some guy in lebanon

My flat mate and I are sitting on the porch joking about how we’re sitting in some sort of weird European spy movie scene – my computer is playing some French/Spanish jazz music, the neighbors are all out on their balconies, the sun is setting, and all around us are little pieces of Europe, but with a Lebanese twist. There’s the guy on the bike smoking a cigarette, the woman hanging her mother’s underwear on the line (I assume it’s her mother’s), the man in the undershirt on his own balcony checking out the girl hanging the underwear, then there are the palm trees, the crumbling concrete, the Mediterranean air and strong sun…

Spring in Beirut is dreamy, even when it includes 14-hour work days. It’s hot but not too hot, cool at night, and even the vast armies of cats seem to have put their late-night gang-wars aside to just lounge around lazily.

At a Cafe on the Corniche called Rawda, I recently sat with Naz (flatmate) and did absolutely nothing for about three hours, then held two business meetings in quick succession, without moving. Such is Beirut – vast periods of intense laziness, followed up by successive bursts of sometimes-highly-profitable activity. Nowhere is there an American rhythm of “constant-on” – instead, work habits here are more like a broken Lebanese air conditioner that clicks on furiously just as its getting too hot, but never works properly until then.

Here are some pictures from the past week – The dark one with the beer is my bartender Andre, with his hero Barack Obama’s miniature figurine. Unfortunately the figurine does not have a karate-chop action. Too bad…

Ignoring my last post, things are going splendidly in Beirut… I have booked my flight back to the States from July 15th to August 16th – I can’t wait for my generation’s first big Small Point wedding!

My prayers are with everyone back home, congratulations to GW Class of 2009…! Sorry about that recession… Perhaps you’d like to read my post about the Coming American Diaspora?

The Dao that can be experienced is not true;
The world that can be constructed is not true.
The Dao manifests all that happens and may happen;
The world represents all that exists and may exist.
-Dao De Jing