Letter From Beirut

September 30, 2009

I arrived yesterday in Beirut, Lebanon, where I will be living for the fall while working on a feature film. The movie is written and directed by a Iranian-American, and takes place in Iran, but will be shot outside of that country for reasons I would prefer not to put in writing until my Farsi improves.

Here are a few verbal snapshots of my experiences so far.
• Air France seems to have more flight attendants than passengers.
• I've been here only eighteen hours, but I already love the Middle East. The people of Beirut seem great, the food is delicious, abundant, and inexpensive. The culture is fascinating and the city of Beirut is easily navigated.
• After answering with an apparently acceptable "I don't understand what you are asking me" to all of the questions asked of me by Lebanese Customs yesterday, I was met and whisked away by my 2nd assistant director Reine ("it means queen in French") and plunged into the exhilarating reality of Beirut traffic. Very quickly, I reached a soul-level understanding of why Middle Eastern taxi drivers in New York City drive in that specific way they do. Traffic doesn't flow here, it oozes, sputters, clogs, and finally explodes in a flurry of sudden movement. Rinse and repeat. It appears acceptable to drive anywhere at any time in any direction at any rate of speed. There is no road rage, praise Allah, probably because, as Confucius must have said somewhere, he who becomes angry with Beirut traffic soon goes insane. The faces of drivers in other cars as we pass them on the wrong side of the street at full speed in reverse show utter complacency, as if they are listening to NPR, which I doubt they are.
• As a daily Manhattan & Brooklyn bicyclist, I dreamt of purchasing a bike here, but this dream was crushed within seconds of witnessing Beirut street culture. It's not so much that it would be dangerous (which it would be) as that there is no room to ride.
• I am living adjacent to Sanayeh Park, and a short walk to the popular Hamra, a neighborhood of on the west and mostly Muslim side of Beirut.
• Historically, before and during the fifteen year civil war here which lasted until 1990, Beirut was divided by what was called the Green Line, with Muslims to the west, and Christians to the East. As with everything else in Lebanese political history, this becomes complicated when you learn that the locals referred to the Christian area to the east as “West Beirut” and the Muslim area to the west as “East Beirut,” differentiating the sides on global cultural lines, rather than local. A cartography enthusiast such as myself becomes irate at this kind of haphazard nomenclature.
• I live in an enormous third floor apartment with ceilings so high I have to squint to see them. The windows and doors onto our six separate balconies remain open most of the time, and the Mediterranean air and smog blow right through. There are no screens on any windows and there is at least one mosquito living in Beirut, but not for long.
• For now, I share this palatial apartment with the director, one of the producers, and the director of photography, but as I can't see or hear any of them, it feels private.
• The neighborhood of Hamra is quite Westernized in terms of shops. I could have a cup of Starbucks in my hand within five minutes of leaving my apartment, if I didn’t loathe Starbucks so much. There are other chain stores as well, but plenty of local businesses too. Internet cafes are very popular.
• The famous American University of Beirut is a short walk from where I live. They are letting us use the pool, or at least they don’t seem to mind. The campus reminds me of Switzerland—and it is perhaps the only thing here that will ever remind me of Switzerland.
• I woke this morning at five o’clock to the sound of the hauntingly beautiful Islamic call to prayers. The amplified chant happens five times daily. The "song" emanates from the sky and fills every nook and cranny of the Muslim quarters of the city. It sounds as close as if a man were standing on my windowsill singing into a bullhorn. I struggle to imagine that I would ever be able to sleep through it.
• Beirut follows a daily schedule of rolling blackouts in three hour increments. These start at 6am and go until 9pm, and the outages follows some sort of "schedule" that everyone claims to know, though I've not yet heard any two people describe it the same way. To counter the blackouts, many buildings have installed enormous generators, which I have yet to hear or see, but I am no doubt distracted by other sights & sounds, namely traffic and general street noise, which are ample. Using generators to compensate for an energy saving blackout strikes me as the definition of robbing Peter to pay Paul, but what do I know?
• The locals describe the weather time of year "cold like winter". I call it perfect. It was 75 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday, and dry. There are many rooftop bars in Beirut which have already closed for the season because it is too cold.
• It is an amazing and eye-opening experience to be somewhere affected by warfare so recently. After one day the bullet holes on so many of the buildings were old news. One of the balconies in my Sanayeh apartment overlooks an empty lot where a building used to be until 2006, during the month-long skirmish with Israel known locally as the July War. Across the street the other way there is an armored guard station outside the home of some high-level government official.