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.