Ágúst í Kaíró

Beirut & Damascus, part I

Þar sem það skilja allir ensku sem hafa beðið eftir þessari sögu en ekki allir skilja íslensku verður enskan notuð í þessari ferðasögu.

When I left Cairo in December and had decided to return, I was certain to use the opportunity and travel to Lebanon and Syria.

The original plan was not to go alone but after bombings and delayed student loans I ended up going on my own. I wanted to go and in a strange way I felt like I had to go to Beirut, like in a support of the Lebanese.

To get a Syrian visa in Cairo, I had to have a six month residential permit here. I needed to extend my permit anyway so I went to the Mugamma to do so. That took couple of hours, since the government was concerned with an organized protest from the Muslim Brotherhood and sent two or three thousand soldiers to Tahrir Square to keep us all safe from such troubles. Being a tall, ginger bloke I was able to get to the Mugamma, which looked almost deserted that morning. The day after I got my passport back and acquired a visa from the Syrian embassy in Cairo (as an Egyptian residents I saved couple of dollars by doing that, not to mention time at the borders), which is hidden in a residential area in Dokki, in a big house with a small office in the basement. Certainly not the glamour that surrounds the embassy of Qatar, my neighbour, but that's another story. So, I was ready to go, with a Cairo-Beirut, Damascus-Cairo ticket.

March 30
I arrived at Beirut International Airport late on March 30th. I hassled with a taxi driver, 20.000 LLP to get to my hotel in Hamra. When we were at the hotel he demanded $30, twice as much. I protested in Arabic and refused to pay any dollars to begin with, “I’m not American, I don’t use dollars” I told him unkindly in Arabic. We argued and the hotel staff acknowledged that the official rate was $30. Finally, he gave up and we settled on 30.000 LLP ($20). An old Lebanese who was in the lobby apologised for not interfering, said those guys were tough and they would throw rocks through the windows if they would intervene – but 30.000 LLP was “fair”. My first night in Beirut and I’d had my first “conflict” before I checked into my hotel room. A good start!

March 31
Beirut greeted me with a blue sky and wonderful weather. After breakfast at the hotel I walked to the AUB and from there to the (in)famous Holiday Inn Hotel. It certainly was strange to discover all the houses, just five minutes from my hotel, bombed and ruined, in between rebuilt or new houses. From there I walked the Green Line to the downtown area, visited Hariri’s grave and the Independence05 camp.
I didn’t really know what to expect. I expected to see scars from the civil war and I expected to see the astonishing reconstruction but I certainly didn’t expect to see what I saw. Only five years ago the city looked pretty much the same as it did at the end of the civil war. Today it has been rebuilt in a way that one can’t fully appreciate unless seeing pictures of how the same areas used to look like. Life goes on and McDonald’s outlets can be found in the same streets as bombed buildings from the civil war. The contrasts are everywhere.

I talked with a young woman who teaches philosophy at a university. She told me that her students came every day to class worrying about the security situation. She also said the Arab tourists were too afraid to come now but for some reason the Europeans kept on coming. She was a typical “new generation” Christian Lebanese. Born in the U.S. shortly after the Civil War started and returned with her family to Beirut in the late 1990s.

I walked around the downtown area looking for a Thai restaurant I had read about in the Lonely Planet book on Lebanon and Syria. I finally found out that it had gone bankrupted a couple of months ago. I was so disappointed, I had looked forward to go to a Thai restaurant for the first time in months (in Cairo they are all but non-existing), and hungry I ended up in one of Beirut’s posh sushi restaurants.

In the evening there weren’t many people in the downtown area and even fewer in the Hamra district. Only Starbucks seemed to have some young Lebanese couples, women looking like from a fashion magazine (with or without a hijab) and a couple of European tourists.

April 1
It had started to rain. And it rained a lot. I looked around for car rentals to get quotations and finally found a good price at the Europecar rental. Walked around the western part of Hamra, saw the Pigeons Rocks, tried to do some shopping but the prices turned out to be too much for an Egyptian student…

I went to the bar on the top of the Crown Plaza to see the city “from the top”. Over a couple of espressos I ended up mingling with the bartender who turned out to be a graduate from the Lebanese American University. We talked about the future of country and a little bit about the past, but like any other Lebanese he was focused on the future. “The past is history”, like someone said.

In the evening I decided to explore the nightlife district in Beirut, around Rue Monot. That street is simply full of clubs, bars and cafés. The main battleground during the Civil War used to be here but for the past years the young, rich (and mostly Christian) Lebanese have filled this area every Friday and Saturday night. The parking spaces are full of BMWs, Mercedes Benzes and even Porches and Hummers!

Somehow I didn’t feel among equals, since I didn’t have a German sports car and walked down to the Place d’Étoile for some tea and people-watching. When I entered the heart of the downtown area Lebanese soldiers stopped me and searched my camera bag. Being used to Egyptian “security” I was amazed because they actually searched the bag. The Lebanese soldiers not only wear the best uniforms but I seem to get some training and take their job seriously, which is very different from their neighbouring Arab militaries.

I later found out that there had been a bomb attack in a Christian town outside of Beirut. Those who hadn’t escaped the weather went home when people started to get news of the bombing. It didn’t help that you could hear the thunders like an echo of distant bombings.

On my way back home I walked pass couple of coffeehouses near the AUB. Young people were sitting there, silently drinking their tea and smoking shisha and the big screen televisions that usually only show music videos or football, showed live coverage from the town that had been attacked.

April 2
After breakfast I picked up my car. I had a new Hyundai Getz, which I had for the day for $30. I started of by getting lost in the Hamra district, driving one one-way street to another. I finally ended up at Starbucks, some 100 m. from my hotel after 10 minutes of driving. There I bought my first ever coffee at Starbucks and a tuna sandwich for the road. Of I go and get lost couple of times. Driving in the Middle East is great, as long as you can accept the fact that there are no rules except watch out for everything in front of you and don’t cross highways unless you’re pretty safe you won’t be run over. Easy peasy, so driving wasn’t a problem. But knowing how to get out of the city certainly was, since my city map was as accurate as a CIA dossier!

I found my way out of the city, when I discovered I had been on the right road in the beginning when I thought the road had to be bigger. It isn’t a highway as you might expect but only a small road with two lanes most of the time, except when there’s only one (ímyndið ykkur bara að keyra upp Kambana í rúman klukkutíma). The scenery is great, I guess – but thanks to rain and fog I didn’t see anything.

Without any problems I drove over the Mt. Lebanon hills and into the Beeka Valley. Welcome to Hizbullahistan it should say, but it doesn’t. Nasrallah, Khomenei and Khameini greet you, smiling – every time you enter a town on the way to Baalbeck, where I was going.

Baalbeck prides itself of being the biggest ruins of Roman temples in the world. I’ve never been to Rome, unfortunately, but having the Pyramids pretty much in my backyard and having seen Acropolis in Athens I would say that temples need to be special to impress me. And Baalbeck did. I was extremely lucky because there were no tourist groups and only me and maybe six or seven independent travellers were walking around the area. The weather stayed dry while I was there and it was really amazing to see the ruins. Another thing that amazed me was that the toilets within the temple area were clean. Yes, the public toilets were actually usable. If you visit temples, ruins, the Pyramids, you name it, in Egypt, you better fast that day because like so many things the Egyptians seem to be unable to manage the public toilets around their main tourist attractions. The Lebanese on the other hand seem to be aware that one of the three main needs of tourists is to “do their business” (the other being eating and sleeping). The Egyptians do poorly on everything except sleeping but having said that most of the good hotels are run by multinational companies.

After a very pleasant visit to the temples in Baalbeck I popped into a souvenir shop close to the temples. There I found among genuine Made-in-China artefacts Hizbullah t-shirts, videos, bumper stickers and you-name-it. Ended up buying t-shirts and got a homemade DVD with propaganda material. When this pale looking foreigner turned out to be (somewhat) Arabic speaking the price, like so many times before, halved.

I wanted to see the Umayyad ruins in Anjar but when I came there I was stopped by Syrian soldiers. I had driven into a military area, which I later found out was the headquarters of the Syrian army in Lebanon after it withdrew from Beirut. Badly trained Syrian soldiers stood lonely in the rain and didn’t know anything about any Umayyad town. By the way, the Syrian army seems to need a hell of a lot of BMWs...

I found the Umayyad town. It turned out to be right next to the headquarters. It was closed so I drove to a fish restaurant called Shams Restaurant after I had taken a short circle around the town of Anjar. In Anjar you see three different names for each street, in Arabic, written in Latin letters and Armenian. Most of the town’s inhabitants are descendants of Armenians who fled Turkish ruled areas during the Armenian massacre in 1915. And the Armenians at Shams Restaurant certainly know how to cook trout.

After the dinner and a shot of a complimentary Arak I drove back to Beirut. The fog on the road over the mountain was so thick that you could see only 10 or 20 meters and down to five when it was at it’s worse.

The day after I would drive to Damascus. Lebanon was very interesting. The people were great. Beirut is a Mediterranean city more than an Arab one. Apart from the suburbs which are car cities par excellance with plenty of American fast food outlets. Not much soul there but there's plenty of soul in Lebanon. Coming from Egypt, the Lebanese even walk differently than the Egyptians. They're proud people, self-confident. There's a can-do feeling there. They've got plenty of problems, muskella kateer - wa kabeer, but they somehow seem to have the faith in themselves to overcome them. Where else in the world would most of the bars and clubs be situated where civilians used to fight each other 15 years ago? Being able to get the Syrians out in only two months must boost that feeling. It's going to be interesting to watch the development over the next months.
Agust skrifaði 16.04.05 16:35 (GMT+2)
(English)