go exploring and swimming. <-- on the list of things i'm going to do here
3. what i saw when i woke up on my first morning here
4. the main gate of aub, bliss street

***
oh, sweet, sweet internet and laptop power cord.

an unbelievable amount of things have happened in the last 24 hours, but my first day of school is tomorrow, so i don't have time to write. i'm going to make a quick list to remind myself so i can write everything tomorrow:
- lebanese family life
- on assorted political topics (israel, the death penalty, hezbullah, palestinians)
- violence in achrafiyeh, which is nearby. (i was there 2 nights ago...that's where monot street is.) i'm fine. just to put that out there.

in the meantime, this is what i wrote the first night that i was here. and some pictures. i'll take more because now i have an adaptor and can charge my camera.

***

A little after 3:30am on Sunday, January 29, 2006

I can’t believe I’m still awake.

I got into Beirut around 8:30pm. On the way to London, 2 highly attractive British soccer/football players sat next to me and informed me that in England, class, not geography, is the chief determinant of accent: “speaking posh,” therefore, is the abandonment of any regional dialect. In London, I met 6 people who are also going to AUB, so we talked freely through the 1 ½-hour delay about our parents’ responses to our decisions to study in Beirut, where we were living, long-distance relationships, and our own perceptions of the city we had all committed to living in for nearly 5 months having never been there before. I slept through continental Europe and woke up only when we were about to pass over the Mediterranean. It was completely black outside, save for a receding stretch of light along the horizon. Rather than trying to figure out exactly where I was, though, I watched the stars, which seemed closer and more brilliant than any I’ve ever seen. I felt like the big dipper was about to smack me in the face. From the sky, Lebanon is crisscrossed with lights, even in the mountains where one lighted tier rises over the next. Flying low over Beirut, the city seemed much bigger than I had imagined. The runway of Rafiq al-Hariri International Airport literally emerged out of the sea.

Once in the airport, a place that played host to some of the worst atrocities of the Lebanese Civil War, the lack of security was astounding. No one asked me anything. I said hello to the immigration officer who was wearing absolutely nothing that identified him as such and he smiled at me and waved me through.

I am temporarily sharing a room in New Women’s Hall with Carmen who is from Michigan and a graduate student at GW. We live in a suite with two stunning Lebanese girls, Mona and Sara. As we began unpacking, Mona came in dressed to the nines to introduce herself, and then apologized and said she was already very late to meet someone and would talk to us later. After a fruitless quest to get internet access, Carmen and I returned and met Sara, who offered us enough food for about a week and then gave us her user name and password so we could get online. I couldn’t believe that something so confidential in North America could be offered so freely to a stranger in Lebanon.

Intending to go to sleep immediately, Carmen intercepted me on my way back upstairs and told me that Sara had invited us to come bar-hopping with her, her boyfriend, Fadi, Mona, and some other friends, among them an American girl who attends AUB named Maris who is an unpaid intern at the Beirut Daily Star. She enjoys it very much, but says it is very time-consuming – so much so that she is unable to take a full courseload at school. I’ve also heard that the Star is always in need of copy editors and thus takes on people fairly liberally. In any case, Carmen and I dressed quickly and not nearly as extravagantly as Mona, Sara, or any of the other girls we passed on our way out, and after some deliberation, all of us got into 2 cabs and left.

We arrived at a place that seemed to me to be quintessentially Beirut: a pedestrian-only area with palm trees and teeming with beautiful and ultra-fashionable young people wandering around from bar to bar, running into friends, and heckling with bouncers. At the same time, every few buildings brazenly displayed varying degrees of physical damage leftover from the war, and armed members of the Lebanese army patrolled the streets. It was the third time in my life that I remember seeing someone walking around with a rifle.

Everywhere was full so we again piled into 2 cabs and went to another part of the city and ended up at a kind of Tex-Mex-themed bar called Cactus where they offered free chips and salsa and played country music. We stayed there for some time, everyone else drinking while Carmen and I sipped virgin Jamaicas. We told stories and laughed and asked each other questions. I learned that bartenders often hit on girls and girls tend to flirt back because it is considered a low-risk situation and will likely earn her free drinks. American girls are assumed to be easy. Men will hit on women even if they’re walking around in pajamas. It is normal and acceptable to pay for things in a combination of Lebanese pounds and US dollars, but I didn’t pay for anything tonight because Mona and Sara insisted that they were taking us out. I heard my first anti-Semitic comment: I mentioned to Mona that it seemed that girls with boyfriends were very flirtatious with their boyfriend’s best friend and she replied that, “We Lebanese are not like Jews; we like to share everything.”

Fadi’s best friend, Roni, gave Mona and Sara a ride to an upscale restaurant/bar and then offered to take Carmen and I back to school. While we waited in front of the restaurant, Carmen and I got into a spirited discussion with Fadi and Roni about Lebanon that stemmed from their realization that we had arrived five hours earlier. They welcomed us to their country and advised us that we would find many surprises in Lebanon, both good and bad. When I asked about that, Roni said first that the electricity in Beirut goes out all the time, sometimes just briefly and other times for several days, a result of the government’s claim that they don’t have the money to pay for fuel. “I don’t know what they do with the money. We pay taxes, but it doesn’t go there. I don’t know where it goes.” He also told us that Lebanon is the most beautiful country in the world, but that the Lebanese themselves are destroying it with their politics. He asked Carmen and me what religion we were. Carmen explained that her parents had converted to Islam before she was born so she was raised Muslim and I said I wasn’t religious. He nodded and confirmed that those differences were unimportant in America, whereas “the three groups in Lebanon – the Christians, the Muslims, and the Druze – have never and will never be united. No matter what it seems; they are not together.” He said that the government was totally corrupt and inept: people enter into politics not because they care about the country, but because it’s a good way to make money. These wealthy politicians have chalked up the assassinations and bombings that have happened here during the last year to “a ghost” and haven’t initiated any kind of investigation. Finally, he revealed that the Lebanese have no money because “they work 11 months of the year and then spend all of it the twelfth to party.” He thought for a moment and then said that, “Lebanon is a country where you can do anything. If you want to go dancing somewhere at 7 in the morning, you can do that.”

That’s what intrigues me the most about Lebanon: to say that anyone can do anything isn’t an exaggeration here and the absence of limits simultaneously contributes to Lebanon’s downfall and keeps the country on its feet.

I asked Roni what people do when there’s a bomb.

“You look around and then you keep driving to a different place. There’s no bomb at the other place."