The Big Things that make you happy

Before sending out that last post on Beirut, it’d been more than two weeks since I updated my blog. In my own defense, I had been working for about 15 days straight before finally getting a first day off, most of them out off the country. This was becoming a serious source of stress to me – not updating my blog that is (not the work mind you. I was getting ready to complain about having had to work for two straight weeks on the phone to my Grandfather, but then I remembered that he had worked on his dairy farm every day for 17 years from the day his father died until he first took a holiday, so I decided to stay silent). I would quickly peek at it at work and was beginning to get physical stress symptoms, that same uncomfortable knot in my stomach I sometimes get when I check my bank account: I owe waaaay too much…

By my count, it was three posts at that time that I definitely owed: Ethiopia, Beirut and Part 2 of my First Impressions. At least that’s down to two. Unfortunately, this post won’t change that balance, this is more of a general update.

I have now moved into my apartment. I have my luggage in with me in here, and… that’s sort of it. I have two pieces of ‘furniture’: a huge blow up bed that I borrowed from one of my colleagues, and a cheap white foldable plastic chair that the former tenant must have thought was too insignificant to drag along and left on the balcony. I am now sitting on that chair (thank you, space-time continuum neighbor) with my laptop perched on my largest suitcase, which stands upright against the wall.

I’m here because I'm waiting for my first piece of furniture to be delivered at some point today: a large, comfortable, white, large, large sofa. I’m so excited about this. Ever since I left my parents house I have been living in rental apartments with cheap furniture that usually has little in common (certainly not colour or style) except for being much too small for me to comfortably fit in. This thing is big… it’s a 3+2, plus it has a big extra footrest that’s as long and wide as another ‘2’, so the three pieces can even be pushed together to create a big, soft, flat area bigger than any bed (this seems to be the in-thing with sofa designers in the UAE these days, my colleagues and I refer to it as being ‘orgy-friendly’). In other words, size does matter, but how you use it can really maximize your comfort and pleasure. Can we all agree on this? (Please vote in the comment link. Silence will be counted as a ‘yes’ vote. I am counting the number of people reading this, and can figure out who you are by tracking your IP numbers. This is easier than you think.)

The only problem is that I’m far from convinced that the ‘3’ will fit in the elevator… which is a bit of an issue when you live on the 17th floor.

Beirut

The entrance to my hotel is guarded by a barbed-wire military checkpoint, and soldiers with bomb-searching equipment scan the cars before allowing them entry. Similar checkpoints dot the streets at various points in the city centre. You pass the occasional tank parked on a street corner and charred remains of bombed-out buildings line the streets. A couple have an entire side missing. You look inside the way you would a dollhouse, and see the way people decorated their homes in the early 1980’s before whatever wave of destruction it was that cleaned out the entire backside of an eight storey building. An encampment of tents sits at the heart of the city near the prime minister’s office, where pro-Syrian opposition supporters have staged a four-month long sit-in during the latest political deadlock. The encampment is guarded by Hezbollah (Party of God; Hezb = party, Allah = God) guards – a second military force inside the country, that answers not to the Lebanese government but to Syria and Iran.

Yet, somehow – the city feels relaxed and happy.

This country is conflicted. Imagine a place where wars can take place inside their own boarders – last summer, no less – and the inhabitants are unsure whose side they are on: the Israelis, who occupied the South of Lebanon until their withdrawal in 2000 (while my mother, Auður and I were in Israel, standing on the border and looking over as Hezbollah moved in to take up the positions the Israeli army had abandoned), or Hezbollah, an army and almost a separate government within their country. But then, these are just the two latest foreign powers who have had their fingers in this country. Back in the day, this was the gateway linking Europe and the Mediterranean to the Asian continent, which made it very interesting to Alexander the Great... as well as the Greeks, and Romans, and Ottomans, and French (Just checked Wikipedia, apparently I missed out the Babylonians, Assyrians [I kinda had those], Arabs [come on, that’s a trick question], Armenians, and the Persians). Each left behind a cultural legacy, somehow interwoven into the national psyche resulting in a nation that is cosmopolitan – and conflicted.

When you walk down the street, the chances seem to be exactly even that the next person will speak to you in Arabic, French or English. When you need an electric socket, there is no telling whether the next one you find will be British, European or a weird three-pronged thing that I haven’t seen before. When I asked for an adaptor at the hotel, the reception staff patiently told me that the room already came equipped with several types of adaptors (along with an emergency torch). The money is Lebanese Livres, but most people think in dollars, which are at least as widely accepted as the Livres, so much so that they had to pass a law so that everyone was forced to also accept the local currency. The street signs in the new city centre were in Arabic and English, but then Chirac came to visit Hariri and complained, and they were promtply changed to Arabic and French.

Back in the ´60s and 70´s, this was the place to be. It was the gateway to the Middle East before Dubai was. A melting pot that combined the best educated people in the Middle East, Swiss banking laws and the accompanying money laundry mixed with hippies, flower power at the universities and legendary nightlife – which remains alive and well. During French music night on a Wednesday at one of the local bars, we managed to sneak in early and grab the last table. My local colleagues looked relieved, but I didn’t understand why this was so important – until I saw wave after wave after wave of people wash in, the young, the hip, and the beautiful flooding into the room until it was too packed to move – I thought of fire regulations, but people who’ve been through wars don’t think of fire regulations – and somehow they were trapped in a hopelessly anachronic setting, perhaps a cognac room in France in 1946, when everyone was so glad to be alive after the war that they forgot to be stuck up for a few years, and all those babies were made – I bet that back then the girls also danced as if no one was watching on tables, and bars, and barstools, some perhaps to remember, some to forget; after all, there was no telling whether tomorrow would come. Maybe that was it… maybe that was why all the girls seemed to be so beautiful – they seemed like they didn’t care whether someone was watching or not. But then, they too a conflicted – if they didn’t care who was watching, why did so many of them decide to have their noses ‘fixed’ with plastic surgery? On the other hand, if they did care, why were they carefree enough to continue dancing on tables, proudly displaying the bandages on their noses? The French music gave away as the DJ mixed Queen’s ‘I want to break free’ with video (and audio) clips of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, which he projected at random around the room: the fragmented images of a speech synonymous with freedom eerily veiling a people who understand what it means.

I walk the streets in the sun and take in the stunning setting, the beach and marina to my left, and the snow-covered mountains with supposedly excellent skiing to my right. As I watch the birds nesting in holes in the walls of a shrapnel-torn building I realize: I’m in love with this city.

Work

As a consultant, you’re often not allowed to talk about your who your clients are, and certainly not details of your work. One of my best friends in London (a consultant) used to take this very seriously. All he would say about his client was that it was a major manufacturer of mobile telephones. The problem was that he kept flying to Helsinki. Needless to say, I would tease him mercilessly about this. He would also talk about how he wasn’t allowed to invest in stocks in the company, or those of any direct competitor; the only thing he was allowed to invest in was index funds (sort of like a basket of companies put together). So I went online and found something called “Hextech”, or the “Helsinki Technology Index” (about 90% of which is a certain manufacturer of mobile phones named Nokia), and told him to invest in that. He didn’t think I was very funny.

The reason I mention this is that now the shoe is on the other foot. I have just started work, and a number of my friends have been asking me what I am working on. However, I have been told in no uncertain terms not to talk about my project, if I want to keep my job and avoid causing an international incident. I’m sure my friend in London had similar reasons, and kind of feel like I owe him an apology now for all the teasing. Maybe I’ll tell him that when he comes to visit me in Dubai.

Let it suffice to say that I am extremely excited about my first three days at work. I feel passionate about my first project, like I am working on exactly what I have always wanted to work on (and the better you know me, the more you know what that means). I will say, though, that the amount of Red Bull, coffee and chocolate in the office kitchen is rather alarming... and my travel schedule looks like it will be a bit hectic, given that it started on my third day on the job, and it looks like I'll be spending time in both Lebanon and the US in the next few weeks. Indeed, I am writing these words from Beirut.

Ask me how I’m doing in a couple of months.

I have learned...

...that the chances of:

- walking into a bar on my first day in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, sitting down in the only empty chair and finding that the person sitting next to me is the country's only Icelandic resident: >0.

- that person sharing the rarer of my two given names: >0.

- going into the far northern reaches of Ethiopia, travelling over 100 km on gravel roads and mountain paths towards a 1600 year old monestary only accessible by climbing a 15 meter sheer rockface with the aid of rope of wound goat skin, running into the only two other white men to have visited in the preceding 48 hours and finding they are also my countrymen: >0.

- two people in my London Business School study group of five independently making the life altering decision to move from London to Dubai and starting work there on the same day: >0, apparently.

I should be playing the lottery.