A love affair with Lebanon

One of my travel dreams is slowly coming to an end at the very moment while I am sitting at Rafic Hariri International Airport in Beirut, Lebanon. Since I met my friend and host in Lebanon almost 4 years ago in Rabat, Morocco, I had always wanted to travel to Lebanon and spend some time in Beirut and around the country. I even considered moving there at some point. If I had had a job offer back then (or anytime now) that would have definitely happened. I remember saying that I wanted to live there to a random Lebanese guy (an ex-boyfriend of a friend of a friend) a few years ago and he replied 'no, it's not a dream, just do it and you will be happy'. This became one of my favorite quotes ever. A few months ago, I finally decided to go there. I thought that I could do it after leaving Australia and before going back to Poland since it was sort of on the way back to Europe. And if you know me well enough you know that I adore making my travel itineraries as complex as I can only take it.

2 flights, 3 airports, 1 layover and 24 hours of traveling later, I finally arrived in the Lebanese capital. My friend picked me up and we drove to Tyre (Sour in Arabic) - a city in the south of Lebanon where she works and lives. The airport is pretty small but for some reason we could not find each other for almost an hour. I was wandering around the arrival hall and watching people. It was really interesting to observe all the Lebanese diaspora arriving from all over the world to visit their country and their families. The population of Lebanon is about 4 million people while there are between 15 and 22 million Lebanese living outside the country. While I was waiting at the airport and watching people I figured that some of them must have arrived first time in years and it was the first time in a long time they saw their relatives. It was quite touching to see the anticipation, excitement and tears of joy in their eyes and faces. But as I discovered over the next 7 days , I would have an equally intense and touching experience in this small Middle Eastern country.

I spent my first day in Lebanon in Tyre/Sour in the south. It's a city close to the Israeli (or Palestinian as the state of Israel is not recognized in Lebanon) border with several camps for Palestinian refugees. The weather in the city was extremely hot. There were electricity outages regularly so the AC would not always work to cool us down. The streets were full of electricity polls and kilometers of electric wires and cables densely filling the air between the buildings and above the streets. I think I discovered an important law - the more wires and cables there are on the streets of a city, the more likely it is that the electricity will be cut off at least several times per day. I started the day in Tyre/Sour with a long breakfast. My friend was at work so I just went to the corniche and found a nice restaurant where I ordered a big breakfast - some eggs, bread and vegetables. It was just me, my breakfast and the Mediterranean - a joyful match. It was perfectly terminated by a cigarette of which a pack is 10 times cheaper than in Australia. Yes, I therefore smoked quite a lot in Lebanon. Tyre/Sour has some spectacular ruins dating back to the Roman times and I managed to see them for a while until the scorching mid-day soon chased me back home. We then left for Beirut in the afternoon.

The next highlight of Lebanon was of course its capital - the city of Beirut. One of the most exciting cities of the Mediterranean region (Mediterranean being my favorite region on the planet Earth). Named the top place to visit in 2009 by New York Times, one of the Lonely Planet's most lively cities of 2009 (way ahead of Paris, London or New York). It was also said to have the second highest visitors' spending level in the Middle East and Africa region. My credit card will sadly confirm that statement. Beirut was simply... amazing. I do not know why (and probably will never know) but for some reason I spent quite a lot of money there and surprisingly did not seem to care about that at all. I also hardly slept and did not feel like I needed to rest much. I was partying till dawn and waking up quite early too. It felt magnificent, even though it did not feel like me at all.

Yes, I met someone too - we danced, we made out and we stayed up till 7 AM wandering around the streets of Beirut. We ended up in some random breakfast place for hungover people at 6 AM. I fell asleep at the table waiting for my pain au chocolate and orange juice.

There was something extremely frustrating about Lebanon - the language. After spending 2 years in Morocco and picking up quite a lot of the street Moroccan Arabic, it was totally useless to even attempt to speak it there. People could hardly understand anything. But the Gods decided to give me a permission to speak my (!) Arabic for one night only. I was introduced by a good friend of mine to his friends in Beirut and they took me out for a dinner on Saturday night. There were a Canadian-Lebanese, an American-Lebanese and a Danish-Lebanese - well, most of the Lebanese are Lebanese and something else so that should not come as a surprise. But the highlight of the soirée was an Algerian trans-sexual who was a political refugee in Lebanon. Algerian and Moroccan dialects are quite similar and mutually understood. So Kamil - a white European guy ended up speaking in his [broken] Moroccan Arabic to an Algerian trans-sexual man-turned-woman, a political refugee in Lebanon while enjoying his noodles at a Chinese restaurant in Beirut, Lebanon. None of the Lebanese guys could understand us. It was a fabulous and positively grotesque situation.

The other highlight was my last 2 days in Lebanon which taught me quite an important but, at the same time, simple lesson - the bad and good people are everywhere. I was going to visit an Australian-Lebanese friend from Sydney who was spending a month with her family in the north of Lebanon. In the morning of that day, my friend from the south was supposed to drop me off at the bus station in Beirut but for some reason we could not find the entrance to the station while we were driving on the highway just above it. I was a little bit stressed about the trip mostly because I was traveling with 2 big and very heavy bags. Let me just remind you that I left Australia after a year of living there and I had all of my stuff with me. At that time, I had no stable home. Whenever someone asked me where I lived I would say 'nowhere, I'm in Lebanon now'. That was true - I left my home in Australia and I was yet to arrive in my Polish home. For that 2 weeks, I considered myself homeless. So with all my bags and luggage, we ended up driving around on the highway looking for the entry to the bus station underneath us. Frustrated, my friend pulled over at a gas station and asked for directions. The guy told her something in Arabic after which she told me 'You can take the bus from here'. We were in the middle of an inner city highway full of traffic and we stopped at a junction where traffic from a smaller road was joining the highway. I was puzzled. 'I don't think I will be taking a bus with all my heavy bags from the middle of the highway. You've got to be kidding me' I said. A few minutes later a bus pulled over and I ended up taking the bus with all my heavy bags from the middle of the highway. Impossible things happen. The bus was supposed to take me to Enfeh - a small coastal town south of Tripoli (not the Libyan Tripoli, there is a Lebanese one too). The bus was more than half empty (or less than half full if you want to change the perspective) but at least my bags and I felt more comfortable. However, city by city and village by village, it got more and more empty. It started feeling too much like 'the-driver-and-I-only' which was kind of an disturbing feeling given that the driver did not look friendly. About 10 minutes before the destination and while in a fabulous city of Byblos, the bus was totally empty and it was just the driver and I. He stopped the engine, looked at me via the mirror and started speaking to me in Arabic (the Arabic that I don't understand at all). His English was as bad as my Arabic (my non-existent Lebanese Arabic to be precise) but I figured that he wanted me to get out of the bus since it was empty and it would be uneconomic to drive further. Unless I decided to pay more so that he would drive me to where he had initially promised to take me to. He mentioned something about $25 which was at least a few times more than the regular price. I gave him $10 (still 3 times of the normal ticket price) and suddenly new passengers came so we took off. I texted my friend, she called me back and I put her through to the driver who got quite angry. But I could not understand anything so I tried to speak to one of the new passengers. She did not have good English or French either. After I gave up on communicating with her she only asked me if I was Australian. As it later turned out my friend asked the driver to drop me off at a certain point but the smart ass decided to get rid of me a little bit earlier so that he would not have to face my friend who was angrier than the asshole driver. So as I entered the bus on the highway, I was also kicked out of it on the highway again. But before that, I managed to get back some of the change. It was not a lot but at least I knew that the bastard did not rip me off totally. I felt he was insulting me although I could not understand a word. Again, I ended up with the bags packed with my Australian year in the middle of a highway. There were some stairs luckily so I climbed or rather crawled up the stairs with all the 35 kg of my Sydney life. I found myself on a bridge over the highway in the middle of nowhere. Suddenly, a few seconds later, a car passed by and stopped next to me probably understanding that if there was a foreigner standing there with a lot of bags, something must have gone wrong. At the very same moment my friend called me, so without explaining too much I just passed my phone to the mysterious man in the fancy Mercedes and he started talking to my friend. Initially, she started shouting at him while she thought he was the evil bus driver. After a while of a normal exchange of information on the phone, the Mercedes man handed the phone back to me, smiled, tried to say something back and drove away. Again, I ended up being by myself in the middle of nowhere under the heat of the Mediterranean sun. This only made me laugh to myself at the ridiculousness of the whole situation. I actually thought that at that moment my life was like a good vs. evil fairy-tale where the good wins over the evil and everyone lives happily ever after. The evil of course took the form of the fat and vicious bus driver who kicked me out in the middle of nowhere out of his ugly, white bus-mobile. The good was embodied by the gentleman in the chic Mercedes who saved me from the mortal peril of that difficult situation. A few minutes of waiting later my friend picked me up and I started the last chapter of my Lebanese trip. I spent a day an half with her, her family and friends visiting the north of Lebanon, tasting the local cuisine and learning more about the country. It was a great way to end my stay in the Middle East.

All of the experiences I have described above were very exciting bordering intense but none of them was as intense as the one I had in the middle of my stay in Lebanon. It was quite harsh and challenging. It only underlined the contrasting aspects of the country and how diversified and difficult its reality is. The intense experience I went through was a visit to the Museum of Resistance a.k.a. the Museum of Hezbollah. It is located on a mountain peak in the south of the country, not far from the border with Palestine/Israel. I went there with 3 French friends, a little bit curious of what I could see but not expecting too much. I was dressed casually or casually bordering inappropriate - my Balinese flowery shorts, Moroccan sandals and my (in)famous, second hand Mickey Mouse T-shirt. We entered the place and were quite surprised by how well it was organized and how packed with tourists it was. We could see a real touristic facility ready to welcome hundreds of people every day. There was a gift shop at the entrance selling Hezbollah flags, T-shirts or key rings with mini guns or kalashnikovs. The whole place was apparently financed and built thanks to money from Iran. It looked like a temple of victory of the Zionist enemy - full of spoils of war, guns riffles, boots, cans, street signs and many many more. People would take pictures with a barrel of a tank or a giant map of Israel/Palestine with all its weak and strategical points revealed, explained and described with details. It was quite an interesting and amusing experience in the beginning but my feelings started to change while we were walking around the place. The past few days in Beirut flashed through my memory - two sleepless nights of heavy partying, amazing brunches with delicious food (one of it happened to take place in a restaurant called Casablanca) or an afternoon with drinks at a rooftop bar with a swimming pool overlooking the city and the Mediterranean. And while I was having those flashbacks and walking through the museum of war, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the strong energy and the intensity of the place. I was taken aback by the contrasts of the country. From a rooftop pool or a loud nightclub full of fancy people, I ended up on in a museum where the war was glorified. It was not about judging whether Hezbollah's actions were right or wrong. When I looked at the whole place and its idea without any context I just realized I was at a place where violence and war were admired. Suddenly, I sensed this feeling of extreme sadness. Lebanon - the beautiful and small country full of nice people, beautiful beaches and thriving cities - was also a place of wars, conflicts, fleeing and suffering. You kind of know that from newspapers and TV but it's easy to forget about it once you're totally carried away by a city like Beirut. But right there, on that mountain I was faced with the other side of Lebanon and the Middle East... and the dark sides of the human nature. It felt sad to have realized that instead of having museums of arts, local craft or other beautiful things, it was a museum of war. All those intense feelings made me feel so down that I started crying and I could not really stop it. I felt so sorry for the country and its people - all the ones that died, were wounded, captured or had to flee. I guess I felt what people sense when they go to Nazi concentration camps in Poland or Germany. I don't really think my experience would be complete, had I not gone to that place. It showed me the other side of Lebanon. It might sound a bit weird but a crazy night at a nightclub was as important as going to that museum. Both were quite transcending experiences - and both give you a good glimpse of Lebanon.

The 7 days in Lebanon felt definitely as if it was a few good weeks there. Maybe because I slept so little, I went out a lot, I met many fascinating individuals and I traveled extensively. My love affair with Lebanon and Beirut was a very deep and intense relationship fueled by a unique connection. And I do hope that soon there will be a 'part deux' of that.