some guy in lebanon

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I’m tan – “How did you get so tan, Will?” You might ask – Well, dear reader, this is for three reasons:

1. I live at the eastern end of the Mediteranian. One can get a tan just by walking around
2. I spent Saturday at “Lazy B,” a wonderful little cabana-style resort south of Beirut.
3. I spent most of Sunday sitting in no-man’s-land at the Syrian border in the sun. For five hours. Just to be in Syria for forty five minutes.

I want to remark on this last point – “Why did you go to Syria, Will?” Well, dear reader, it’s because my visa was going to expire and they changed the rules in Lebanon requiring an exit stamp to leave at the airport if you’re in your third month of a tourist visa. But I couldn’t get an exit stamp because my visa was going to expire in two days, so they told me ‘just go to Syria – you don’t need an exit stamp.’ Of course, going to Syria means waltzing into one of the most skeptical-of-Americans nation in the world – they purposefully make you wait forever if you’re American to dissuade you from coming back – or something, I’m not really quite sure (they fax the information to Damascus – who knows how long it sits next to a cup of coffee there). Luckily, they let me in after I got a mean tan – I had to be out of the country for “a few mintues” according to Lebanese authorities in order to renew my visa.

Unfortunately, I have renewed my tourist visa too many times, so they confiscated my passport on the way back into Lebanon, and I spent this morning at General Security sorting things out.