High School

I opened my eyes Tuesday morning, wary of what the day would hold. Named by Hezbollah as the day of the nation strike, I was frightened and excited by what the day might bring. "Snow Day," I chuckled as I started to get dressed. In the northeast United States, we all stay home when it snows too hard to get on the road, but in Lebanon, I was quickly learning, we all stay in when Hezbollah decides to hit the streets.
I turned on the news to see what the latest was, but the reporting on BBC was too general for somebody who lives in the city. I got quickly changed and headed out to the street to get to work. I opened the front door to my building to find an almost abandoned city. There were some people walking along the streets, but there were no cars to be found. I headed on my way from Hamra, where I live, to Gemmayze, where I work, along a route that I had picked out on a map with help from my doorman. I set out with my friend Steve Walker from Groton, who is visiting Beirut for a month as part of a Middle East tour he's making, and we nervously anticipated what each turn in the road might hold.
Most of the businesses were closed, some because they were run by Shiites but most because their employees could not reach their shops. Another significant difference between this and any other day was that that the typically extraordinary view of the mountains and the sea was obscured by a dark gray haze that hung low over the city. I'd have typically taken a cab to work, but since there were none on the roads it was almost half an hour before I arrived in downtown. A part of the city that's almost unnaturally modern and clean due to Rafiq Hariri's rebuilding plan, downtown was a virtual fortress of troops, barbed wire, and tanks. We twisted and turned through downtown, passing the Prime Minister's offices and the Parliament Building before coming to the last leg of our walk.
In order to get to Rue Gouraud, where my office is, I had to cross Martyr's Sqaure, a giant oblong plaza, and a favorite spot for activist movements. Sure enough, as I entered the square, I spotted a group of about fifty or so men burning tires in the road. The amazing thing about Lebanon is that because it's such a small country, it only takes blocking a handful of roads to effectively shut down the country. Martyr's square is a confluence of important roads, and if shutting down the country was their aim, then these protestors were well placed. I passed them by quietly, drawing not more than a passing glance. I knew that hurting westerners was not their aim; plus, these men were not Hezbollah but rather members of a Hezbollah-allied Christian party called the Free Patriotic Movement (the FPM) who harbor considerably less resentment to the western countries. I could tell they were FPM because many of them were dressed in orange, the party's color. The air, as I passed these protestors, was thick with the awful smoke of burning rubber.
I made it to the office and spent the day watching the news and calling the hospitals for casualty reports. For those of you worried about me, you'll be happy to know that the staff would not send me out into the field on this day because as an intern, I was not under contract with the newspaper, and I therefore posed a higher level of liability to them. Throughout the day, I watched the western news on the television and grimaced in the knowledge of what everyone would be seeing back in the States. While what you all saw on television actually was happening here, it was not representative of the Lebanon I was witnessing. In northern Beirut, where I live and work, there were some peaceful demonstrations, like the one I saw, but by and large the city was just in a quiet waiting mode. Most of the violence was in the south of the city or in the north of the country.
I walked home without incident, picking up a couple beers on my way celebrate with Steve our first encounter with major civil strife. I went to bed that night after watching the news in which all of the many political leaders were taking to the airwaves in a flurry angry rhetoric which seemed to me to be killing more people than the day's gun battles.
I woke up the next morning, Wednesday, and wondered what the streets would be like since Hezbollah had decided against a second day of strikes. I've always been told that the greatest danger in Lebanon is that once you come, you'll never want to leave. I didn't know what to expect on Wednesday as I stepped out of the building, but I was amazed to see a city bustling defiantly with life. Suddenly I saw the other maxim I'd always heard about Lebanon fuse with the first. The second one says that the country can be besieged by war and violence one day, but that with the strength of its people, it rebounds immediately the next. I realized at that first moment I hit the street on Wednesday that so much of Lebanon's allure, so much of the reason that I'm quickly falling in love with it has to do with the resilience of its people.
Wednesday was a peaceful day in Beirut, but a hectic one in the office. I was charged with my most difficult story yet. I had to write a report on the previous day's casualties and arrests. This was challenging because the information was still coming in all day Wednesday and would continue to right up to the point I had to submit my story. The difficulty here was that I had to begin the story and continually add and edit as the details shifted. On top of that, I had sources who, for much of the day, gave me conflicting information on how many dead and wounded. So I had to continually try to widen my number of sources to achieve consensus numbers that most reflected the general thinking among the authorities. Ultimately, I ended up noting the conflicting sources in the article as well.
Then there was today. Today was the first day that made me anxious. Tuesday's violence felt somehow controlled, and I felt less at risk in the city. Today was a little more difficult. The day began with a note of optimism as I sat in the office watching the proceedings at Paris aid conference. I saw each delegation give encouraging words to Lebanon and then announce its dollar pledge. The United States and Saudi Arabia each offered generous sums, and as much as I hate to say it, I have to give the French a tip of the cap for their sizeable donation too. But then violence once again stole the headlines. Sunni-Shiite fighting broke out around the Arab University in south Beirut. In the camera shots I recognized the stadium that I had driven past many times on the airport road. I was a little rattled by this spontaneous outburst of violence because I could handle conflict that was announced days in advance, like Tuesday's, but unexpectedness of this new round really stunned me.
To make matters worse, I heard of outbursts around a university in Hamra, where I live. Furthermore, we could hear spirts of machine gun fire as we sat in our office. The whole thing made me a little uneasy.
And now I come back to the title I've assigned to this post. High School. I left the office at about 6:30, getting home around 7. When I went out to go to the internet café at 8, my doorman warned me that the government had just instated a curfew that would go into effect in half an hour. I ran down to the café to find it closed. So was the other one on my street. Considering the late hour that the curfew was announced, I saw people hustling down the street and rushing to their cars, heading home. And now here I sit, unable to leave, wondering what the coming days will hold. This amazing three day stretch began with a Lebanese snow day and ended with a Lebanese curfew. I somehow feel like I'm back in high school.

Welcome (Officially) to Part 2: Beirut

So now as the haze of the jet lag finally wears off and my lost bags have been found, I feel as though I can begin to let you all know what I'm doing here and what I've been up to so far.
I arrived Thursday at 4:45am after having flown British Airways through London. When I got to my apartment building, I thought I was going to have to go find a hotel for the night, but enough banging on the door persuaded the doorman in the next room to get up and let me in. My apartment in actually on the first level of the basement, but because the building is built into a hill, I am three floors up with a great view of the Mediterranean and the mountains. It's a small studio apartment with a bathroom by the entrance, a living room, and a bedroom separated from the rest of the apartment by a sort of half wall. Additionally, I have a full, nice kitchen on an enclosed balcony. Next to that, I have a great open balcony that gives good views.
I live in a neighborhood called Hamra, which is a Muslim neighborhood in West Beirut. I am only a stone's throw from the American University and from the main drag called Rue Bliss. I can't stop chuckling about the fact that even though I try to immerse myself in the culture as much as possible, at the end of the day I have to tell the taxi drivers to take me home to Rue John Kennedy.
As for what I'm doing here….. I have somehow managed to muster enough credit from Middlebury (to still graduate in four years) that I am taking this semester off. I have come to Beirut with a fulltime internship with The Daily Star newspaper. The Daily Star is the large English newspaper based in Beirut. I won't dwell on it for long since I haven't actually started working yet, but what I will tell you is that I am working for their Lebanon section, where I'll be helping out with stories, doing some copy editing, and writing my own articles. I begin work on Monday. Check out their website at www.dailystar.com.lb. If I get anything published on the website, I'll try to post the link here on the blog, but you should check out the website anyways because even by reading the headlines, you'll get an idea of what's happening in the country.
While there is a thrill to being new in a country and discovering everything for the first time, the one thing I really don't like, that I've had to do in the past couple days, is nail down the essentials. Finding the supermarket, bank, laundromat, pharmacy, etc., etc., is both necessary and tedious. I'm looking forward to finishing all that up today or tomorrow. More interesting has been the apartment search. While I like my apartment now, I need to move by the end of the month into a place that is both cheaper and closer to where I will be working. Unlike in Cairo where there are real estate agencies on every block, in Beirut you have to go door to door. Thursday was like a treasure hunt in that I'd go into a café or store and ask about apartments at which point I'd be given directions to somewhere else. By the end of the day, having wandered the length of Rue Gouraud about a dozen times, I had several contacts and decent housing possibilities.
The other thing that bears mentioning are the protests in the center of town. I'll go into more detail in my next post about why they're there, but since December 1, Hezbollah has run a sit-in protest in the center square of town until the Siniora government resigns. Because there is one big road that connects east Beirut to West Beirut, I've driven by the protests several times. What you see when you look out over them is thousands of tents of varying shapes and sizes with people wandering through them. I have not, thank goodness, seen an actual protest yet, just the tent city where the Hezbollah supporters sleep and hold their protests when called to do so. All around the camp also are hundreds of posters of Sheikh Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah.
The tent city forms a sort of semi-circle around the Grand Serail, the Prime Minister's office building. The Prime Minister, Fouad Siniora, has hardly left the building since the protests began, and many of his cabinet ministers, fearing violence, have moved into the building too. Considering the proximity of the tents to the building, and considering the supposed size and volume of the protests that take place there, one can only imagine the stress felt by those holed up in the building. Between the protests and the Grand Serail, however, is an intense wall of barbed wire, tanks, and troops. Driving by it, I cannot help but get goose bumps as I watch the scene.
In general, the feel of Beirut is very different from that of Cairo. A much more liberal city, I rarely see women in veils here, and there are noisy and conspicuous bars all over the place. The relative affluence is apparent here too as evident through all the Mercedes, BMW's, and SUV's that prowl the streets. The city feels more like Paris than it does Cairo (a statement that I will permit myself to amend as I see more of the city). All in all, this is a fantastic city that seems as sexy as it does dangerous. And whether the latter contributes the former, I'm not sure yet. All I know is that I'm in for a hell of a semester, an I look forward to many more posts on the blog as my life here begins to take shape.

10 Ways You Know You're Back in the Middle East/Beirut

(In sequential order)

1) When the Che-Guevara-biography-toting Lebanese guy sitting next to you on the airplane tells the flight attendant he's "a fucking idiot" for offering wine to a veiled woman.

2) When you expect your bags to get lost en route to Beirut and when you find out they are, you know there is still order in the universe.

3) When the taxi that was supposed to be waiting for you upon your 4am arrival is nowhere to be found.

4) When the Prime Minister's office building looks more Alcatraz than the White House, with miles and miles of barbed wire and dozens of tanks and hundreds of soldiers protecting it.

5) When you begin your apartment search by asking in a restaurant for the location of a real estate agency and a waiter comes over to you and swears he's a professional real estate agent.

6) When, after seeing rain clouds on the horizon and asking somebody whether they think it will rain tonight, you get an annoyed glare and they say to you, "How should I know? Only God knows this!"

7) When you chuckle at the irony when a man in a café tells you, "You don't want to live in Hamra. That's a Muslim neighborhood. You want to live here in Gemayze because only Christians live here," which he follows up with "Alhamdulilah!" ("Thanks to Allah!").

8) When you're already able to string three languages together in the same sentence.

9) When, typical of the 'life goes on' Lebanese mentality, you get more than a half dozen "Who knows" and "I'm not even sure" comments when you ask about the Hezbollah protests that are taking place in the middle of town.

10) When you swell with pride after getting asked if you're Egyptian when you say a few quick words in Arabic.

So, yes, I am now here in Lebanon. I arrived at 4am on Thursday morning and still feel crazy with jet-lag and too tired to write a more detailed post. Tomorrow I'll put up a more thorough explanation of what I'm actually doing here as well as some initial observations from the city. After that, I'll try to do Lebanese history/current Lebanese political situation 101 so that further posts make more sense. So, bottom lines: I'm safe and sound, I'm wearing the same clothes three days running since the airport lost my bags (I'm supposed to get them back today), I'm unable to think straight due to jet lag, and I promise there'll be more soon!