Champagnista in Lebanon

Masa el kheir,
(it means good evening in arabic)

I arrived yesterday in Lebanon where I have joined a dear girlfriend of mine who moved here to work as a freelance journalist last autumn.

When I announced my holiday destination around, the main reaction was 'why?'

... well why not?...

In the 70's, Beirut had the best university in all of Middle-East, and it was supposed to be the 'Paris of Middle-East'. Although today, the peace is still quite precarious after 30 years of Syrian occupation, the capital of Lebanon is swiftly regaining its pre-war status.

I was worried Lebanon might not offer the true oriental experience I hoped for, and my first few hours in the metropole confirmed this trip was going to be totally different from what I expected.

Beirut is very exotic. It is the temple of a culture you could never find anywhere else in the world: it is a glorious mix, a condensation of contrasts and antagonisms. The three religions are present in this city where communities cohabit in conditions that tend to become less or more tense according to times. People, signalization panels and menu restaurants mix up Arabic, French and English in the same sentence, and policemen smoke in front of no-smoking panels in public spaces.

Some districts still bear the traces of the civil war: skeletons of bombed buildings stand, walls lacerated with bullet holes, baring the steel infrastructures that hold them in a fragile balance, right against the new center of the city whose skyscrapers and luxury buildings are raising in a brand new and almost obscene fashion.

There are soldiers, tanks and chek-points everywhere. Bimbos have to present their Louis Vuitton bag for inspection at the entrance of shopping malls, and street merchants their ID when they go up a street under military surveillance. The discrepancy between rich and poor is much more emphasized than in any western country: it seems like there is almost no middle-class, and while 80% of the population live on monthly salaries ranging from 100 to 400 US dollars, the rest spend their money like we Londoners crave for a glass of wine after a hard day's work.

There is a strong occidental influence, and women in the streets are polished and dressed in an almost Parisian way, but with this extra tan, this extra hair wave, this extra sparkle in the eye. This extra bling also, which shows itself unashamedly against the understated rules of European chic: girls will not hesitate to walk around a university campus with a Hermes Birkin bag at their arm.

Social status is everything for this fragment of the population: you exist through your designer brushing, your Cartier watch and your gold-woven Elie Saab dress. If your car has a scratch, you will borrow your parents' mercedes and their chauffeur until is is repaired and spotless rather than to show yourself so openly flawed at the door of an 'it' restaurant.

This obvious melange is scary, and exciting and fun: tonight we went to Centrale (picture below), one of the 'bars en vogue of the city', which looks part like a prohibition bar (especially because of the music), part like a bunker and part like an anti-atomic shelter. The space in itself is rather controversive, but the crowd that gathers there, if a little in your face, is very bon enfant and warm, and on a tuesday night, they party like there will be no tomorrow.

Maybe it comes from living in a country always a step away from going back to war.

This post is the first of a week's holiday and I will stop it here because there is (what is my idea of) a magnetic storm over Beirut: silence, no thunder, no lights striking the sea but the whole sky comes illuminated every 5 seconds, and the power keeps cutting so I might lose this text if I do not post it fast enough.

I have told about a millionth of today's experience, but I will put more in tomorrow.

Champagnista V