some guy in lebanon

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My flat mate and I are sitting on the porch joking about how we’re sitting in some sort of wierd European spy movie scene – my computer is playing some French/Spanish jazz music, the neighbors are all out on their balcony’s, 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 Mediteranian 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.